Greater Than Code

063: The Distribution of Brilliance and Opportunity with Rehema Wachira

Mandy Moore — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 05:00:46 +0000

Panelists:

Astrid Countee | Rein Henrichs | Jessica Kerr |
Sam Livingston-Gray | Janelle Klein

Guest Starring:

Rehema Wachira: @remy_stack | Andela

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Show Notes:

01:22 – Rehema’s Superpower: Empathy

02:53 – Rehema’s “Untypical” Origin Story

07:20 – Enjoying Coding Because of the Complexity Behind It

11:21 – Creating a “Culture of Saving”

14:52 – “Diversity of Thought” and Seeing the World Through Others’ Eyes

22:20 – Being Creators and Makers

Indie Hackers

30:28 – How Technology Empowers People

38:27 – The Distribution of Brilliance and Opportunity

47:01 – Freedom of Creative Expression

Reflections:

Astrid: Having to unlearn the need of being perfect.

Jessica: We want to speak to more guests on a global level! Please reach out!

Sam: Fixed vs growth mindset.

Rein: Diversity is not just good for ethical reasons, it also makes your organization more competent.

Janelle: Celebrating beautiful.

Rehema: A fundamental right to freedom.

Transcript:

ASTRID: Hello everybody and welcome to Episode 63 of Greater Than Code. I’m Astrid Countee and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Good morning, or whatever time it is when you’re listening to this. I am here with my friend, the colorfully-haired Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Good morning! And I am thrilled to be here today with Sam Livingston-Gray!

SAM: Woohoo! And I’m happy to introduce the prodigal Janelle Klein.

JANELLE: And we’re here today with Rehema Wachira. And she doesn’t fit the typical profile of a software developer. She is a self-taught coder from Nairobi, Kenya whose passionate about making a positive impact on people’s lives through technology. She’s a graduate of the University of Virginia. And she first started her career working in advertising. And then after learning about product development, becoming intrigued with the complexities of coding, she began teaching herself the basics of Python. So, with only two months of coding experience under her belt, she applied and was accepted to Andela’s development program where she now creates code that’s used by companies every day. Welcome.

REHEMA: Thank you. Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here.

JANELLE: We’re excited to have you here, too. So, the way we usually start this is by asking a question about your superhero powers. So, what would you say your superpower is and how did you acquire it?

REHEMA: Hey, that’s an interesting question. I think for me, it would have to be empathy. I think. My mom used to work for nonprofits for most of her career. The majority of her career, actually. And she has a big heart. She cares a lot. And I think she would bring that home and that’s something that I would witness and sort of absorb as well. And it was really important and it made me good at my job when I was working at nonprofits and when I worked in advertising and communications.

I wasn’t so sure how it would apply to being a developer but I actually more and more am realizing just how important it is to have that empathy to see people not just the way you see them but to be able to see people the way they see themselves. And to be able to understand things from their perspective, really putting yourself in their shoes. It’s important just for everyday life but also when we’re building things. To me, code is a tool but it’s also always an expression of who you are and the way that you think in the way that you write the code. And so, being able to put yourself in a potentially user’s perspective I think adds more to the thing that you create at the end of the day. So yeah, I like thinking about empathy not just as a personality trait but as an actually really useful took for navigating the world, especially as it becomes more complex.

REIN: Superheroes also usually have an origin story. Can we talk about origin stories in tech for a minute? I think that you said that you don’t have what you would consider to be a typical origin story for a developer. So, in my mind that’s the, for my generation it was you grew up with an Apple2e in your parents’ basement and you wrote BASIC when you were five or something. What was your origin story like? And how do you think that has given you maybe a different perspective than other people who are in the industry?

REHEMA: Well to begin with, I’ve never had a basement. [Laughs] That’s not something that we have in Kenya.

SAM: Well done.

[Laughter]

REHEMA: But yeah. I always thought that I would do something with my life related to helping people and communities. Again, I think stemming from what my mom did. And I was one of those kids for whom school wasn’t that difficult. It was fun. I enjoyed learning things, especially the humanities and languages and all that good stuff. Good at the sciences as well but really terrible at math. And I just didn’t think that I was a logical thinker. This thing that we tell ourselves and we tell kids from a very early age of like, if you’re good with languages and humanities, then that’s how you think and that’s where you should stay. And then if you’re good at maths and science, then you’re logical and that’s a completely different thing. And we sort of put people into these different categories from very early on. So, I always thought I was going the humanities route. And even when I went to college, I studied political and social thought. My major literally was called Thought, something that my parents were not too happy about but they got over it. But essentially that was the way I was thinking about my life and my career, was in terms of how I help people and thinking about systems and the human systems that we build, really. Society, culture, all that good stuff.

But it wasn’t until I was working for a company, a telecommunications company in Kenya, the biggest one in East Africa, and they created a mobile money payment solution that is pretty revolutionary (and I can talk more about that because it’s really cool), way before you guys had Apple Pay and all that stuff. We’ve been sending and paying for things using our mobile phones for the last 10 years. So, I was just fascinated by the impact that that had, just seeing what it could do for communities for individuals and for financial inclusion. It just, it blew my mind. And I was like, “Okay. So, if you can create these things, if people can do this, then why can’t I also be one of the people that creates things.” I wanted to be more involved in actually shaping solutions and creating them.

So, I was interested in product, actually. I wanted to start building products. And I figure if I know a little bit of code, maybe that can help me be a better product manager. And when I started playing around in Codecademy and all that stuff, I realized, “Hey, wait. I actually really enjoy this. I’m writing stuff and things are happening.” [Chuckles] And that feeling really got me excited. And I just continued with that, trying to figure out how I could get better at it. And a short while later, found Andela and applied to join their program and yeah, and now here I am as a developer. And sometimes when I say even as introduction to other people like, “I’m a software developer,” it still sounds a bit funny to my own ears. But it’s cool. [Laughs]

SAM: You said something interesting just now which was that you thought that learning to code could help you be a better product manager. And it’s funny how many programmers I don’t hear say things like, “You know, I thought that learning more about the humanities would make me a better developer.” And I feel like we do, just societally, we do such a tremendous disservice to kids who are good at math by not making them study more of the humanities. Because there’s so much out there that we could benefit from.

REHEMA: Absolutely. Because at the end of the day, everything that we build is within a particular context, right? Whether business context or social context, we’re putting things out there that other people have to interact with. And if we don’t understand the human systems that affect those, then I think the solutions that we build can never really be true solutions. And it’s so important because I have met people who are so focused on the code and they’re like, “Just give me the specs and I’ll build the thing,” and I’m like, “But there’s a whole world that you have to build for and that your product will live in.” And if we don’t have a sense of what that means and then importance of it, then I think we’re missing out in a big way as developers.

JESSICA: Yeah, and that world is full of human systems which are even more complex. I found it interesting in your bio that you enjoy coding because of the complexity of it?

REHEMA: Yeah. It struck me as a field where when I started to think about a possible career in terms of getting into this and really looking at it for the long haul, it struck me as a space where I would continuously be learning. And that was really important to me as well, because at some point in some of my previous careers I was looking up the ladder and looking up the chain and thinking, “I don’t feel like excited by what’s in the future.” Like if I try and imagine myself five years down the line as a marketing manager or something like that there were parts of it that really excited me, things that got me into the field in the first place, but I wasn’t super excited about it. But when I think about a possible career as a developer, and not just as a developer but what it could mean as a product manager, as a person who creates things, hopefully also as an entrepreneur, the skillset and the fact that it’s a field that’s changing so often is what I find really exciting about it. And the fact that you also have to do a lot of deep work, a lot of deep thinking to really solve problems, the problems in front of you, that kind of complexity also I think is just really fascinating.

REIN: So, when you say complexity, I’d like to maybe explore that for a minute. Because I get the feeling that you may not mean algorithmic complexity or cyclometric, like ‘how many branches there are in you code’ complexity. What do you mean by complexity?

REHEMA: Yeah, so you’re absolutely correct. For me, the complexity is in, I always think about things in terms of what can this help solve in terms of a human need. So for me, complexity is in terms of ‘Are we able to build something? Are we able to build a product or a solution that can address things at various layers or various levels of understanding or reach or depth?’ essentially. So, if we’re looking at creating the mobile money solution for instance, in Kenya, if the problem is we need an easier way for people to be able to send money back and forth to each other because we don’t have the right banking systems that make banking accessible to the vast majority of the population, how do we make that happen?

So, one way of thinking about it is, “Oh, let’s just have this service where I can send money to you, you can send money to me. Done.” But what has happened in Kenya is that it’s gone way beyond that. It’s not just about sending money. It’s also about savings. How do you create a savings culture? How can you use technology to remind people or to prompt people to start planning their finances and thinking through long-term how they’re using their money and where it’s going and how they can better track and monitor it? How are they able to seize opportunities to get loans for small businesses and enterprises? And are we linking that back to financial education?

So, that’s why I mean by complexities. It’s more in terms of the human complexities that we live in and how we can use tech to address all of those different things. I think as I continue in my learning and in my career and as I continue to get deeper into trying to solve for those different problems, things like algorithms and things like how to optimize different kinds of systems, the nitty-gritty, I think that’ll start to become of more interest to me once I can relate it back to a bigger picture. Does that make sense?

REIN: So, the complexity for you comes from the computers, that system interacting with other systems, usually humans, right?

REHEMA: Exactly, exactly. Humans and the infrastructures that we create. So again, in the same thread of the financial systems, how do we integrate that back with banks and make sure that they are actually serving people in a way that’s meaningful to people but also useful for them as a business, right? So yeah, for me that’s the area of interest.

REIN: Software would be a lot easier if we didn’t have requirements.

REHEMA: [Laughs]

SAM: Or people.

REIN: Or people.

REHEMA: Or people. [Laughs] It would also be a lot less fun. [Chuckles]

SAM: This is true. So, you talked about creating a savings culture and I find that really interesting that you’re talking about using technology to affect the larger culture in that way. Is that something that you think is just something that you’re personally interested in? Or is that a major value of the culture that you’re in?

REHEMA: Yeah, I think a culture of saving is important, and especially so in a country where traditionally banking has not been accessible to the majority of people. So, companies that are in this space and that are trying to create and promote a culture of savings obviously have their own personal interest, which is the more money you put with them, the more money that they make. But I think it also goes much deeper and much larger than that because it does affect people’s ability to pull themselves out of poverty, right? So, in Kenya right now there’s big talk about a growing middle income. And you can definitely see it. Kenya’s a country that’s going through a lot of changes and we’re the biggest economic powerhouse of East Africa. So, there’s a lot of activity happening here. But how do you make sure that that’s a tide that’s raising all boats? So, the way that people have access to and are able to understand and interact with their money is super important, super big part pf that.

ASTRID: So Rehema, it almost sounds like your major that you talked about, that social and political thought, is actually…

REHEMA: Yeah.

ASTRID: The beginning of where you start thinking about these problems as opposed to the side-effect that you hope will happen in the end. And because of that, it looks like what you’re doing, well not just you obviously but other people who you’re working with, is that you’re creating a physical infrastructure by using technology instead of maybe augmenting or changing or even just adding to some other infrastructure that already exists. And that changes the way you ask questions. Do you think that some of what you’re doing can be translated to other systems that are not already set up to think about that stuff first? And how would you suggest somebody start changing the way that they solve these problems?

REHEMA: That’s huge, right? So recently, I learned about civic tech as an area that I guess a lot of people and interestingly enough a lot of cities are getting into, at least in the west. So, I met somebody who worked for New York’s, I can’t remember if it was part of… I think it was part of the city’s push to start using data science more effectively, essentially. And they were creating or they were using different maps and applying different algorithms to them to try and figure out as the city grows and as different types of infrastructures pop up in different parts of the city, how do you optimize for the populations that are there? So, if you notice that a whole bunch of high-rises are coming up in one part of the city, then you can figure out if you need more buses. Or do you need to add more libraries or more public amenities? Things like that. So, a very smart way, literally smart as in, you know what I mean [Laughs]. Like a smart city, essentially.

But thinking about how you build right from the get go instead of using information that may be outdated or anything like that, you essentially have this data constantly at your fingertips. And so, city planners are able to tap into that and look at all this information and be able to make smart goals and smart planning based off of data, which I thought was really interesting. So, there’s lots of different ways in which this is happening all over the world. And even in Kenya, open information type of movements and all of that where we’re keeping better track of what government is doing and what the public sector is doing to empower people.

REIN: Can I just mention that the phrase ‘diversity of thought’ has been sort of perverted to mean being able to be a bigot without consequence. But in my mind, this is what ‘diversity of thought’ really means. When someone like you approaches a problem, you may look at it from a way that no one else on your team looks at it. And that gives the whole team a better understanding of the problem.

REHEMA: Yeah. I think that’s the biggest argument for diversity, because at the end of the day, like I said earlier, what we build is an expression of ourselves. So, if I’m building and I’m thinking about the end user, then essentially I’m just thinking about myself, right? Because that’s the frame of mind in which I understand and interact with the world and that’s what I know best. So, it’s so important to have people from all different walks of life, different experiences. I think the challenge that a lot of companies have is, because this goes right through to hiring, to how the company talks about itself, to the type of people that it attracts. So, its’ one thing to talk the talk and say, “Yes, diversity is important for us,” and I think quite challenging for a lot of companies to actually figure out how to put that into practice. And making sure that as you’re sitting there in an interview with somebody across the table that you can somehow control for people’s biases, right? Because people have them and it’s like, how do you navigate past that? That’s a tricky one.

SAM: Yeah. It’s very easy as a company to say “We value diversity,” but it’s a bigger commitment to actually value it with dollars or local currency of choice, right?

REIN: [Laughs]

REHEMA: Yeah.

REIN: The other problem is hiring for diversity and then making everyone think the same way.

SAM: Right.

REHEMA: Yeah. I think that that’s also really fascinating, because you… I see this a lot in adverts or company profiles, especially in Silicon Valley where the descriptions all kind of tend to sound the same. “We’re super fun. We hang out all the time. We have lots of games and we all drink.” It always… they say they’re hiring for different people but you’re right. The culture always seems to be the same in every environment. So, the question is how do you create a world where within the company, a world where everybody can have their voice and be comfortable.

Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot that we discuss quite a bit here at Andela is extrovert versus introverts, and how the world is primed and built for extroverts. But how do we make sure that those of us whose energy comes from different places are also served just as well and feel comfortable in that environment?

JANELLE: I’ve just been kicking back listening to you and taking all these notes. And there’s this theme that I hear emerging in the references you’re making of continuously taking the problem that you’re looking at and then zooming out and zooming out and zooming out and relating it to that bigger picture. And that bigger picture always comes back to culture. And when you started and talked about your superpower with empathy and you mentioned your mom, I have that in the back of my head. And then I’m thinking about where we went with this discussion to the meaning of diversity and diversity of thought specifically. And what I’ve come to really appreciate in different people is to learn how to see through their eyes and to listen to them and see ‘How is it that you see the world?’. And when you learn how to look at the world through another person’s eyes, that’s where you really get that diversity of thought coming together in synergy.

And so, the question on my mind that I wanted to ask you is you’ve got this rich culture that comes from your mom and from Kenya and this savings culture and everything that means. And that’s given you a current set of eyes. And so, when you look at the human system around you, what I’d like to ask you is just what are the major patterns that pop out to you? What do you see?

REHEMA: Would this be specific to Kenya or just in general?

JANELLE: I think contrasting those things. If you think about that upbringing and you look at the things around you, I’m guessing what you see is a lot of dissonance with that culture. Like savings culture and what that means. Here we promote the complete opposite. It’s a spending culture, right? And that contrast alone is very distinctive. And it’s also in that meaning of diversity, right? It all comes together in that human system. And I bet given the things you’ve bene talking about, you see a lot of contrast in that. But it is contrast at the same time, like the smart city movement is very much happening. It’s very much alive here, right? But there’s a lot of contrast to that, too, of people stuck in the weeds in their thinking where you’re like, “Bigger picture. Bigger picture. Bigger picture.” Like an echo.

REHEMA: Yeah. So, when I’ve been fortunate enough to travel, I spent a bit of time in the US. And when I contrast these different places that I’ve been in and the different spaces I move through, I think one thing that always strikes me is how to some extent, people are fundamentally looking for the same things. It’s just how they go about actually getting them that tends to be very different, or even how they will talk about how they go about getting them. So, I don’t know. The interesting thing about comparing people in Nairobi specifically to people in for example New York City is there’s a very similar drive towards being active and active in terms of hustling. Like, I need to get to this next thing. I need to get this next gig. I need to push and push and push.

And I don’t know. It’s interesting how people will describe what they are doing, because here it’s very much like that’s the accepted thing. Whenever people from outside come to visit, they’re always fascinated by the fact that so many developers are doing other things completely unrelated sometimes to actually being developers. You have people who have farms. You have people who are like, raising livestock. You have people who are doing very different things. But here, it’s just part of the culture and the energy of the space. So, it gives the two cities very similar energies in terms of being very almost frenetic and high-speed. But at the end of the day what people are looking for is a sense of independence, a sense of control over their lives and their incomes in many ways. In Nairobi that’s very much geared towards ‘I need to do this because for me, but also because I need to support family’. In places like New York, it’s ‘I need to do this for me because I need to be at a certain level and have a certain level of accomplishment’.

So, people are sort of going after the same things in what seems to me to be increasingly similar ways, like the gig economy and all that stuff. But the way that they talk about it here, they’ll always try and frame it in terms of “I’m doing this because people need me to do this.” Or people often are the only breadwinners or have come from outside of Nairobi and therefore this is their one big break and if they don’t make it then the world falls apart. So, that’s been interesting to see. I don’t know if I’m really getting on, I’m really touching on what you’re asking in terms of the human systems. I don’t know. I might need to think about that a little bit more.

ASTRID: It sounds like what you’re saying Rehema is that they’re doing the same sort of things but in the context of the values of wherever they’re from and what’s going to be rewarded. Is that right?

REHEMA: Yeah, yeah. I think so. I think so.

ASTRID: Earlier in the conversation you were talking about how people kind of get tracked into different routes, like you’re good at math and science, you’re more humanistic. And some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately are similar and to like, how do you stop making it about those specific traits and more about how people think? And you had also mentioned how the reason why you wanted to pick up more coding skills is because you wanted to be able to make things. And so, I wanted to ask you what you thought about creating and making as something that is more neutral in terms of you’re not really talking about how you’re doing it. And if people can start to think of themselves as wanting to be creators and if that can help them switch their mindset a little bit and give them more access to maybe something that they weren’t trained to do.

REHEMA: Absolutely. That’s something that’s actually quite close to my heart [Laughs] as an area of discussion. So, like I mentioned, growing up school was fun for me. And I think I’m quite lucky for that, because I know for a number of people, it wasn’t. And I think for me it was fun because again I enjoyed learning. I enjoyed the process and act of learning. I did well in my studies and so I got a lot of positive feedback. “You’re smart. You’re clever. You’re intelligent. Good job.” That all fell apart once I got to college, actually. I started a bit late. I think I joined about a week after everybody else did. And I had put myself in this, I guess it was an accelerated intermediate Spanish class or something like that. I’d only done Spanish for three months before then, but I somehow tested into it. And I was excited. I loved learning languages, which probably also explains why I love being a developer. But I was excited and I joined the class and I realized that it was a week late but I figured, “Oh, I’ll just catch up.” And I never did. It was a four-credit class and I think I got a D by the end of it. So, this is first semester, first year, new country, university and all of that. And I was failing that class that had the most credits.

I think that was my first major experience with failure and I completely fell apart. I didn’t know what to do. My whole identity was built around this idea that I am clever, I am an intelligent person. Nothing should be too difficult for me. Failure shouldn’t happen. And I completely fell apart. And it took a while, probably the rest of my college career and a lot of time after that, to realize that essentially what they call the ‘growth mindset’ versus ‘fixed mindset’ of me believing that I was a certain way and it was therefore a fixed amount of intelligence that I had and I had surpassed it when I failed and realized that I had used up my quota of intelligence, so to speak. And that was that. But fortunately, over many sort of almost painful years of trying and failing and trying and failing, I got comfortable with the idea of failure. And reading about growth versus fixed mindsets and seeing people who are a lot more comfortable with experimenting and creating helped me realize that actually, I needed to change the way I think about things.

And it’s interesting because to me, being a creator, when you’re in the context of development it’s very specific. Like, yes there was nothing there and I built something and now there’s something there for somebody to interact with. But I think it applies to everything. Like, people who cook, people who make music, people who write, people who do haircuts. The idea of being a creator to me matters or integrates with the idea of a growth mindset because essentially what you’re saying is, “I’m going to take a blank page,” so to speak, “and I’m going to put something on it. And I’m going to see where that leads.” And it doesn’t have to be perfect from the get go. And even if it goes wrong, I can always fix it, change it, scrap it, start again, and create something else. So to me, that mindset of being comfortable, being a tinkerer, being comfortable with just playing almost with things and just to see where they lead, has been really important, like shift in my mindset.

When I started writing code, I was terrified of breaking anything. I always thought that to even begin writing the code I needed to know the exact right way to approach a particular problem. And I would spend hours trying to google and research and figure out, ‘What is the right way?’ before I would even begin. And it took me a lot of unlearning to get past that and to be comfortable making mistakes, essentially. Hopefully none that cost my company anything. [Chuckles] But being comfortable with that frame of mind. And I’m applying it to all different areas of my life. Learning how to play the ukulele, for instance. I’ve always loved music, always wanted to learn how to do something and how to play something. But I was always like, “If I’m not going to be perfect, then why begin?” which is a terrible way to go through life because essentially you never do anything. You never challenge yourself. So yeah, I’m all about thinking about myself and having other people think about themselves as creators.

REIN: I think there’s a whole conversation we could have about the value of mistakes, per se. But I just wanted to mention this one neat trick that I learned from Virginia [Set] here, which is that whenever you catch yourself making a statement about who you are that comes from a fixed mindset, like ‘I don’t know how to write JavaScript’ what you do is you tack the word ‘yet’ at the end.

REHEMA: Mm.

REIN: You say “I don’t know how to write JavaScript yet.”

REHEMA: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s awesome. Actually, I’m going to start adding that to my mental lingo. [Laughs]

ASTRID: I love that story, Rehema, because I feel like there are so many people who when they hear will be nodding and saying, “Oh my god, that’s me. Oh my god, that’s me.” And we don’t hear enough of it because there tends to be a lot of discussion about how amazing you are and how you got to be so amazing and how your amazing is so special that nobody can be amazing like you.

[Chuckles]

ASTRID: And there’s not a lot of discussion about “Yeah, this was hard and I failed. And then I tried and I failed again. And I tried and I failed again.” Even in the “tech failure stories” it’s always like “Yeah, they gave me a hundred million dollars and then that company crashed and burned, but it’s okay because I took a vacation and I thought about things. And then when I came back from climbing that mountain, I realized I could do this other thing.” And that’s really not helpful for most people to try to take that next step forward. So, thank you so much for sharing that.

REHEMA: Yeah, no problem. And one place that I really like to go to read stories about people who are still in the weeds and trying to figure that out, especially entrepreneurs, is Indie Hackers. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with that. They have a really good newsletter where people ask different questions but also a lot of people will just talk about their experiences trying to build something and the mistakes that they made. Which I think yeah, is important to hear that over and over again. And especially back now in my context of being in a developing country. We’re in a position where the majority of our leaders are a generation or two older than the majority of the population that they’re leading.

And I think the topic of empowerment is a difficult one. Because on one hand, you have a group of leaders who perhaps see things in a very different way and believe in a sort of “I’m going to tell you what to do so you should do it” type of mentality, the traditional teacher/student type of relationship where you don’t really have an opportunity to ask questions or at least in our context, you’re not really supposed to talk back to a teacher and question them or challenge them. And I see that a lot. We see that when we go and do mentoring or tutoring for kids in different schools. And you ask kids a question and everyone will be scared to respond, not because they don’t know the answer but because they haven’t been in an environment where they’re empowered to speak and to have their voices heard and that their thoughts are valid.

So, letting people know that it’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to try and to create and you have some agency in your world I think is such an important mindset to have, not just for us as we build things in our day-to-day lives, but in an entire population actually, of people who will become the next business owners and public leaders and all of that.

JANELLE: So, there’s no real right answer to this question. What I asked you was essentially ‘What do you see?’ because we were talking about this diversity of thought and perspective. And I wanted to be able to just see the things that stand out to you as a starting point. So, we got Nairobi versus New York City. Two cities, both very high-speed. And you’ve got this similar active drive and hustle, the similar culture in terms of push, push, push toward the next thing. And what you described as the importance of this is the sense of independence and control over your life, of your income, being able to choose your next goal, where you invest your energy, whether it be your money or your time. And at the core of this seems to be the essence of what it means to be a free human being. [Chuckles] And there’s constraints in terms of things that we shackle ourselves down with in terms of culture and shapes.

And we talked a little bit about identity and how we look at ourselves. And then you mentioned earlier about how technology has this role in shaping culture, in shaping that human system. And so, you’ve connected these things together. So, you’re always going big picture, big picture, big picture, right? And so, I’m wondering then, if these are the patterns you see at a societal level, how do you think technology has helped to shape those two systems similarly and differently?

REHEMA: I think one thing that always stands out to me about a difference between the two societies that I’ve moved through, Kenya and the US, one of the things that always strikes me about the US and I think for any foreigner who visits especially if you’re coming from a developed country, is you can see the history of the place. America’s very good at, and has been very good at, telling a very unified story to the outside world, to the international community, about its origin story, going back to superheroes. Its origin story, its ethics, values, the people who made it great, the things that they’ve built. And you’ll see monuments to that and you’ll see all of this massive effort to preserve a particular narrative in the history, right? I know the US last year was having some trouble with that. [Chuckles] But from the outside it’s always seemed very unified. One thing that I struggle with as an African is where to find that at home in terms of where the monuments to the people who’ve made our countries and our continent great, where the monuments to the things that we have built that have stood the test of time.

So, one thing that Andela’s director, country director of Nigeria, our Nigeria campus, his name is Seni Sulyman, he loves to say “Africa may have missed the industrial revolution but we’re not going to miss the technology one.” And I think that’s the thought that I think is really important for a particular generation of Africans in terms of “How do we build things that will last?” And how do we build things that can become part of that conversation and part of the monuments to what makes this continent important and incredible and amazing? And they don’t have to match what has made the west and what has made America important and amazing. We’re trying to create our own narrative and our own story.

So, in terms of how technology can bring that about for us, because technology is in many ways such a huge force for democratization (if I’m saying that correctly), it’s an opportunity to really build something that could change the narrative around the entire continent, if that makes sense. So, I guess in some way, it very much ties into why I wanted to be part of Andela and what Andela is all about. It’s essentially founded on the belief that brilliance is evenly distributed but opportunity isn’t. So, how do we create that opportunity? How do we make it accessible? So, we’re about creating an entire network of technologists that will be not only the leaders for Africa but for the world as a whole, to be global technology leaders and creating solutions in a world and a space that is really moving forward in a more inclusive and supportive way.

So, that’s an area where I’ve seen so far has been a huge difference between the African context and for example the North American one, where there’s a history there and a narrative that continues to empower young people in the US telling them that if you’re going to build something, it’ll impact the world. And that’s very true in Silicon Valley, I think. That’s the narrative in Silicon Valley. But in the US as a whole, you build products for the United States but they impact the world. That’s something that I think we feel very strongly about here now in the African continent, that it’s now our turn to do that. And we’re empowering people to do that. We’re building solutions that may begin locally but will impact the world, essentially. Does that connect? [Laughs]

JANELLE: Yeah, I thought that was great. There are so many great things in that of what I ultimately heard you coming to with technology empowers people.

REHEMA: Yeah.

JANELLE: And lets us have an impact, lets us not be invisible. And our narrative that we push forward as ourselves, this is the foundation of our identity. This is our story. And if you think about who I am, what it comes back to is, what is my story? What is the narrative I’m telling? And whether we’re telling that narrative as an individual, as a team, as a company, as a nation, there’s this echo of the same kind of human system that we’re talking about at all these different levels of abstraction, that bigger picture, bigger picture, bigger picture. That echo. And so, that’s kind of what I hear from you when you jump to these different tangents, is there’s essentially isomorphisms between these different contexts that are associated with identity.

REHEMA: Very much so, with identity and the story we tell ourselves about what is possible. Because if our identity is built around the idea that we missed out in this revolution, we missed out on that revolution, we don’t hear or see or tell stories about the things that have made us as the African people uniquely powerful and uniquely fantastic. If we don’t hear enough of those stories, then our idea of what’s possible, what’s in the realm of possibility is therefore very small in comparison to the kinds of stories that in the US, that you are told and that you hear about yourselves as a people.

So for me, yeah exactly what you’re saying, identity is so important. Because if we continue to push the ideas of what is possible, if we change what the stereotypical developer is supposed to look like and I present myself as a developer and I’m saying “I’m from Kenya, born and bred. I’m female. I changed careers. I’d done all of these different things,” and there’s so many stories here of people who come from such different backgrounds who are creating and building such incredible things, I think that narrative is so important. And that’s why Andela is more than just a company. It’s really a movement, because we’re tapping into that and saying “This is possible. We are here. We are working out of our native countries. I don’t have to leave my home in order to have global impact.” And that’s so important to me.

JANELLE: That’s beautiful. Because it basically echoes as a statement of identity “We’re just going to be superheroes. We’re going to choose to be superheroes and let technology empower us to make the world a better place.” That’s the identity statement.

REHEMA: Yeah, exactly. [Chuckles]

JESSICA: This goes back to something we wanted to talk to you about, which was you told us that sometimes you feel insecure about not having the traditional developer story?

REHEMA: Yes, yeah.

JESSICA: I love that ‘brilliance is evenly distributed but opportunity isn’t’ in relation to that. Because maybe it’s like we think of developers as having learned to program as children and been doing this their whole lives and they had computers as kids and this is how the grew up, and that’s the traditional getting into programming story. But maybe that’s not where brilliance is distributed. It’s where opportunity is distributed.

REHEMA: Precisely. Exactly. [Laughs] You’d be surprised the number of people who started learning how to code on phones here. They saw games or whatnot and they were just like, “Hey, let me just try and figure out how to make a game.” The number of my colleagues who first interacted with computers when they were in high school or once they were in college didn’t even have laptops of their own, borrowed from friends, because they were just, they saw something. They saw somebody write something or they saw a game or they saw a website and they were like, “Hey, I’m really curious about that. Let me figure out how to do this thing.” And now they’re here working for companies like Viacom. They’re working for companies like Facebook. And it’s amazing, right? And I think that every single day that I come to work and I’m working with people and I’m interacting with them, that always come to mind as why it’s so important that we do provide and we do give people access to different kinds of opportunities. Because it’s not always going to come from the most traditional or the most obvious of places. And there’s the whole narrative, I think especially in startups about yeah, they went to university and then they dropped out. And here it’s like, “Well, some people didn’t even have that opportunity to get to university.” but here they are still creating incredible things.

REIN: When you think about the global tech community culture, it is extremely anglocentric. And one of the outcomes of that is that work done by people that aren’t in the USA, Europe, especially people in the global south, is erased. We don’t know that it exists unless you go look for it. And even if you do, it can be hard to find. So, I wonder how many of our listeners knew that there was a system for mobile payments in Africa before Apple Pay was a thing. I wonder how many of our listeners knew that Chile in the early 70s had a cybernetic software-based system that managed their global economy that is the basis for a lot of work in cybernetics. It’s led to things like [Kybernetes] today. We don’t know that. If you go search…

JESSICA: Wow.

REIN: For that project, it’s called Project Cybersyn. If you search for it on Amazon, there are zero results and Amazon things you misspelled something else.

[Chuckles]

REIN: So, this work around the world that’s getting done in various countries that don’t speak English, that aren’t primarily white, is erased. It’s hard to find. And That’s a tragedy as far as I’m concerned. And I’m wondering what we can do about that.

REHEMA: Very true. I mean, even when you think about it essentially, to be able to code means to have to learn English. [Chuckles] Essentially.

SAM: At least the 50 or so keywords that are used in most programming languages, right?

REHEMA: [Laughs] Exactly. But even…

JESSICA: But the documentation.

REHEMA: Just to read documentation. Exactly, yeah. I was working with a developer from Albania and he was saying to me how when he started off it would take him an incredible amount of time because he had to, when he was looking something up [Chuckles] for every other word that he read, he would have to google that word. So forget just trying to understand documentation, which can be difficult enough in and of itself. He had to understand the language as well. And I never really thought about that because Kenya is predominantly, English is one of our national languages. So, it’s not something that I’d had to think about. And even then, you’d assume that because I’m coming from a country where we do speak a lot of other languages, that that’s something that I would be sensitive to. But it wasn’t until I met someone who was from somewhere where English isn’t even on the menu, he was like, “Yeah, that was actually a really big challenge.” But he’s grateful fro now the ability to learn the language because it’s helping him in other ways in terms of his education and his business opportunities and all fo that. But again…

SAM: Thanks, colonialism.

REHEMA: [Laughs] Exactly. Very anglocentric world that we’re living in. Yeah, I don’t know how we go about fixing that. I think part of it is telling these stories of people from different places and having their voices heard. The fact that you guys agreed to have me on here, I think that’s incredible because otherwise there isn’t much of an avenue for people from different parts of the world to tell their stories and have them heard on the global platforms. That’s quite tricky. But I do think that the tech world does it better than most though, even having said all of that. Because I think there is, okay with some caveats, I think if you’re working on things that are already deemed interesting by the Silicon Valley set, then yes, you’ll be able to maybe have your voice heard. If you’re working in spaces that are not directly related to the next Uber or the next e-commerce app, if you’re working on things that are more local to your context or even more focused on civic tech, then I think there is still more of a challenge there and we still need to highlight those projects because they’re just as important.

JESSICA: Yeah. And that gets back to the empathy of, can you appreciate a solution to a problem that you don’t have?

REHEMA: Right. [Laughs] Absolutely, yeah. I think that’s the biggest thing. I’m not entirely sure how that’s something that we can solve until we really appreciate what we were saying earlier about the importance of diversity and the importance of different people’s perspectives. Because at the end of the day, it might not be a problem that you have directly, but I think we should be able to appreciate and try to understand the difficulty that somebody else is having and how that solution then solves that. But yeah, that’s a tricky one. Because I think it means not just being able to imagine having a problem but to imagine how that problem then affects so many other aspects of somebody’s life, right?

So, I read about, sorry I watched a documentary actually about a coding competition for young girls in different parts of the world. And I think there was a group of girls from an Eastern European country. I don’t remember which one, but if I find it I’ll share it with you guys. And they had a problem where in their town, clean drinking water is very difficult to find. So, what these girls did is they built an app that basically pointed people to all of the wells in the surrounding neighborhoods and would have indicators for the level of cleanliness of the water or like at different times of the day or at different times of the month. I can’t remember. But essentially, a way for people to easily check and see which wells were most appropriate to go get clean drinking water. So, that’s a solution that’s very much tied into that particular area. But you’d also have to understand why, for you to understand how important their solution is, you’d have to understand how lack of access to sanitary drinking water can affect so many other aspects of their lives.

So, it’s not just about understanding a specific problem but understanding a whole context in which somebody lives. And that takes a lot of mental effort. [Chuckles] And I guess some people would find that to be too much work. But I think hopefully if we continue to tell the stories in a positive and inspiring way, more people would be interested, hopefully. And want to take part in those discussions. Because eventually, there will be some application or some learnings that they can take and bring back to their own context.

SAM: I’m really encouraged by that particular example just because it tells me that the tools of programming and creation are accessible enough that they can be picked up and used by people who have such different contexts than somebody in my position does.

REHEMA: Yeah. Technology as a tool is incredible, I really think. And so is the internet, which allows us to go and find out all of these things. But not everyone has access to [Laughs] internet easily. Which is again, another challenge. So, seeing stories like that and hearing about people who’ve been able to create solutions in that way is really inspiring but it’s also I feel like another reminder of just how important it is to make sure that these tools are actually more greatly accessible.

SAM: Oh yeah. I didn’t mean to imply that we don’t have a lot further to go. But yeah, definitely.

REHEMA: Yeah.

REIN: We were talking earlier about access to opportunities being unequally distributed. I think in my mind there’s another thing that’s very important that’s also unequally distributed, which is freedom of creative expression. The ability to…

JESSICA: Is that the ability to make mistakes?

REIN: It’s the ability to create on your own terms without being dictated by other people.

REHEMA: Can you give us an example?

REIN: Yeah, so… and I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t name-drop a philosopher on one of these shows.

[Laughter]

SAM: Bring it.

REIN: John Locke, the inventor of classical liberalism, said that the basic human rights were life, liberty, and ownership of property. Wilhelm von Humboldt a hundred years later said that the basic human rights were freedom of inquiry and freedom of creative expression. And the example he gave is that if a craftsperson makes a piece of art of a sculpture or something like that on their own terms, we generally respect their creative expression. If they were told to make a thing by someone else, if they made it for their boss, we can appreciate the thing they made but not respect the way it was made. So, access to freedom of creative expression is necessary for art and I think it’s necessary for a lot of human growth.

JANELLE: I think this was the same thing I was seeing before in the contrast that I brought up freedom. And then Jessica made this funny face like, “What?”

[Chuckles]

JANELLE: And I was sitting there thinking about well, how does this fit in? But it’s this theme that I see repeating with this idea of basic human rights and being able to see all this potential of what could be. And then being able to have the freedom to reach for your dreams and to express creatively. And in order to do that, to not have shackles that hold us from those things, we have to have knowledge distributed. We have to have the opportunity to be able to experience these things, to have the basis of knowledge so that we can participate in that. And once we’re empowered by technology which is awesome because it’s just, we’re empowered by the ability, the things that we learn, by things that are in our mind. They’re not things that we acquire. They’re not materialistic things. It’s the ability to create with our mind, the ability to do free, creative expression. Think about what you can do with software. It’s amazing. It’s like magic. We can create anything we can dream, right?

And so, if you think about the freedom of creative expression as something that’s core and fundamental to be what it means to be human, and you bring back this contrast in culture of movement, movement, movement. We’re always pushing forward toward the next thing. And then when you look at that system and how technology influences the culture, then you’re like, well what if this was the thing that we all looked at? What if we saw our potential? What if we imagine that we could build anything that we can imagine and we started working together to make that happen? What if we looked at the human system and started with smart cities you brought up? So, that’s sort of the similar theme i’m hearing, is there’s all this potential that we’re wasting because of our culture, essentially. Like barriers in our culture. And what if things like, we could tell our stories and identities and we could accept people for who they were and the way that they saw the world and their unique perspectives that they brought to the table? And you described those things at a team level, an individual level, and then at a national level too, which I thought was really interesting.

REHEMA: Yeah. Because I think the world that you’re describing would be utopia, right? And I think that we can get closer to it, inching closer to it, in different ways and with different aspects. But you’re right. I think that’s such a profound way of looking at the whole idea of human potential, and through human potential achieving an incredible almost nationwide or continent-wide potential. I think for the context of the African continent, access to that kind of freedom is something that we have been sorely lacking. And what you’re seeing now is this huge resurgence in music and fashion and food and all of these different things that help to cement and celebrate different aspects of different cultures within these different countries. And it’s so fascinating to see that grow, because I think the more that we celebrate in the things that we are able to do, the more people’s minds open up. And the more they’re able to start thinking beyond what we currently have and think about the opportunities of the future and how they can make the best use of that.

What’s been really fun for me personally is, so currently Andela is based out of three countries in Africa. We’re in Lagos, Nigeria, Nairobi, Kenya (where I’m based), and Kampala, Uganda. So, we have a lot of exchanges where we’ll meet and hang out with folks from the Lagos office or from the Uganda office and it’s just so fascinating to see and to experience and enjoy everybody’s differences and the cultures. Because they’re all very different. And we all get to interact and share so much. And I think that really adds to and builds to everybody’s sense of what we’re doing and what we’re building might look slightly different in each country but it’s all moving towards the same ideas and goals of opportunity and what can we do and what can we make of this opportunities that we have? What can we build for each other? What can we share with each other to help continue to grow and cement this movement? And I think that’s such a cool, cool way of thinking about it, what freedom can do for lighting a fire essentially, towards achieving such incredible things. That’s so exciting. I hadn’t really thought about it in that way. But that’s really cool.

JESSICA: Speaking of really cool, it’s now time for reflections. Who wants to go first?

ASTRID: I can go. What I wanted to bring up was what you had said Rehema about you having to unlearn this need to wanting to be perfect or wanting to have the right solution first. Because I think it’s something that happens a lot. I know for me it’s something that still happens to me a lot except it’s more under the radar whereas before it was top of mind. But now it’s, “Why haven’t I done this yet? Oh, because I think I have to make it perfect.” Or I want it to be this way, instead of just starting. And I feel that it’s applicable to actually writing code. But I think it’s also applicable in other aspects of your life where it’s very uncomfortable to be uncomfortable so much and I think it makes you want to retreat back to what you know so that you can at least feel some sense of safety again. And you have to push yourself to take baby steps so that you’re not still in the same place month after month, year after year. So, I thought that was a really great thing to remind everybody about.

JESSICA: One thing that stood out to me was that Rehema, you said that people outside of the US don’t often get an opportunity like this podcast to speak to people globally. And I’m like, “Whoa, our podcast is global?”

[Laughter]

JESSICA: But, but, but I think you have a great point there and we should seek out guests from all around the world and do this disparate timezone thing some more.

REHEMA: Absolutely. There are so many stories out there that are just waiting for a mic. [Chuckles] It would be incredible just to hear from these different people, to hear so many different perspectives. Because it makes our worlds all that much richer for it. But also because there could be real sparks of inspiration from people’s stories and the things that they work with and the things that they’ve created. If you guys could create that kind of a platform, I think that would be incredible because I also think it would be very, very unique.

JESSICA: Greater Than Code: The World Tour.

[Laughter]

REHEMA: Do it. [Laughs]

ASTRID: I like the sound of that, I really do.

SAM: One thing that really stood out for me was Rehema, your story about failing in your first semester of Spanish and you were talking about the fixed versus growth mindset. And that really resonated for me because a lot of the frustration that I feel in life really does come from that place of feeling like I should be good at something from the get go. So, it was a really useful reminder to me and hopefully to our listeners as well that I need to be more gentle with myself, that I need to accept mistakes as being part of the learning process, and how you get good at something is by [chuckles] being bad at something first. And Rein, I’m going to take your reminder to heart to add the word ‘yet’ at the end of my sentences now. So, thank you all.

REIN: I’m glad that we as a podcast are thinking about how we can add more diverse voices. I think we do better than most people or most podcasts in the game right now because our focus is on people and because we care about getting diverse viewpoints. But we’re still reaching into a really small pool. And there’s so much more that we could be doing.

And my other reflection would be that diversity is not just good for ethical reasons. It’s also a way to make your organization more competent. Because you need at least as much variety to solve problems as the variety of problems you have.

REHEMA: Absolutely.

REIN: And the way that you get that variety as an organization is through diversity of experiences, of viewpoints, of all sort.

SAM: And you have more problems than you think you do.

[Chuckles]

REIN: And so, if you want as an organization to solve harder problems, to become more competent, that’s where you should be looking.

REHEMA: Absolutely.

JANELLE: So, the thing that really struck me that I still got on my mind was right at the end you mentioned fashion. And so I’m thinking “Fashion? Where does fashion come into this?” But you brought up this idea of celebrating culture and celebrating our stories through fashion and how beautiful that was to be able to empower something like fashion. And when I started thinking about who I am and who we are and you start thinking about what matters to us, being able to express my soul, being able to express my art, that essence of creative freedom; and then I’m thinking about fashion and it’s the same kind of thing, right? We have all of our stories and all these things that we build which is the beauty that comes out of us. And that maybe if we just take a step back, that fundamental thing that we can do to influence the culture around us is just celebrating beautiful. And I think that’s ultimately the message I hear you echoing through all of the things that you’re saying when you’re admiring all these different cultures, when you’re admiring all these different people, is to celebrate beautiful.

REHEMA: Yeah. I think that’s probably yeah, my reflection as well, my takeaway from this. Because I’m all about opportunity and I believe in it so much but I hadn’t, even I hadn’t thought about it in terms of fundamental right to freedom, which I think is such an incredible way to think about it. Because technology as a tool, like we said, it democratizes. It has so many applications. Like you said, it’s like magic, right? You can create entire worlds with it, which I think is what so many of us love about this. But if we do go slightly more bigger picture and we pull back and we’re looking at people’s fundamental rights to have freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the ability to create, and the kind of mindset that allows them to see the world around them and want to, and feel like they have the ability to effect change and positive change hopefully on it, then opportunity isn’t something that somebody else has to provide. It becomes something that people are able to take and make for themselves. And that’s the big thing that I’ve taken away from this conversation. Thank you guys for directing that and for bringing that up because I think that’s really cool.

JESSICA: Awesome. Rehema, thank you so much for coming on the show.

REHEMA: Thank you guys for having me. This has been a blast. [Laughs]

JESSICA: As a reminder to our listeners, if you like the show and you want to hear more of it, Greater Than Code is a listener-sponsored show. We are looking for a few really special companies to sponsor episodes but we’re pretty much listener-supported. And you can participate in that. And if you contribute to our Patreon in any amount, even $1 once, you get an invitation to the exclusive Greater Than Code Slack channel, which is my favorite Slack channel because it’s not very high volume and everyone is super nice. And especially, you get access to the overheard channel where I put things that Rein has said without attributing them.

[Laughter]

REIN: Wait, what?

[Laughter]

JESSICA: Go to GreaterThanCode.com to find out more!

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062: The Beauty of Art and Technology with Jamey Hampton

Mandy Moore — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 05:00:31 +0000

Panelists:

Jessica Kerr | Sam Livingston-Gray | Astrid Countee

Guest Starring:

Jamey Hampton: @jameybash | jameybash.com | Agrilyst |
Sugar City Arts Collaborative

Join Our Slack Channel!
Support us via Patreon!

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Show Notes:

01:22 – Jamey’s Superpower: “The Fharlanghn Sense”

02:40 – Working in Agriculture

04:03 – Theories on Automation

05:56 – Pivoting Into Computer Science and Software Development

10:35 – Feeling Like You Need to Know Everything

Stella Report from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping With Complexity

15:47 – ‘Zines and Being a ‘Zine Librarian

27:50 – The Beauty of Art and Technology and Forming Emotional Connections to Things

Floppy Music DUO – Imperial March

35:26 – The Death Star => Ethics in Technology and Taking Responsibility/Being Accountable for your Code

Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsite

“I think the more powerful a tool is, the more respect you have to have for it.” ~ @jameybash on Greater Than Code

— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) January 8, 2018

49:42 – Brilliance and Learning From Others Without Consent

54:49 – Advice for Channeling Your Own Inner Fharlanghn Sense

Transcript:

SAM: Hello and welcome to Episode 62 of Greater Than Code. I am Sam Livingston-Gray and I am here to introduce my good friend, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Good morning. Thank you, Sam. I am excited about this episode of Greater Than Code because this is our first episode wherein we don’t have an extra guest and we get to grill one of our fellow panelists. So, thank you very much to Jamey Hampton for being the first panel target. I mean, guest.

Jamey is a non-binary adventurer from Buffalo, New York, who wishes they were immortal so they can have time to visit every coffee shop in the world! They’re an artist who turned into a programmer after one too many animation classes that was a Computer Science class in disguise. Currently, they’re working as a professional plant-liker and software engineer for Agrilyst, a data analysis platform for indoor agriculture. They’re also the zine librarian at Sugar City Arts Collaborative and, bet you wouldn’t have guessed this, a permanent panelist on the podcast, Greater Than Code!

SAM: Woohoo!

JESSICA: Jamey spends most of their free time camping and thinking about Star Wars, sometimes simultaneously. Jamey. So, the other day you came to St. Louis and visited me and it was fun and I learned about your superpower, which is to magically find the best place to go on a given night in a city you’ve never been in.

JAMEY: Yes. I call it my Fharlanghn sense where Fharlanghn is the god of travel and roads from Dungeons and Dragons.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: It’s a good superpower to have. It makes me very fun to travel with. So, if anyone ever wants to go on vacation with me, just hit me up.

JESSICA: Yeah, if you’re adventurous, I guess. If you don’t like surprises, don’t go with Jamey.

JAMEY: That’s true.

[Chuckles]

JAMEY: I’ve thought about it. I’m like, I wish I could offer my superpower as a service…

JESSICA: [Laughs]

JAMEY: To other people, like have an app.

SAM: [Laughs]

JAMEY: That’s like me giving people advice on what to do. But I’m worried that if I tried to exploit it in that way, maybe it wouldn’t work the way I want, because it’s kind of fickle.

JESSICA: It sounds like you would have to be there.

JAMEY: I don’t think I could automate it. I think I would have to have a personal consultation with someone. I could do that. I’m quitting my day job. Hard pivot.

JESSICA: [Laughs]

JAMEY: Just kidding. I love working at Agrilyst. I like plants. And I like working with plants. And I like working with farmers and growers because they’re very interesting.

JESSICA: I’m curious. So, I used to work at an agriculture-related company, too. And one thing I observed about the growers in that particular very corn-dominated agriculture segment is they’re all white males. Is that true in your customer base?

JAMEY: That’s a little bit true. Agrilyst is actually, the founder of our company, her name is Allison. She’s the CEO, Allison Kopf, and she’s awesome. And she used to be a grower. She was an agronomist for an indoor farm and she actually did very similar to what I was just saying about my superpower where she was like, wow, not every farm can afford a me to have a personal agronomist to do this for them. So, what if I created myself as a service? And [chuckles] that’s kind of how Agrilyst happened. And so, she had this whole idea for how you could do the kind of management that she did with software. And I think that’s really cool. But also, the reason I brought it up is because she is a minority, for sure, in the agriculture industry. So, it’s an honor to work with her.

JESSICA: Sweet. So, she is also in the process of automating herself.

JAMEY: Yeah. It’s going well. [Laughs] Now every farm can have an Allison. It must be nice to be so important. I like that.

JESSICA: Ah, that’s an interesting point. But the part about whether we’re important, that’s our decision, right? Is my work worth automating and spreading?

SAM: You have to have the ability to do so as well, right?

JAMEY: Yeah, I think…

JESSICA: Yeah, not everything works.

JAMEY: Some things need the personal touch, I think. Automation. There’s a lot of discussion about automation and what’s going to get automated. And we’re not going to have people doing jobs. I remember the first time I ever thought about that question. I used to work… when I was in high school I worked at a TV studio and I was really, really into it. And we got to tour a local news TV station one time. And I was so excited. And so, we show up there and we met the newscasters and it was super cool. And we watched as they were doing one of the news broadcasts and they had these really cool cameras that were on these robotic tripods and they moved around the studio on their own and focused on different things. And we were like, “These are so cool! These are amazing. We wish we had these in our studio.” And my boss was like, “I’m not saying that they’re not cool. But think about this. Because this is doing your job to the point where they don’t need you to do your job anymore.” And I was like, “Oh.” And that was the moment I first thought about that.

SAM: [Laughs] Right.

JESSICA: We think of… your job was to move the camera, but there’s so much of your job is deciding how and where to move the camera.

JAMEY: That’s true.

SAM: And somebody still does need to at least punch a button to tell it which move to make. But yeah, maybe you go from three camera operators to one.

JESSICA: Or three and you just do more camera movement.

JAMEY: That’s true. It freaked me out at the time because I was planning on going into TV production for my career at that point. And I was like, “Oh, it’s going to be so hard to find a job in TV production,” which was true. And it’s not what I do now. So… [Laughs]

JESSICA: Yeah, so tell us about how you made that switch.

JAMEY: I went to school for digital art, which was the closest that I had to film and TV production at the school that I went to. And because it wasn’t an actual film and TV production major, I took a lot of other miscellaneous art classes. They were basically like, “Take animation.” I’m like, “I don’t want to take animation. I don’t want to be an animator.” And they’re like, “Well just take one. One is required. And then if you hate it, you don’t have to take any more, ever.” So, I took some graphic design classes and I took some animation classes and some game design classes. And I found that specifically in animation and game design, there was a lot of actual strict writing code involved. [Chuckles] I learned ActionScript at that point. And everyone else in all of my classes was like, “This sucks. Why do I have to do this? This isn’t art. This is math. It’s stupid.”

SAM: [Laughs] Wait, there’s a difference?

JAMEY: [Laughs] Some people think so. But so, I was like, “This is great. I love writing ActionScript.” And everyone else seems to hate it, which makes me special for liking it, I guess. At least, in my digital art classes. So, I started studying computer science. And I got a minor in computer science. And then I decided that’s what I actually wanted to do instead of trying to move to the big city and make my big break or whatever I would have had to do to go into film production.

SAM: So, I really want to ask you about that. But first, I have to mention that we have a surprise bonus panelist. Astrid Countee has just joined us.

JESSICA: Yay.

SAM: Welcome, Astrid.

JESSICA: Thank you for coming.

JAMEY: We’re glad you’re here.

ASTRID: Yeah, I had to hear all about you, Jamey.

JAMEY: That’s a lot of fresh [inaudible]. Sorry.

ASTRID: [Laughs]

SAM: So yeah, I had it on my list to ask you how you got into tech. And so, it sounds like you sort of discovered a love for it during college. What happened after you graduated? How’d you get your first tech job?

JAMEY: I found my first tech job on Craigslist. That’s a true story. And it was this tiny startup, like locally to me, that did QR code generation and text message marketing using it.

SAM: Oh yeah, I’ve seen one of those.

JAMEY: I was the only developer. I learned Ruby on Rails while I was working there. So, they hired me. They were paying me $10 an hour to basically teach myself Ruby on Rails to the point where I was capable of running this software by myself. And I worked there as the only developer until essentially they ran out of money to pay me and they started cutting my hours. And I found another job at that point. But it was really, really interesting being the only developer at my first tech job because I did a little bit of mentorship because one of the owners is a very talented developer. He just wasn’t writing code for this project. So, he was there to answer some of my questions sometimes, although this was kind of his side-gig. But I learned a lot from him because he was really brilliant. But I worked for about a year on a codebase that I was the only person who touched, which was really interesting. Because I knew how everything worked and that is the last time I’ve ever worked on a project…

[Laughter]

JAMEY: Where I knew how every single piece worked.

SAM: Yeah.

JESSICA: Yeah.

JAMEY: I was the one who built everything. That’s not true, because it did work before I joined. But I touched everything in that year and I updated everything in that year. But also, then if something breaks, I didn’t learn that, “Oh, who broke this?” It was always me.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: If something was great, I could pat myself on the back. And if something was broken, I could blame myself because there was nobody else. [Chuckles]

ASTRID: I once went to a talk with somebody who was in a similar position where they are the only developer. It was a Rails app. And they had done it for, I think at that point, three or four years.

JAMEY: Wow.

ASTRID: And the talk was titled “Galapagos Rails” and they were talking about like…

SAM: [Laughs]

ASTRID: When you’re the only one and it’s only you and everything that breaks is your fault and you have to just figure stuff out. And how it made him into a better developer but that it also made him had way less patience for people who don’t fix their own problems.

SAM: [Laughs] Yeah, because I guess in one year you could potentially make a bunch of problems and then leave and then let somebody else deal with them, or at least some of the bigger problems that you made, you could leave to somebody else. But in three years, you’re really going to have your face rubbed in it, huh?

ASTRID: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah. He talked about that, about the really lonely nights where it’s all broken and you just can’t do it anymore. And you have to come back the next day because the whole company is depending on you.

JESSICA: Wow.

ASTRID: So, do you think it changed anything about your attitude about being a developer, Jamey? Like, having to do it by yourself?

JAMEY: Yeah, I do. I think the hardest thing about going from being the only person to working with other people, and in fairness I’ve never worked at a big company. I’ve never worked on anything with more than a handful of developers, really. My next company after that, at our peak, there were about 10 of us. And at Agrilyst right now there’s, at our peak, there were probably five or six people touching the codebase. But even just from that jump from one to a few, the hardest thing was that I feel guilt about not understanding how something works. And if someone’s like, “Hey, do you know how our application does this?” and I have to be like, “No, I didn’t write that and I’ve never looked at it,” I feel guilt about saying that. I feel like I should know everything. And so, that’s kind of hard. And I still feel that way a little bit. I recognize that it’s kind of silly and that it’s reasonable not to know everything.

JESSICA: It’s more than reasonable.

JAMEY: [Chuckles]

JESSICA: It is literally impossible to know everything. And if you try to know everything, you won’t get anything done. These systems scale bigger than our heads. Actually, there’s a paper on this in the [inaudible] report. It talks about our software systems are sufficiently complex that every model is always incomplete and out of date.

[Chuckles]

JESSICA: The best we can do is collectively have enough accuracy over enough of the system to be able to keep it running and change it.

JAMEY: I would agree with that. And I think the other thing that I got from being the only person is that a sense of, “Well, but I’ll figure it out,” because I was in a position where I had to figure it out. There was no other option. And so, that was kind of empowering. Because I remember, and that was my first job and I was very new. And there were a lot of times where I was like, “This is impossible. I don’t know how to do this. I can’t pawn it off on anyone else. [Chuckles] I just got to do it.” And every time I started a new big feature I’d be like, “This is impossible. I’m never going to be able to get this to work.” And somehow, I always did get it to work eventually. I’d have to learn new stuff. And I’d have to figure it out. But I did it. And so, after this cycle happened a few times, I started to be like, “Okay. I’m feeling that feeling where it feels like it’s impossible. But the last six or eight times I said that, it was possible. So maybe, that feeling is wrong.”

JESSICA: So, one of those things that you learned at that first job where there wasn’t really anybody else was that you could figure it out?

JAMEY: Definitely.

JESSICA: And it is. [Sighs] I still feel that every day. I have this urge to understand the whole system. And I just have to let it go because if I try to keep up, it’s changing so fast and there are six other devs working on it. It changes so fast that if I tried to just keep up with what’s going on, I don’t have time to do anything. So, I’ve had to force myself to narrow my focus, not know how most of the backend works, and just move forward on relative frontend stuff.

JAMEY: That makes sense to me. I think the two things are related. Because if you have confidence that you can figure it out if and when you need to, then you can let it go for now.

SAM: Yeah.

JESSICA: That’s a good point, yeah.

SAM: Yeah, my strategy for that is to try to leave the code in a legible enough state that when I come back to it, some way down the road, that I’m confident that I can pick it back up again. Or whoever else touches it can pick it back up. And that’s why refactoring is important, kids.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: Code politeness.

SAM: [Laughs]

JESSICA: Lately I find that the limiting resource is based in my head. So, I’ve become really stingy with what I keep in my head and started writing more stuff down and letting go of it.

JAMEY: I write everything down. And I write it all down on paper. Everything has to go on paper. It’s like I don’t even know something until I write it down on paper. Because I can type without thinking about what I’m writing or reading what I type. [Chuckles] But I can’t do that with paper.

SAM: Right. Well, the trade-off is you can search typed stuff easier. But writing it down with your hands on paper helps cement it more firmly in your brain.

JAMEY: Yeah. A lot of times I don’t even go back and read the stuff I wrote. But just having written it down is so helpful.

ASTRID: I’m totally like that. It’s like by writing it, now it’s in my brain so I don’t need it.

JESSICA: Yeah. It’s almost like that. That puts it in a more built-in form of memory instead of some active memory that I feel like I’m expending RAM to remember this, until I write it down.

JAMEY: I like that.

JESSICA: Like deeper storage or something.

JAMEY: I didn’t know you were a droid. But now I know.

[Laughter]

SAM: Yeah, actually I think possibly a better metaphor would be registers in the CPU for working memory. Because I think most people have seven plus or minus two slots for holding onto things in their head.

JESSICA: Yeah. Today I feel like I have three.

[Chuckles]

SAM: That’s my usual.

[Chuckles]

ASTRID: So Jamey, you’re a librarian. Can you tell us about that?

JAMEY: I am. I get a little nervous about using the word librarian sometimes because there are actual librarians that had to study and learn a lot of things to be a professional and that is not what I do.

ASTRID: Well, was is it you do that they’re not doing, or that you’re not doing that they are doing?

JAMEY: I don’t know what they’re doing. I feel like they’re doing magic and I’m doing, I don’t know, volunteer work. But I work at a local collaborative art space called Sugar City and we have the zine library that people can donate zines to. And I take care of them and I keep them nice on the wall and I put them in the database. And I meet people who want to donate to us and I get zines from them. I take in donations from the mail and I keep track of all of it. And I love all the zines in our library and I take care of them lovingly. So, if people read them and they get ripped, I fix them.

ASTRID: What kind of zines are they?

JAMEY: We have any/every kind of zine you can imagine, because we take any kind of donations that anyone wants to give. So, we’ll often get someone donating their entire library because they’re like, “I’m moving,” and, “I don’t collect these anymore,” whatever.

SAM: Wow.

JAMEY: So, we’ll get a whole box of art zines or queer zines from the 90’s, which is cool. We have a ton of anarchist political zines because we’ll get full collections of those. So, it’s really cool. And then we put them on the wall. There’s no order or anything. So, you just have to browse. We do have a list of what we own and people can come in and read zines. And it’s very exciting and cool. And I run zine fairs where people can sell zines.

JESSICA: Define zine.

JAMEY: A zine, well it’s short for a magazine. This is like a 90’s thing that’s… I feel like it was very popular then and then it got less popular and now it’s research, which I’m really excited about. I feel like zines are very popular again. But it’s basically self-published magazines.

SAM: So, I’m guessing something like something that a person would type up or draw and then take down to Kinko’s and make 20 copies of?

JAMEY: A lot of them are like that. There as some that are a little bit more well-put-together than that. But that’s what I like so much about zines, is that anyone can do it. If you want to go big and do this whole production and do bookbinding and stuff, I know people who do that and it’s really cool. But if you don’t want to do that or you don’t know how to do that, or you don’t have the time or the skill, you can still do zines. There’s really no minimum skill required. If you have an idea that you want to put on paper, you can put it on paper and make it. And I love all zines. Some of my favorite zines are just these crappy Kinko’s copies that you can barely read. But the content of them is so important that I’m like, “Yes! I’m so glad that I have this on paper.” And it’s so different from the internet in some ways. Because the internet also has that extremely low barrier of entry. You don’t have to have any measurable skill in anything to go on the internet and post something. So in that way, it’s similar. But in every other conceivable way, it’s different.

[Chuckles]

SAM: Yeah, it’s funny. You were talking about how they were really popular in the 90’s and then less so and then they experienced a resurgence. And being the sort of nerd that I am, I want to correlate that with a technical story about how in the 90’s publishing to the web kind of sucked. And then we got sites like LiveJournal and then later Tumblr and somewhere along the way WordPress. But that doesn’t really account for their recent resurgence. And maybe I’m totally off-base. What do you think? Why did they come back? Why did they go away?

JAMEY: I think that they went away because people were like, “Oh, we can use the internet for this, but better.” I would agree with that. I’m not sure why they came back. I was doing zines in 2010-ish and people were making fun of me. And now, half the artists I know locally do zines. And so somewhere in between there it’s become a thing.

SAM: Is the answer hipsters?

JAMEY: I don’t think the answer is hipsters.

SAM: [Laughs]

JAMEY: I think if anything, the answer is like the punk scene. And I think the punk scene has, not that like… I’m not accusing punk of being dead at any point. But I think the punk scene has been more culturally relevant lately because of the political climate. I think that’s part of it. I think there’s been a nostalgia factor. Not just to, “Oh, remember when we had zines?” specifically, because I think some of these people are doing zines for the first time now. But like, the idea of holding something in your hand is very attractive to me and very different from the internet.

One of my favorite things about zines is that they travel organically and they can’t be censored or searched. So, they can’t be censored is kind of obvious. You make them yourself and you hand them out to people and nobody can stop you from doing that, which is cool. But I also think that you get very personal stories in zines that you wouldn’t get on the internet, because you have a lot more control in some ways about who gets that story. You can control who you pass these zines to. You can make 20 and then never make them again. And now it’s out there and maybe it was cathartic for you to do. And maybe you shared it with someone who really needed to be shared with, but nobody can go on Google and be like, ‘Jamey Hampton this, this, and this’, and get these personal stories that I’ve written in zines. Because they’re just not on the Internet in that way.

JESSICA: So, you’re sharing your story and you have some control over who sees it but not full control. You don’t know where all those zines will end up but you have some idea how many. And it’s more localized?

JAMEY: I like sending zines through the mail. Someone recently asked me if I would put my zines on Etsy and I was like, “No.” And they’re like, “Well, can I buy one?” And I was like, “Yes.” PayPal me money and I’ll mail it to you.

SAM: [Laughs]

JAMEY: But I’m not going to put it on Etsy. And I think that the reason that I’m against… I’m not against Etsy in theory for other people, but zines used to be like you would find an address on the back of another zine and you would mail them a dollar through the postal service. And they would mail you something hopefully, or they would steal your dollar. I don’t know. Hopefully they’ll mail you something. I don’t steal people’s dollars. I do mail them out. People are like, “Well, that’s kind of sketchy.” I’m like, “Well, you know what? It is a little sketchy but that’s how we’re doing it. So…” [Chuckles]

JESSICA: Your two dollars are not PayPal-insured.

JAMEY: [Chuckles]

SAM: Yeah, so back in the 90’s I actually had a physical copy of a book that think was called ‘Weird Stuff by Mail’. And if I remember correctly, it was actually written by the same person who did the whole ‘Church of the SubGenius’ thing.

JAMEY: Awesome.

SAM: It was a printed book. So, by the time I got it, some of the stuff was already obsolete. But it was a list of just places that you could mail a couple of bucks and get back random, weird shit.

JAMEY: I love that. I want to get that book and mail to people and see if any of them still exists.

SAM: [Laughs] Right. Well, good luck finding the book. I’m sure it’s out of print.

JAMEY: Even the book doesn’t exist. It’s an enigma. Out of print is also another thing I think about with zines. Because a lot of them are really low printing numbers and I have zines. I got a zine when I was in France and it was four out of 15 on the back. And I was like, “15 copies of this exist.” And in France. And somehow I had one in Buffalo. Just the sheer randomness of the universe that put this zines into my possession. I love that.

ASTRID: I also think, it seems to have something to do with art. The whole it started and then it moved to the internet and then now it’s coming back again because… I was just at the art museum this past week over the holiday break which was awesome, because I forgot how much I love going to art museums, because I’m always at science museums because I love science. But when you go to the art museums and you realize some things you just can’t experience the same unless you are holding, touching it, looking at it in person. It’s just different. Especially because part of the purpose of things that are creative and made to be artfully done are that you want to experience something. You can’t just always experience it online in the same way.

And I kind of feel like things that first moved to the internet like blogging, when that first moved there, it was a small community. It was like you could actually talk to people. And then it got to a place where everybody was online so, it’s like you’re shouting in a crowded room. It’s not the same intimate personal feeling, which is part of the reason why I think there’s starting to be a resurgence of the more tactile experience of things. And then there’s people like me. I love to buy Kindle books because I have a Kindle. It’s so easy to read that way. But then books that I really want or things I want to read again, I want the real book, because I want to touch it and smell the pages. And I think that’s happening with a lot of things.

JAMEY: I’m a little bit materialist, too. I used to be very self-conscious about it. I wanted to be like, “I’m not materialistic.”

ASTRID: Okay. [Inaudible]

JAMEY: But I kind of am. And it’s because I feel safe when I physically surround myself with things that I really love.

ASTRID: Mmhmm.

JAMEY: And so, the idea of I really love this book and I want to put it on my bookshelf so it’s there is comforting to me.

ASTRID: Yeah. It’s like when you see sci-fi movies that are supposed to be set in the near future. And everything is very sterile and there’s no personal or clutter-y because everything is just perfect, it feels so lonely. It doesn’t feel like a life you want to have.

JESSICA: Yeah. There’s a quantity of information here, too, just like with our programming systems. You can’t read all the blogs but you can read all of the zines that are in your hand.

JAMEY: At first I got a little overwhelmed by the fact that things were so limited edition. I was like, “There are so many that I’m never going to see.” And I’m like, “I mean, true. But there’s also so many that I am going to see that other people aren’t going to see. And I can share them, the ones I like.” I also collect cassette tapes from local bands and stuff, because I just really like things that other people made that I can hold and read and listen to and be like, “Somebody spent time doing this.” And they made creative decisions about how this is going to be. I listened to a cassette tape recently that was literally just static-y noise with beeps.

SAM: [Chuckles]

JAMEY: And I loved it so much, because I imagined the person who made it sitting there and changing the frequency of the beeps and being like, “No, this is wrong,” and then changing them and be like, “Yes. This is it. This is what’s going on the tape.”

SAM: [Laughs]

JAMEY: And I thought about, what feeling were they having that they were trying to evoke in me? It’s probably not the same feeling I’m actually feeling. But this idea of putting something together and being like, “Yes. This is it. This is the feeling and now I’m going to give it to someone else and see what happens.” That’s what art is to me. And it just makes me really happy. I feel like I have a connection with whoever this was that put the beeps on the tape.

JESSICA: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And we are physical beings, so we do have a connection to physical objects that the interwebs can’t satisfy. You talked about the beauty of this art that’s created by someone and passed down. Do you find any beauty like that in your work?

JAMEY: I think about code and art a lot. And I think the beauty of a lot of code is what it does. We talk about beautiful code and beautiful code is nice. I enjoy it. Aesthetically, it’s good to work with. But in essence, when you’re writing code, you’re not creating code to give to someone. You’re creating a program to give to someone. But I’ve thought some about playing with it. I had this idea. This is an art exhibit idea that I’ve had for a while and I haven’t done yet. But I’m like, what if I wrote some little applets in JavaScript and I wrote them normal and tested them, made sure they worked. And then I typed them out on a typewriter and framed them.

SAM: [Laughs]

JAMEY: Because [chuckles] I think it’s really funny to present things that are useful in a context where they are useless.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: Yeah. You can get code embroidered, right?

SAM: Mmhmm.

JAMEY: I cross-stitched a QR code, once.

JESSICA: Oh, cool. Wow!

SAM: I actually saw something like that on Twitter yesterday.

JAMEY: I saw something like that recently, too. But I used to do urban exploration. It was my big thing. And I ran a blog about urban exploration. And I had a backpack that I took with me. And so, I cross-stitched a QR code to my blog and put it on my backpack. [Chuckles]

SAM: [Laughs] Nice.

JESSICA: Oh, you just said you used to do urban exploration. And you didn’t tell us about that when we asked where your superpower came from?

[Laughter]

JESSICA: It does seem like…

JAMEY: It does seem related.

JESSICA: Doing urban exploration would enhance your, what did you call it? Far-fig-newgan? No.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: My Fharlanghn sense.

ASTRID: So, Jamey when you were just talking about the beauty in code, it sort of made me think about something, this book I had to read when I was doing anthropology graduate study. And it was this book about why we buy. And there was this anthropologist who would watch people in the supermarket and see what they purchased. And some of the people, he would go home and see how they distributed their food items. And there was this interesting that he noticed where some people would purchase something, especially parents, and let’s say like a box of goldfish crackers. And they would go home and they would take it out of the box and they would put it into other little baggies or something for their kids. And he talked about how functionally, that doesn’t really do anything. But that it gave this impression that these are not the brand crackers. Like, these are mom and dad’s crackers for you. It created a connection to it that was beyond what it was purchased. It was about this function of somebody putting the time to put this into a small enough package for you to have so now it’s specialized for you.

And that might be a big leap, but it just made me think about how you were saying it’s not about… you’re not making code for someone. You’re making this program, but that’s what programs do. They have some sort of thing that they are supposed to complete or finish or do. And it’s almost like it’s a similar concept where it’s not about the thing. It’s about how well that thing was made, who it could have been made for, and how that affects someone, and what that could mean. It’s more abstract but when something is well-built and you’re using it, you feel that as a user. You feel like someone thought about what I was going to do. Someone thought about this choice. Someone gave me an option that I’ll always have. And it means something. And it reminded me of that same scenario where he noticed that it’s not really… it’s a strange thing to do functionally, to take something out of a box and put it in another box basically, but it’s being done to create a connection.

JAMEY: I think that how we feel about things emotionally changes the meaning of them really profoundly, too, in the way that we form emotional connections to things. When I was talking about how I feel like I’m kind of materialistic, I’ve forgiven myself for it, I guess, because I form these really intense connections to things I own. But it’s not because like, “Oh, I have this valuable thing.” It’s like, “Somebody gave me this. And now it has meaning beyond what it just is, because it makes me think of this person or this thing that happened or this place I was.” It’s almost like you can take emotions about people or memories about the past and trap them in these things that you own.

JESSICA: Oh, because even though it’s a thing, itself doesn’t contain the memory. The thing in combination with your brain has the memory.

SAM: Yeah, because our brains are highly associative.

JAMEY: It’s like cryptography, almost.

ASTRID: Yeah.

JAMEY: Like your brain has this key…

SAM: [Chuckles]

JAMEY: That makes these random letters into words. And your brain also has this key that makes these objects into like…

JESSICA: It’s like we’re living in augmented reality.

[Laughter]

SAM: But it’s only augmented for you.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: Now if only we realized that.

JAMEY: It’s personalized. It’s like the crackers.

SAM: Yes.

ASTRID: Yeah.

SAM: [Chuckles]

JESSICA: So then, if the beauty of the code is in what it does, and I completely agree with you there, then your work satisfaction is going to be less about what language you’re writing or how well-factored it is than what the software accomplishes?

JAMEY: To me, the moment that makes me writing code is the moment when something that didn’t work before suddenly works. And I’m sure that other people feel this way. Like, they must, because it’s so satisfying.

JESSICA: Mmhmm.

JAMEY: [Laughs]

SAM: There is definitely a magic in that moment.

JAMEY: I remember the first time I ever really… I don’t work with a lot of hardware. But I was doing consulting and I was doing a project where I was working with printers. And it was a huge pain. It was just the worst. And there were all these restrictions. And so, I ended up sending information to printers via… I opened a bytestream from an Android phone and sent it directly to the printer via Bluetooth. It was such a pain. And it didn’t work for a long time and I was just days of, “Oh, I sent it and it didn’t work. It printed gibberish. Oh, I sent it and nothing happened.” And the first time that a piece of paper came out of that printer with real words on it I was like, “Oh my god.”

[Laughter]

JAMEY: “I am the master. I control. The technology. I have so much power. I felt so powerful.” And I was like, “Ah, this why people like working with hardware.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: Right, right. It’s that changing the physical world thing.

SAM: Oh my god, I made an LED blink. I’m so great.

JAMEY: I’m a powerful technomancer.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: I can make the LED blink whenever I want.

SAM: And of course, at this point I absolutely have to share one of my favorite YouTube videos.

JAMEY: [Chuckles]

SAM: Which is of somebody who programmed two floppy disk drives to play The Imperial March from Star Wars.

JAMEY: Oh my god.

[Laughter]

SAM: And I will drop a link to that into the show notes. Because, oh my god, it is awesome.

JAMEY: I have a tattoo of the Death Star. Fun fact. Fun to me.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: Really, Jamey. Is that ethical?

JAMEY: It’s not at all. And that’s literally why I have it.

SAM: [Chuckles] Yeah, because did you pay a copyright fee for that tattoo?

JAMEY: That’s not why.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: George Lucas doesn’t need any more of my money. I promise.

SAM: [Laughs]

JAMEY: He has so much of it. [Laughs] No. I think about the Death Star all the time. I think about the Death Star whenever I think about my career, to be honest. It sounds like a joke, but it’s actually kind of true. Because when I started thinking critically about the Death Star for the first time, which happened the first day that Rogue One came out, when I went to see Rogue One. I went to see this movie and I’m like, “Yeah, Star Wars. I love it. I’m going to go. I’m going to see this movie.” And I went with my fiancé and we were just like, “Yes, a Star Wars movie. We’re so excited.” And we got out and he was like, “What did you think of it?” And I imagine that I went super pale and I was like, “I’m worried about my career.” And he was like…

[Laughter]

JAMEY: This is what you want to talk about? Don’t you want to talk about Star Wars? I’m like, “I am talking about Star Wars. I don’t know.”

[Chuckles]

JAMEY: Because it really freaked me out to watch that movie and see the backstories of the engineers that worked on the Death Star. Because everyone wants to go to the movies and be like, “I’m the good guy. I’m a hero. I’m an action hero.” And I was like, “Oh, I’m like an old white man in a white coat that works for the Empire.” Like, that’s who I relate to in Rogue One, because they didn’t know that they were building a super-weapon. They were just engineers who want to build something cool. And they did. And then it was the Death Star. And they all got killed. Spoilers.

ASTRID: I feel like that’s so relevant to our current life and times in technology.

JAMEY: Yes, yes. I think about it a lot and it’s like, if you don’t think about ethics when you’re building something, that’s dangerous. Because I was like, “I wouldn’t work on the Death Star. No way.” But you can’t prevent yourself from working on something like that unless you stop to consider what it actually is. I’m lucky because I’ve worked on projects pretty much my whole career that I actually do feel really strongly like, “This is a good thing.” But there’s a lot of stuff that seems just not immoral but amoral. Like, unrelated to morality. And I think if you are too quick to be like, “Well, my work is amoral. It has nothing to do with morality,” you put yourself in a situation where you could be doing something that’s really immoral actually and you don’t really realize it. And I think that’s what happened in Rogue One.

ASTRID: Or it could be used in a way after the fact.

JAMEY: Yes.

ASTRID: That is not the way it was intended when it was being built.

JAMEY: Definitely.

JESSICA: Or have effects that it wasn’t designed for.

ASTRID: Mmhmm.

JESSICA: What if you get really good at growing indoor plants and then the plants take over and eat you?

ASTRID: Little Shop of Horrors.

JAMEY: I’m not as worried about that as other things.

[Chuckles]

JAMEY: But I’m glad we’re talking about it.

[Laughter]

SAM: I feel like a lot of us look at the Volkswagen thing where they were deliberately spoofing emissions tests. We look at that and we think, “Well, I wouldn’t ever write something like that.” But a surprising number of us might write something like that if it’s where money was coming from, if that’s how we’re feeding our family. And [sighs] there are a lot of other cases in our industry that are a lot less clear-cut even than that is. And that I think a lot of people just don’t really think about, because they don’t really want to think about them. Because you don’t really want to face the possibility that you might be even to some small degree a monster.

JAMEY: I’m working on a talk about this right now actually. And I was researching the other day people who regret their inventions.

SAM: Mmhmm.

JAMEY: Because I was talking about… like a well-known example is Einstein’s contributions that ended up being related to the atomic bomb, even though he wasn’t personally the person who did that. He was very regretful of his involvement. And I was looking up other examples. And the person who developed pepper spray didn’t do so to make it a biological… it was supposed to be a weapon. It wasn’t something that wasn’t going to be a weapon. But now, the way people are using it, the way that police use it and stuff, he’s like, “This is just so… I’ve never seen such irresponsible uses of chemicals.” So, he has regrets about that. The person who invented the AK-47, there’s a really interesting quote that I found where he was debating, “Am I responsible for people who died with this gun or not? Sometimes I think I am. Sometimes I feel like I didn’t force anyone to do this.” But, on his deathbed or something, he had this quote where it was like, “I wish I just could have used that energy doing something else. I wish instead of inventing the AK-47 I could have invented something that could help people do their jobs, like farmers or something.” And I read that and I was like, “That’s what I do.”

[Laughter]

JAMEY: But another example I used is the person who invented the cubicle, because he was like, “Yeah, the cubicle is great. It’s going to be flexible. It’s going to let people have a better work environment than offices,” and then people used it to just pack people in because it was cost-efficient. And he was like, “No, that’s not what I meant.” But it’s too late.

SAM: Right.

JAMEY: Because he already invented it.

SAM: But it was in many ways better than what came before, which was a giant, open, floorplan with a bunch of people at desks just making noise.

ASTRID: You mean like now?

SAM: Well, but now it looks different.

[Laughter]

SAM: Now it’s IKEA furniture, right?

ASTRID: Exactly. So, there’s this talk that Malcolm Gladwell does in a similar topic and it’s about the Norden bombsight. Have you seen that, Jamey?

JAMEY: No. Tell me about it.

ASTRID: Okay, so you’ll probably like this for the research you’re doing. It’s about a person who was, he makes this device to make bombing more accurate. Because what he’s thinking is that if we can make the bombing more accurate then we can have less death and then war can be over faster. Because he assumed, “I’m not going to stop war. But maybe if I can make war more efficient, then we won’t lose as many people.” And he tells a very interesting tale about how it works. But at the end of the day, it ended up being used to drop the atomic bombs. So, even though his intention was to try to make the loss of life as small as possible, it ended up being used completely outside of its intention of being accurate, because you don’t have to be accurate so much if you’re dropping an atomic bomb, to hurt and kill so many people.

And that’s like what we’re talking about where sometimes you’re building something because you think it’s going to do something that could be good. But then it could be used in a completely different capacity in a way that you never expected or intended. And unfortunately, especially with science and technology, oftentimes the money that you get to build things, when they will fund you to build all kinds of things and let you learn all kinds of science, it’s usually to be used in some way that’s going to exert power from one people over another people. And it’s like, how do you deal with that Faustian bargain of we’re going to advance science but it’s going to be at this cost that we may not be able to quantify? And it seems like it always happens that way.

JAMEY: It’s hard because once you’ve put something out there, you kind of lose control over it and how it’s used. And I think that’s what a lot of the stories that we just told are about. And I also think that as programmers, we’re at a particular risk of that, because code doesn’t know what it’s doing. So, repurposing code is very easy in many ways. The example I like to use of this is AR technology, which is really interesting, and like facial recognition. So, people are like, “Yeah, AR video games.” It’s a big thing. And it’s cool and it’s interesting and it’s new and it’s futuristic or whatever. But if you write facial recognition software, the software doesn’t know whose faces it’s recognizing or why. And then if they repurpose that code to say, try to find protesters to arrest them; that would be easy to do with that code. And if you wrote it, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t stop them from doing that once they’re doing it.

[Sigh] So, I think it’s just really hard because there’s no way that we can anticipate all of the ways that our code could be repurposed. But I do think we have to take some sort of responsibility for what else could be done with it that isn’t what we originally meant. And I’m not sure where the line is between, “I’m afraid that my stuff’s going to get repurposed so now I just can’t write anything, ever,” which is also not realistic.

JESSICA: Yeah. The world is a complex system and when we create something or learn something, we change that system. And we can’t know how that’s going to affect things. But we can influence the system in various ways to hold people in power accountable for their pepper spray actions.

ASTRID: You know Jessica, sometimes I wonder if maybe we could just start thinking about… like, I try to think about code like a tool. In anthropology, especially when you’re learning about hominids, what you learn is that the tools that we make are extensions of us. So, an axe is an extension of our ability to use our arm with force. And cars are an extension of us to be able to run. Something like that. So in that case, then code is like an extension of what we could use our brain to do, or use a connection of brains to do, in one instance. And so, it’s like you wouldn’t give young kids sharp objects and then leave the room. Because you would expect that something bad could happen. So maybe it might be possible for us to think more about, “Okay, this type of code could be utilized in a bad way or in a destructive way by those who are uneducated about what to do with it or not capable of understanding how to use it.” We should know that. And maybe there are things we can do around that to help it be used properly.

Because I think it’s not so much that you can make things without any type of morality. But, tools are tools. They’re just there until somebody picks them up. And you can use hammers to build a house for somebody or you can use them to destroy something. So, it’s really not, should you not make a hammer? It’s like, how do you teach people to use hammers and why would you have hammers? And who should be around if somebody doesn’t know how to use a hammer so that they can teach them the right way. And maybe we should be thinking around those questions and less so about, should we make this or not?

SAM: I feel like there are some tools that are a little bit more single-purpose than others. Like it’s hard to imagine a use for a gun that isn’t destroying something. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t make guns, but it’s maybe a little bit less balanced of an example than a hammer.

ASTRID: I was just reading a book about somebody who was doing research in the rainforest and having a shotgun was really important because there was anacondas and there were jaguars. And you needed it. That’s totally different than if you take that same gun and point it towards a person in the rainforest.

JESSICA: Yeah.

ASTRID: Because you don’t need to shoot a person unless they are seriously [inaudible]. So, it’s really about understanding… you know a gun is a powerful tool. So, you should understand when you’re using it, what the implications of what you’re doing with it could be.

JAMEY: I think the more powerful a tool is, the more respect you have to have for it. And I think the tough thing here is I can control how much respect I have. And I can try to encourage and teach other people to have respect. But I can’t force other people to respect something the way I respect it, or think it should be respected. You know what I mean?

ASTRID: Yeah.

JAMEY: I like what you’re saying though. And I think that with software, what you’re describing, we already do a lot in a… not a moral way, but in a mundane way. When we build something as engineers, we say like, “Okay. How are users going to break this? How are they going to screw this up and do it wrong? And what safeguards can I put in so that they don’t do it wrong?”

JESSICA: Mmhmm.

JAMEY: I think that’s a huge part of our jobs. But I think you’re right. I think extending that to be about morality and not just usability is important. I just have to figure out how to do it. It’s not just my job to figure it out. We can all think about it.

ASTRID: Well, I think it helps to just ask the question.

JAMEY: I agree.

JESSICA: Yeah.

JAMEY: I think getting people thinking about it is a huge thing. Because I had never thought about this, really, before I saw Rogue One, like I said. And it was scary, because I’m like, “I’m a good person. I wouldn’t purposely do something that I think is wrong.” But until you’ve asked the question and thought about it, you never know what you’re going to do, I guess. And at that moment, I felt like I didn’t know what I would do in that situation. And now that I’ve asked the question and talked to people about it and thought about it, I feel like I do know what I would do. And so, I feel much less anxiety about it now. And I feel like the more I talk about it, maybe other people will think about it, too. Hopefully.

JESSICA: I had two things I wanted to follow up on. Your first job. You said one of the owners was a developer and even though he didn’t have a lot of time, you said I learned a lot from him because he was really brilliant. Does brilliance cause someone to be able to learn from you? Or is there some intermediate step? Or something different?

JAMEY: I think brilliance does allow someone to learn from you. I think being a good teacher definitely, obviously, helps someone to learn from you, even if you’re not a genius, which this person was. But I think if you really want to learn from someone who’s a genius, you can learn from them without their consent. [Chuckles] Like if you just observe things that they do that are really brilliant and think about why are they doing these things and how can I emulate these things? There’s stuff to be learned there. Obviously if someone is also a good teacher, that’s a great combo. And he did teach me some stuff. It wasn’t that he was a bad teacher. It was just that he didn’t have the time to devote to me all the time that I would like. But I think picking out people who you look up to in that regard and just watching them very intently and observantly, you can learn things from them, even if they’re not trying. If you’re trying. At least one person has to be trying.

JESSICA: Interesting.

JAMEY: Do you agree with that?

JESSICA: Yeah. At the time you were inexperienced. So, there was an infinite amount of stuff to learn. And you had the energy to devote to that careful learning. I wonder if there are some people that we think are brilliant that if we put the effort into learning from what they do, we’d find out they aren’t.

ASTRID: I agree.

SAM: [Chuckles]

ASTRID: I think we slap that label on people because they’re doing something that feels like we don’t know how to do that. And then we miss the people who are doing what they’re doing so amazingly that it’s so seamless we can’t even see it, unless you’re really looking.

JESSICA: Yeah, the real genius makes it look simple.

ASTRID: Yeah.

JESSICA: But then if you look closely, you will learn.

ASTRID: Yes, of course. But I think part of it is just, I feel like sometimes our culture has this idea about genius, like some people have it and some people don’t. And genius are these people that do things that nobody can do. And I think sometimes it’s like, when you see them, it’s the combination of a lot of things they’ve gotten really good at and that’s why they seem so otherworldly. And then we kind of confuse that with people who are just loud about what they do.

JESSICA: Mm.

ASTRID: You know, like, “I’m awesome. You have to love me.” And then we’re like, “You must be a genius.” And then they’re really not.

JAMEY: I think if you want… I agree with you. But I think that if you want to be critical about that, that’s a pretty easy thing to be critical about. I think that kind of genius façade that you’re describing is a façade that kind of crumbles pretty quickly once you look closer at what someone is doing.

ASTRID: Yeah, I agree. I just don’t know how much time we spend to look for those little things anymore.

JAMEY: That’s true.

JESSICA: That is the limitation, the time we have to process the information. There’s so much more that we… more zines than we can possibly read. [Chuckles]

SAM: Yup.

JESSICA: And yeah, and more blogs and more people that we could possibly learn from than we can possibly learn from.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: There’s one other thing you said early, Jamey, that I thought was important. You were in your animation classes and there was a lot of code. And you said you loved it and everyone else seemed to hate it. So, you recognized that that made you special and ran with it.

SAM: Yeah, that’s not a reaction that a lot of people would have. They would think, “What’s wrong with me? Maybe I shouldn’t love this.”

JESSICA: Yeah. If you can see that thing that is different that makes you different from other people, then that’s where you can find your special job that’s actually fulfilling.

JAMEY: I think there are some kinds of people that are afraid of being different from other people. And then there are some kinds of people that are afraid of being the same as other people.

JESSICA: That’s so true. That’s like welcoming of difference is easier for some people than others.

JAMEY: But I even think, originally I was going to say some people are afraid of being different and some people like being different. But I decided to… I think it’s even more than that. I think that some people who like being different are actually afraid of being similar. And I feel that in myself, sometimes, I think.

SAM: I feel like there’s a Portlandia sketch about that.

JAMEY: There’s a Portlandia sketch, I feel about everything, every episode we talk about. We could just… in fact, you could just watch Portlandia instead of listening to Greater Than Code.

[Laughter]

SAM: You could, but please don’t.

JESSICA: No, no. Our podcast is good.

JAMEY: I’m just kidding. Don’t do that.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: So, I wanted to bring it back to your superpower. And how can you share your superpower which does not transfer to an app. What is one piece of advice that you would give people who find themselves in a new city with options about where to go that evening?

JAMEY: Okay. I’m going to give away part of the secret.

JESSICA: Ooh, goody.

JAMEY: And it’s great because it’s related to what we were talking about. But the way that the Fharlanghn sense works is being very observant. I’ve had people say to me something like, “You’re cheating. You’re not really using the superpower. You heard about this place from someone else who went to Montreal four years ago and that’s how you know about it.” And I’m like, “Yeah. And the fact that I remember what somebody else said about a place in Montreal four years ago and remembered it enough to look it up and go to it, that is what the superpower is.” [Chuckles]

SAM: Right. To somebody like me with memory problems, that is a freaking superpower.

[Chuckles]

JAMEY: But like I catalog information about places that I’ve heard people say are cool or read about or a stranger told me about. I catalog that information and I’m observant about what sounds like it would be fun. And then I remember it. And I think that what Astrid was saying about, are we observant about things in our lives? Do we have time or whatever? You don’t have the time and energy and mental RAM to be observant and catalog information about everything that you ever hear from anybody. You have to prioritize what’s important to you. And to me, this is what’s important to me. And so, I categorize it. And then it coagulated into the superpower.

JESSICA: So, to turn the question to our readers, what do you want to be a genius about?

JAMEY: And what kind of information do you have to catalog to get there?

JESSICA: We can’t all hold it all so we each get to be special with the piece we…

JAMEY: [Chuckles]

JESSICA: Focus on. What do you love that other people don’t love quite as much?

SAM: And thank you listeners. We’ll end it there. We will be back at you soon with a new episode. Meanwhile, if you like the sort of things that we do, the conversations that we have here, please support us on Patreon. We all as panelists do this show for free because we love it. But the production costs are not insignificant. It takes money to pay Mandy to do the wonderful editing that she does so that you get the interesting bits without all the uhm’s and ah’s. And it takes a bit of money to pay for transcriptionists so that our show is searchable and accessible. So, if you’d like to help us with those costs, go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and help us out. And any donation will get you into our Slack community as well where we have a couple of hundred people being really, really nice to each other. Anyway, thanks very much. We’ll be back at you soon.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.

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061: Destruction-Focused Development with Safia Abdalla

Mandy Moore — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 05:00:07 +0000

Panelists:

Jasmine Greenaway | Jessica Kerr | Coraline Ada Ehmke

Guest Starring:

Safia Abdalla: @captainsafia | safia.rocks | Zarf | Tanmu Labs

Join Our Slack Channel!
Support us via Patreon!

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Show Notes:

00:53 – Safia’s Superpower: Sight

03:04 – Learning Languages — Both Human and Programming

The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

07:56 – Being Empathetic in an International Perspective and Building Universal and Approachable Tech

11:19 – What does success look like for minorities in the Silicon Valley monoculture?; Being Tokenized

Admiral Grace Hopper

21:59 – Accepting Speaking Engagements Because of Who You Are (i.e. as a woman, minority, etc.)

24:07 – Writing Things Down to Balance Prioritizing Decisions

30:46 – Defining “Happy” and Always Feeling the Need to Do More

37:02 – Destruction-Focused Development

Destruction-Focused Development:
write it, delete it, repeat.
“I don’t become obsessed with the code.
I think it’s more important to be obsessed with the problem.” @captainsafia
on @greaterthancode

— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) December 20, 2017

43:58 – Safia’s Early Coding “Shenanigans”

Reflections:

Coraline: Being thoughtful about planning finite energy and labor. Also being content vs being happy.

“I often feel like I don’t do enough
and I haven’t defined what ‘enough’ is.”@CoralineAda on @greaterthancode

— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) December 20, 2017

Jasmine: Exploring feelings about being represented at events.

Jessica: Broadening perspectives that most of us were born into.

Safia: Talking about the Silicon Valley monoculture, being content vs happy, and tokenism.

Transcript:

JASMINE: Hi and welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 61. My name is Jasmine. And with us on the panel today we have Jessica.

JESSICA: Good morning. I’m Jessitron and I am thrilled to be here today with Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hi, everybody. And I’m happy to introduce our guest, Safia Abdalla. Safia started building HTML websites when she was 11 and writing Python and JavaScript since she was 13. For a little under a decade, she’s been a curious young technologist using computers to make cool things and share them. Now, she can be found speaking at conferences, blogging, contributing to open source, and working on her startup. Safia, so happy to have you here. Welcome.

SAFIA: Thank you so much for having me.

CORALINE: Our standard question that we start every podcast with is, what is your superpower and when and how did you discover it?

SAFIA: I would say my superpower is sight. One of the things that I pride myself in is being the kind of person who can just sit back and observe a room and look at people’s interactions and see how they’re talking with each other and what they’re sharing, and use that to inform my interactions or solve problems or work with them. So, I would say just having this empathy and this ability to feel and observe things and watch people would be my superpower. It’s not as cool as being invisible or being able to fly, but it works.

CORALINE: Cool. And were you always able to read a room like that and understand where people were coming from, or is that something you developed over time?

SAFIA: So, I think it kind of relates really strongly to my background as an immigrant. My family moved to the United States when I was seven years old. And when I moved here I didn’t really know any English. I had a lot of trouble interacting with people and making friends. And so, one of the ways that I would figure out what was going on in a place was just to sit back in the corner and watch what people were doing and see if I can gather some sort of understanding of what was going on around me. I think it started from there, from trying to just understand this new setting I was in and learn what was going on and evolved to me just reading a space and figuring out what I can do to make myself useful to the people in it, or figuring out how to interact with those people.

CORALINE: That’s so cool. That kind of reminds me, about 10 years ago I went with my grandmother to Germany and Poland. She hadn’t been back to Poland, where she grew up, since World War II. So, I took her on this trip to go back to her home. And all of the relatives we were traveling with, only one of them spoke any English at all. And my German is extremely rudimentary. I can talk in first-person present and that’s about it. So, I did a lot of sitting around listening to people speaking German which I could kind of follow what they were saying, but yeah, you’re right. That did give me a lot of time to observe their interactions and step back and see what they were saying without saying anything.

SAFIA: Yeah. I agree. And I think you brought up something really interesting about learning different human languages. So, German, Spanish, French, et cetera. That I think has been useful is, as someone who’s been programming for a long time I’ve kind of gotten to the point where learning a new language is second nature to me. I pretty much understand all of the ropes. It’s just learning the syntax. And I think one way that I’ve learned to empathize with people who are completely new to the industry who are just starting to learn how to code is thinking about my experiences learning new human languages. Because I think that’s the best way to understand what it’s like to come into tech and not know Ruby or Python or JavaScript or anything and have to learn that from scratch. It helps me just relate to people better. So, I can definitely understand you having to use German in a setting that was not normal to you and what that was like.

CORALINE: I think it’s so valuable too, with programming languages to know more than one language, because I think what happens is you start to understand underlying concepts outside of syntax. And I think that makes people better developers long-term, because you’re thinking about solving problems in the abstract and then translating them into syntax, instead of just trying to look for the canonical solution in the language that you happen to be working in.

JASMINE: Yeah, I agree. And I would also say, just different languages that have different characteristics and different sayings and just different ways of looking at how we communicate, I would say that programming languages are the same way. The way we actually write the code, the way that we… I guess just difference in style and how we target solving different problems can differ between languages.

JESSICA: Yeah, it’s one thing to learn the syntax of a language and another thing to learn how to think in it, because they do each make you think differently. So yeah, I thought it was interesting that you compare learning a new human language to learning your first programming language. As in, that’s a whole lot harder than learning your second or third programming language.

SAFIA: Yeah, because I think part of learning your first language is learning things like if statements and while loops and for loops, and the concepts that underpin, this might be a fancy way to say it, but just the algorithmic thinking around writing software. And then once you figure that out, it’s just about learning, what is the special way that this language does for loops? What is the special way that this language addresses an issue that another language solves poorly? Whereas when you transition to learning a new human language, it involves learning a new set of grammar, a new way of thinking about the world almost. I think there’s a close connection between what we speak and how we see the world. And the transition into learning a new human language and the way it affects the way you see the world is very similar to learning your first programming language, learning algorithmic thinking and problem solving and how that changes the way you see the world and approach problems.

CORALINE: Language definitely influences the way that we see the world. There’s been a lot of studies on that. And there’s this thing called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which explicitly states that the words that we use influence the way we interpret things and events and people around us. There’s a great example of that. There was a bridge built in Europe. I can’t remember. I think it connects Spain, maybe Spain and France. And it’s the tallest bridge in the world. And the word for bridge in French is masculine. And someone did a study of the newspaper reports of the construction and finishing of this bridge. And in French, all of the words that were used to describe the bridge emphasized its mass and its strength and its material. Whereas in German, the word bridge, ‘die Brücke’, is feminine. And the German reporters use words like weightless and it floats above the clouds, and they emphasized its gracefulness. So, I thought that was a really poignant example of how language was… they’re looking at the same bridge and they’re seeing completely different things.

SAFIA: Yeah, so fascinating. And I think just a great way to showcase something that I’ve been experiencing as I’ve started to adopt a more international focus with my writing and speaking in tech. it’s just the ways that developers in Germany or India or France see things differently from developers in the US. And I’ll admit that I kind of mostly lean towards presenting and blogging towards an American audience. But just recognizing and hearing back from people across the globe who read my work and realizing that they pick up on different things or that they interpret my tone in different ways has been really interesting. And that’s one of the things that I’ve made a personal focus recently, is becoming more empathetic in an international perspective. Because I would say that for the first part of my life, moving to America and having to learn English, it was a lot about conforming to American culture and fitting into the standard. And now I’m realizing that I kind of need to go back and connect more with the outside world, now that I’ve figured out how to speak English and how to live in America and how to interact with people in America. It’s just learning how to do that for people in other countries.

JESSICA: Oh, that’s beautiful. Can you give us some examples of ways that developers outside of the US think differently?

SAFIA: So, one of the big things that come to mind when I think about how developers outside the US think a little bit differently than developers who are local is the attention to linguistic diversity that European developers have. And I think that comes as a consequence of the fact that Europe is about, I think smaller than the land mass of the United States but within that small area you have lots of different languages and lots of different cultures interacting with each other. So, one thing that I’ve found that is a little bit more common in developers in Europe is just a stronger focus or a bigger awareness of differences in culture within a particular region, or differences in language within a particular region. And I think that developers in America haven’t totally figured out because we’re used to looking at the world from the perspective of a Silicon Valley startup or from our tech hubs. Whereas if you’re in Europe and other places around the world, you’re more attentive to the nuances in language and thinking that occur even within a small region of the world. [Inaudible]

CORALINE: I would argue that Silicon Valley companies do the same sort of thing except without that awareness. They’re influenced by the culture of a small geographic area because they think of their users as being exactly like them, right? And that doesn’t apply even across all of America. My dad expressed a little frustration. He lives in a very rural part of the country and doesn’t have high-speed internet. He has satellite internet which is throttled and metered. And so, a lot of the applications, the web apps that people develop assume a broadband connection when the significant portion of the country doesn’t have access to that. And as people in a bubble in Silicon Valley just assuming that everyone across America is just like them, then we see the same thing when those companies try and go international. They assume American culture, and specifically Silicon Valley culture, exists everywhere else in the world, too.

SAFIA: Yeah, that’s a great way of putting what I was trying to say. Everyone seems to think that, or I think most developers in Silicon Valley and our country think that everyone’s got the newest iPhone at a high-speed data connection with great internet at home. And the uncomfortable reality is that most of Silicon Valley isn’t like that. Not everyone in San Francisco has those kinds of resources. Certainly not everyone in America. So, building universal and approachable tech is really difficult.

JASMINE: So, you know, this [inaudible] culture that we have in Silicon Valley, what is it like? What’s the experience like for somebody who doesn’t fit in that norm and their norm, or Silicon Valley’s norm? And what does success look for somebody who is trying to work their way up in that industry?

SAFIA: To kind of establish to those who are listening or might not know me, as mentioned earlier I’m an immigrant. I’m a woman of color. So, I exist at the intersection of a couple of minority labels or minority identities. And I’ve been involved in tech for a little under a decade if you include all of my youthful shenanigans that I pulled when I was 11 and 12. But I’ve been directly engaged with different companies and different conferences and at events for probably six years now. And I’ve been this different person who doesn’t look like the “norm” in tech. And one of the things that I’ve seen in other successful minorities in tech and just in myself as I try to establish a career in the industry and develop something for myself in the industry is the fact that so often people who are not the norm in tech end up being tokenized a little bit.

One example that I think of, and I think this is going to be a popular example that everyone can relate to, is Admiral Grace Hopper. That name is probably recognized by pretty much everyone in the industry. There are conferences named after her. Her name gets used a lot as an example of a successful woman in tech. But one of the things I struggle with is of all of the people who know her name and know that she was a female computer scientist and one of the first, how many actually know what she accomplished? Grace Hopper had the courage to bring up the idea of a compiler in her time. This notion that instead of writing everything in low-level machine code and it being painstaking and difficult to debug, you can create compilers that could translate code in a language that a human could understand much more easily to something that a machine can process. And that idea was revolutionary. It’s the reason that we have things like startups. it’s the reason that we can even talk about people learning to code at home or at bootcamps or at universities, is because she reduced that barrier to entry. But I think so often when we talk about her, she’s tokenized for being a woman in computer science, that the intellectual and technical value of her work is overshadowed.

And that’s something that I think a lot of minority individuals struggle with. And something that I’m trying to struggle with is I don’t want to be remembered for being a woman of color who is an engineer. I want to be remembered as an engineer who happens to be a woman of color. And it’s so difficult because when you’re different from the mono-culture or from the norm, people want to focus on your differences, not how you’re the same. So,people want to focus on how I’m a woman of color and how that is something unique about me and not necessarily the fact that I’m a pretty darn good engineer and that I’m really great at maintaining open source projects. And that’s one thing that I’ve tried to think about a lot and dictates a lot of my interactions recently in tech, is I don’t want to be remembered for being a great woman in tech. I just want to be remembered for being a great engineer, a great business person, who happens to be a woman of color.

I’m sure that there’s more examples beyond Grace Hopper of people who have experienced similar tokenizations, I would say, where who they were and their identity quickly overshadowed what they did. And it’s tough to balance, because I definitely… who I am is a big part of my identity but it’s not all I am. So, playing this balancing act where I am comfortable with who I am and I recognize that it’s part of my journey, but it’s not my entire self. And I don’t want people to see me as that.

CORALINE: I think that’s such a difficult balance too, because you want… I don’t want to project onto you. I want to open the way for other women in tech. I want to open the way for other transgender women in tech. I want to be a role model in some kind of way and I want to inspire people who are like me to succeed and show them, you can do these things and who you are isn’t a barrier. But like you, I don’t want to be, “Oh, Coraline’s a great transgender female engineer,” right? That’s not my identity, but it is part of who I am. And I think the struggle is being your whole self without erasing part of your identity or overemphasizing part of your identity. And that’s so difficult to navigate.

JESSICA: Yeah, you just want it to be so that there are enough transgender women in tech that that’s not the first thing people notice.

CORALINE: Yeah, exactly.

SAFIA: I agree with that. And I would say this is a problem that uniquely falls on individuals who are underrepresented minorities. And I think that’s something important for people to recognize when they want to be maybe good allies or just good friends and colleagues of underrepresented individuals, that we do have this kind of emotional burden that we’re carrying about how we move around the industry. Do we want to be seen as a woman of color? Is now the time to showcase the fact that we’re a strong engineer? Do we emphasize this part of our identity now or this other part? And that’s just an emotional and intellectual burden that is constantly on our minds that might not be a primary focus for somebody who is part of the norm or doesn’t have to struggle with being underrepresented in the industry.

CORALINE: I’m really curious about how that intersects with your conference speaking, because I know for me myself, I get a lot of invitations to speak at what I call unicorn talks where it’s like, “Oh hey, come be on this panel about women in tech,” or, “Hey, come be on this panel about X or Y.” And that’s like a hyper-focus on identity issues. I think it was Sandi Metz who said that she’ll know that the industry has changed when women in tech can go on stage talking about something other than being a woman in tech. Have you had that same kind of experience? And do you talk about your identity as part of your conference talks? Or what do you prefer to talk about?

SAFIA: Yeah. So, I haven’t had any direct experiences, and I might just not be recalling them at the moment, where I’ve been invited to speak specifically about being a woman in tech. But I can tell there have been instances where a conference just realized that a majority of their speakers were white men and it’s kind of rushing to invite minority speakers. So, I’ve never been in situations where I’ve had to speak about being a woman of color. But I have been in a lot of situations where I could tell that I was invited because I was a woman of color. And those are always really hard for me to navigate, because it’s like, “Okay, do I accept this invitation because I know it will push forward my career? It’ll help expose me to a new audience. It’ll be another speaking engagement that I could use to lead into a job or some sort of other opportunity.” Or, the fact that you know somebody invited you not necessarily because of what you did or your accomplishments but because of who you are, it kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth going into the talk.

And I’ve learned to just take the opportunities regardless of the reasons that I’m invited. But I definitely think that when I am invited to speak because I’m a woman of color, even if I get to propose my own topic or speak about what I like, there is an expectation by the conference organizers sometimes that I will perform a certain amount of emotional labor and discuss the issues of diversity and inclusion. And it’s not an over-explicit expectation. But it’s definitely there, that we want you to tie this topic into your talk in some way because you are of a minority identity. And sometimes I will discuss it. I think the fact that I was an immigrant is a big part of my experience in tech. But oftentimes I try to avoid it and just focus on the fact that I have been in this industry for a while. I’m curious. I’m passionate. I like to build things. I have all of these attributes that we correlate with “good engineers”. And it doesn’t really matter who I am at the end of the day. It’s what I am. Such a weird way to phrase it.

And I think the fact that I’m struggling to convey what I mean right now is a big part of the problem. There’s just this emotional burden and this intellectual burden around my identity and who I want to be and how I want to present myself. And I’m constantly thinking about it. And I don’t think this is just an issue in tech in particular. I think anyone who is an underrepresented individual attempting to navigate career or social life or anything is going to struggle with this. I’m not like everybody else. It affects everything I do and I always have to think about it, so how do I manage that? I didn’t answer your question at all, I think. But I think the reason I can’t answer it is because this is still an ongoing journey for me. I’m still trying to figure out what my identity is and who I want to be represented as. And am I a woman of color first? Am I a startup founder or am I an engineer? What label do I want to put on myself? Because although labels suck, our culture at large is very obsessed with them and everyone needs to have a tag on them for you to be understood.

JASMINE: I myself also struggle with that. And for the first time, I listened to somebody who pretty much drew their line on the sand when it came to that. So, I was listening to a podcast and Neil deGrass Tyson was on it. And the interviewer pretty much asked him, “How do you feel about being one of the very few people of color in astrophysics?” And it sounded like he was frustrated. It sound like the question’s been asked a lot. And he sounded frustrated. And from what I understand, I think he said something along the lines that, “At the end of the day, I’m a scientist. And that’s what I want to be remembered and known as. And my knowledge is there for everybody. And I want to influence everybody.” And I had some feelings about that but for me it was just not my place to judge because like you said, everyone’s on their own journey. everyone’s still trying to figure it out.

And personally, I think that there’s so much value in conferences where yes, they might be reaching out because they see that you’re somebody in their… let’s just be honest about it, there’s space, who was different. And the fact that they find having that representation is… I guess in my opinion, is valuable, but also is valuable to you, like you’re saying. It’s a career booster. It opens you up to different audiences. And also, it opens you up to, just your presence in general, that somebody who is interested in maybe your technologies or somebody who maybe also identifies as a person of color, a woman of color, wants to explore something that you’re talking about and they’re excited about it. So, just being present can be just as important as a career booster. It can influence other people.

SAFIA: Yeah. And I think, I talked a little bit about how it’s an emotional and intellectual burden for me personally to navigate the world as an underrepresented minority. I’ve also tried to manage the chaos that comes into my head when I address those topics by just having a mindful approach to living. And this is for my personal life and for my career as well. Starting to be really introspective about my own goals. And am I doing something because I think it’ll align with the status quo or it’ll make me look more normal in this industry where I’m not normal? Am I doing something for me or am I doing it as a representative of a larger identity or group? And just sitting down and having really honest and sometimes hard to have conversations with myself about why I’m doing what I do and what part of it is for me and what part of it is for people who are like me who will follow me in the future. And what part of it is just to conform and to not feel like I’m different all the time. I’ve been trying to work on that a little bit more and I’ve developed techniques for just existing in this industry, this chaotic, always moving, always busy industry, in a more mindful way.

JASMINE: Do you have any tips for us that you’re willing to share?

SAFIA: For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I am totally obsessed with notebooks and paper and writing things down. And that’s just because I think, especially for us as technologists, we’re so busy just clackety-clacking away on a keyboard and regurgitating a lot of our thoughts very quickly to a machine, which is great in some cases. But sometimes I think it’s good to grab a pen and paper and just slowly write out your ideas. And I find that it’s been very therapeutic, because that kind of buffer or that lag between you having an idea and you writing it down on paper slows down your mind a little bit and helps organize information. So usually, I say that as a precursor, that a lot of my tips will involve writing things down, just because I find that it helps slow my mind down and clear my thinking as opposed to typing things in an email or notepad or something like that.

And I would say one of the first things that I’ve started to do recently,, and this is when it comes to big career decisions, for me a big career decision is like I’m invited to give a keynote talk at a really interesting conference or I’m invited to a residency program for my startup or I’m given a job offer, the one thing I like to sit and do is sit down and draw a quad diagram. And it’ll have two columns. And the columns will be me and others. For me, ‘others’ is the people that I prioritize in my life. So, it’s my family, It’s my immediate circle of friends. My immediate circle of mentors and associates. And then me is just, what is this, it’s me. And then I’ll have multiple rows and the rows will be 6 months, 1 year, 1 and a half years, and 2 years. So, just time. And I’ll write out, in six months, assuming that I take this offer or I do the best I can at this job or I speak at this conference and it turns out lending itself lots of other opportunities, what will this do to make me happy and what will this do to make others happy?

And I’ve found that this is a great way for me to balance prioritizing my own feelings versus the feelings of others, because one of the big things that I struggle with especially as a young person is I have a lot of mentors and friends and family who want me to do things that I don’t want to do. So, physically writing down how something will make me happy versus how it’ll make others happy helps me manage those distinctions. And then I’ll go through and I’ll fill out that chart and I’ll think about the total value of my own happiness and success versus the happiness and success that others might derive from my actions. And I’ll just have a conversation with myself. Do I care about the fact that if I do this, other people will be happy but I won’t? Do I care about the fact that I’ll be happy but others will be maybe a little bit upset? And just sit down and have that conversation about how my choice affects not just me but others long-term. So, that’s one of the techniques that I utilize especially when I’m faced with decisions. Things like referrals where somebody referred me to a position or things like a job offer where my entire family wants me to take it but I don’t want to take it. Or things where my friends really want me to do something that I don’t want to do and vice versa where I can be very stubborn and headstrong and want to do something that other people don’t necessarily support or totally believe in, and just managing those distinct things.

So yeah, that’s one technique I utilize. And that’s more structured and chart-based. Others, I think it’s just really useful to write out your feelings sometimes. And I think that’s advice that’s been given a lot to a lot of people. And I think it’s because it genuinely works. Just grabbing a pen and paper and writing it all out. And if it helps, if it’s something negative that you want to take it out of your mind or your head space, just burn it at the end. But just trying as much as I can to take a lot of the conversations that I have about myself and my career, where I want to go, from my head to a physical medium like paper.

JASMINE: That’s a great perspective. I just recently started my first journal ever. And it’s really been a great exploration into the things that I’m feeling. And for a bit it was a little bit scary to write those things down, because I’m like, “This is me. This is mine. Why do I want to put this in this book?” But it’s really just therapeutic and it just feels really good to just get it out and get it there on paper and just being honest with myself. And that’s a great, great tip.

CORALINE: I did journaling a lot when I was younger. And when I wanted to start again, I found writing on paper very frustrating because I was thinking much faster than I could write. Plus my handwriting is super bad. So, I actually did video journaling for a while. I would just literally open up Photo Booth and start recording and take 5 or 10 minutes to express what I was going through and what had happened. And I found I could discover more things that were actually on my mind that way, because I didn’t feel like I had to have a narrative flow. I had random access as opposed to sequential access to memories. And get it out really quickly and skim over details if I wanted to without feeling the need to explain them. So, I think that’s an alternative, too. But I definitely see the value of putting things down on paper, too.

SAFIA: I can really relate to the taking video journals. I think it’s a really great alternative to people who think writing is too slow. One of the things that I actually did when I was working on building out the product for my startup, Zarf, was do a weekly podcast where it was kind of like an audio journal of what I’d worked on that week and what was on my mind. And I would just sit down in my bedroom, usually, at 10pm on a Friday, and I would just record what was going on, what I’d done, what was on my mind. And I would share it out with everyone on the internet. And there were quite a few people who were listening. There was that intimidating component that I was actually being heard when I spoke, that it wasn’t just this direct contact between myself. But I agree that audio and video are great ways if you want to just dump and not necessarily have to structure.

And I think sometimes, that’s another thing you have to be mindful about is, do I want to structure and take things slow and really think slowly about what’s going on in my head? Or do I want to release? That’s a choice that we have to make. So yeah, I think that video journal idea is really good. And I should probably start it up again. I’ll definitely try that.

JESSICA: You mentioned the very conscious definition of success. And you defined it as you being happy and others being happy in the medium and long-term. How do you define happy? Is it like warm, fuzzy feelings? What does success mean beyond feelings of “woo!”?

SAFIA: So, I might get really dark here, but I don’t think true internal happiness exists, that there will ever be a case where you’re just satisfied with everything in your life. I think what I strive for is general ‘contentness’ in the things that matter to me. And I have some big life priorities that I want to accomplish. Some of them are personal so I can’t share them here, but some of them are career-oriented. Like I want to one day run a small tech company that has a diverse, dedicated, inclusive, and empathetic staff of engineers, designers, managers, et cetera. And that’s just a personal goal for me. And ‘contentness’ in that goal is once I’ve achieved it and just checked off all of the boxes in that goal. And then there are some things that are a bit less defined, like not very specific vision that I just laid out. But maybe I want to grow my technical skills in a particular language or framework.

And for me, ‘contentness’ is just, it’s so hard to explain because it’s, I would say it’s a deep sense of self-satisfaction, of being okay with yourself. And that’s such a hard thing I think for a lot of people to get or to achieve. It’s just being okay with who you are as things are and not striving for more. One of the things that I struggle with when I think about success and my vision of being content with the way things are is I’m a bit of a perfectionist. And I’m the kind of person who will check off one thing and immediately want to do the next. And I have this to-do list mentality that most people I think glamorize and think is the pinnacle of productivity. But for me, I’m just never going to be happy with what I’ve done. I’m always going to want to do more. So, success for me along that dimension is just getting to a point where I don’t feel like I need to do more, where I’ve conquered the intellectual and mental tick that I have that is always wanting to do something else.

JESSICA: But, would you even be you if you didn’t want to do more?

SAFIA: Oh my goodness. That’s a great question, because I struggle with this all the time. Like, “But wait. Is this aspect of my identity where I’m always a do more kind of person, is it me? Is it all I am? Am I going to eventually just hurt myself with my obsession of always doing more?” And it’s so difficult because I think with something like my need to always check things off a list and to always do the next thing, it’s great. Because I can be really productive. I can accomplish a lot. I can be a very dedicated and motivated person. But I can also just be consistently deeply unsatisfied with the way things are. And it’s this double-edged sword that I have to navigate. And like I was saying earlier, this is another thing that I’m working through in my journey of mindfulness. It’s just figuring out, am I this to-do list checker always doing the next thing kind of person? Or is there going to be a point where I can say, “Safia, enough. Be happy. Be content with what you’ve done.” And yes, it’s [Laughs] so difficult to figure out. But I’m working on it.

JESSICA: Gosh, I can’t imagine being content with what I’ve done. But I do find myself content in the doing.

SAFIA: Yeah, I can relate to that. I’m definitely the kind of person who is most satisfied when I’m intellectually, physically, and mentally busy or occupied. But I can’t spend the rest of my life like that. Or can I? I have no idea. I’m also only 21 years old. So, I’m sure I’ve got several [Laughs] more years to figure this out. And I think one of the tough things is I do have that part of my personality that is very motivated and checklist-oriented and wants to make lists for everything and do the next thing. And I think the hard thing is I have that personality on my own but I also exist in an industry that ‘fetishizes’ it and treats it as this holy grail of productivity and success, is you’re just the person who always make lists and wants to do the next thing. I don’t know, Jessica. Do you feel like you are also… it seems like we’re the same kind of person where we’re always looking to do the next thing. Can you relate to that?

JESSICA: Yes, yes. And it’s never done. And yeah, I work at a startup now and I’ve just come to realize that there are many things that are not okay. This piece of documentation, not okay. This particular bug, not okay. This missing feature. It’s just, how can we even? But now, it is okay. We can’t do everything at once. The fact is we’re doing it and we’re looking around for information on which particular piece is affecting people and is most important right now. And so, I can be happy within the process. But I really have to be content with, “we are working on making the important things okay,” because it’s never going to be totally okay. It’s never going to be up to my standards. And if it ever is, I better raise my standards.

SAFIA: Yeah. And I really like the point that you made there, that I think ‘contentness’ is far more elusive than happiness to find. Being content is for me personally far more satisfying than being happy.

JESSICA: Yeah, happiness is like a fleeting feeling of ‘woo!’. It’s supposed to come and go.

SAFIA: Yeah. That’s a great way to put it.

JESSICA: Yeah. And one reason that I can never be content with the software that we have is because we don’t yet know what’s the most useful thing for it to do. And if we knew that, then we would already have written it. And then if I wanted to get it actually right, I would have to go back and write it again.

SAFIA: Yeah, I agree. And this is something that I had a really extensive experience with when I was working on launching my startup product. And I actually ended up building it in four iterations before it officially launched the beta. And as of this recording, I’m working on doing yet another rebuild of the product. And I kind of tweeted a little bit about this before that I think it’s very healthy to rebuild things. And there is a part of me that from a philosophical and emotional perspective is really into destroying things I make and making them again. I don’t know what that says about me. But I’m definitely gone to a point where I’m comfortable building an entire app, deleting everything (don’t worry it’s backed up on GitHub) and then starting to build it again.

This has two effects for me. The first is I don’t become obsessed with the code. I think it’s more important when you’re building a product to become obsessed with what it means for your users and how it’s going to solve a particular problem than the actual characters that you write in a text file and execute or run. And that helps me be the kind of engineer who’s more focused on the problem than the particular solution they’ve crafted. And another thing I think it’s helped me do is the process of rewriting something helps me get a better sense of the problem with each iteration. Like in the destruction of the first iteration of an app or the first build, there is this process of learning that you can bring into the next version.

I know I’m kind of presenting this really huge scary situation where I build an entire app and then I start over again. But I also try and do it in small iterations. And this is something that was inspired by my friend Corey Haines, who’s on Twitter @CoreyHaines. And he talked a little bit to me about one of the development philosophies that his startup uses, which is they have feature branches that only last for a day. So, you have a day to get the code in for the particular feature or fix that you’re looking to implement and then it’s cleared out at the end of the day. And the effect is that A, you get to iteratively learn and be able to start from scratch every day and not have this branch that hangs around for three weeks that you’re working on (which I think we’ve all had experiences with). And the next is you start to think more about building things smaller and smaller. And eventually getting into a big feature or a big fix. And I think that’s the holy grail for me as an engineer is getting to a point where I can look at a problem and break it down to the smallest possible parts it can be and then work on those independently.

CORALINE: That’s so important. And I’ve been in this industry for over 20 years now and when I started we did a lot of prototyping. And the rule with the prototype is that you would write it and throw it away. The prototype was your learning exercise and it allowed you to explore different options for how to solve a given problem. And when you were done with it you literally threw it away. And we did it. And I think that with Agile, that’s something we’ve lost. Because we’re constantly thinking in two-week iterations. And you can’t spend the next sprint rebuilding what you did last sprint because that has to be done. It has to be cumulative, right? And I love the idea of throwing code away. It’s so freeing. And knowing that it’s okay to experiment and knowing that it’s okay to get it wrong because this isn’t what the code’s going to look like in its final form, I think that is so valuable. I wish we were more free in this industry to do things like that. Partly I think we don’t do it because we’re afraid. Partly because we get attached to the things that we create. And partly because our development methodologies don’t support it.

SAFIA: Yeah. I think you just did a great job laying out all of the reasons that I think this happens. And I’m hoping that at some point I’ll have the chance to write a little bit more about my, let’s call it destruction-focused development. [Chuckles] But just the idea of being comfortable deleting things and not being attached to code is really difficult to manage, especially when your label is software engineer and that is what you do. And maybe not the ‘summarity’ of your existence as job but a big part of it.

CORALINE: So Safia, when you destroy a branch, when you destroy the app and build it again, how tempted are you to hold onto precious parts of the code where you’re like, “This was really, really hard. I don’t want to have to write that again. I’ll just copy that one piece over.”

SAFIA: Oh, I actually do that quite a bit, I’ll admit. So, it’s not completely destructive. But I would say it’s largely for things that are boilerplate or just logic that I know I’m going to need elsewhere that I can just copy over, which I’m comfortable with. But there are definitely times when I’ve had to write a lot of logic for something and then copy it over. And there are cases where it worked out well, where I was able to progress successfully with the new iteration of the app. And then there were cases where by bringing along that code, it actually brought all of the baggage that was needed to make it possible.

And I think that’s one thing I try to be mindful of, is every line of code has baggage no matter how insignificant. And when you bring it into a codebase, you’re bringing all of its baggage. Sometimes baggage is okay and sometimes it’s not. And I’ve definitely shot myself in the foot sometimes when I’ve brought a piece of code over and then I had to bring in the database migration and bring in this configuration and bring in all of this other stuff. It was just like, “Oh, come on. I could have just written this in a different way or taken this opportunity to think a little bit more about it.” But I would say in general I try to make sure that whenever I rewrite something, at least 80% of it is new, whether it’s using a different framework or focusing on different feature sets or fixing different bugs and letting other things slide. So yes, you caught me, Coraline. I am definitely guilty.

CORALINE: [Laughs]

SAFIA: Of copying things over. [Laughs]

CORALINE: I am reminded of part of the process that I use when I’m writing music. Sometimes a song will get to a point where I don’t like it anymore. There’s something fundamental that isn’t working about the way it’s been structured or the way the parts are coming together. So, I’ll start over. And there’s a lot of temptation to say, “That guitar part was so hard to play. I’ll just bring over that one guitar part.” And I don’t do it typically. And what I try to tell myself is that the important parts of the song are the ones that I’m going to remember. And if I remember them, I can do them again. And if I don’t remember them, they weren’t important.

SAFIA: That was so profound. I might need a couple of minutes to process it.

[Laughter]

JASMINE: So, in the beginning when we just started to chat, you mentioned that you had some shenanigans back when you started coding. Can you explain or tell us about one of those shenanigans?

SAFIA: Yeah. Coraline mentioned during my intro that I started to code when I was 11 years old. And I think one of the big things for me in my journey as a young technologist, young being tween to teenager, is just I had this moment where I realized I could control the machine. The machine wasn’t controlling me. And it was a huge transition in the way that I approached software because I now saw the computer as this thing that would respond to what I told it to do, not just where I would go to play Neopets and Miniclip games and whatever it is I was doing when I was 11. And you know, I miss those days so much because I was just gleefully hacking and I wasn’t doing it for work or to close issues or anything like that. One of the stories that I tell a lot and I think about it because it’s very funny is I kind of taught myself HTML. And my goal there was to make my Neopets page super awesome and glittery and the best thing ever. So, I picked up HTML and CSS. And I tinkered a lot with the visual elements of software. I did some stuff in Photoshop and InDesign and a lot of digital media type stuff.

But it was the summer before I started high school, I was watching a documentary series about the history of computers and it talked about Charles Babbage’s analytical engine and the ENIAC and early IBM computers, and just the entire history of the field. And the last episode talked about Larry Page and Sergey Brin and how they build Google and what that experience was like for them. And mind you, at this point I could write HTML and CSS. I was familiar with Photoshop. I knew that you could code computers or write software for them but I’ve never actually written a computer program. So, after watching that episode about Google and Larry and Sergey I thought, “I’m going to build a search engine,” because at that point in time I thought this was a trivial thing to do. So, I spent a lot of high school just in my spare time after school, on the weekends, during breaks, learning about search engines and machine learning and AI and how we manage information.

In this age, I built a silly toy search engine. I did a lot of machine learning related projects. I read a lot of books. And those were the best times in my career as a person in tech because I didn’t really have a goal. I wasn’t looking to be hired by a company. I wasn’t looking to get an offer to speak somewhere or to contribute to a project. I was just doing it because I thought it was fun and it made me happy. And I call those kinds of things shenanigans because there was no point to them. They were just fun and joyful. And I feel like I have lost a little bit of that sense of joy and play around what I build and how I build it that I’m kind of trying to bring back into the way I write software. But yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to just have fun and do something pointless on a computer.

CORALINE: It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t know what the impossible is.

SAFIA: Yeah. That’s a great way to phrase it. That was definitely my head space at the time.

JESSICA: And you said there was no point to them, but didn’t we already establish that the whole point was making ourselves and others happy? [Laughs]

SAFIA: Oh, yeah. I would say [inaudible]

JESSICA: So in a way that it was direct. [Laughs]

SAFIA: I would say this was… So, all of this was before I really started to think seriously about my life. I was doing this stuff when I was 14 and 15. And I was just a very self-centered teenager. [Laughs] So, the point for me was just to sit at a computer and do fun things and build cool things and not think a lot about why I was doing it or if I was going to make money off of it or if anyone was going to hire me. And I think as much as it is sometimes good to find things that make you happy or content, sometimes it’s good just to do things for the heck of it and for no reason at all other than it brings you joy at the time, as temporary as that time is.

CORALINE: That’s so wonderful, Safia. We like to end every show with reflections, thinking back on the conversation we’ve had and picking out certain points or topics or ideas that were really meaningful to us. A couple of things that struck me about our conversation today Safia is first of all, the grid you described where you laid out these quadrants of what’s going to make you happy, what’s going to make someone else happy, and being really thoughtful about planning your finite energy and labor around those sorts of goals. I often find that I feel like I’m not doing enough and I haven’t defined what enough is. And I haven’t defined why I do the things that I do. So, I’d like to try that approach and see if that makes me more mindful about what my own success criteria are.

The other thing that struck me is the idea of being content versus being happy. And I don’t have an opinion on whether I think it’s more important to be content or to be happy. I’m actually afraid of being happy. I don’t know how I feel about being content. [Chuckles] So, that’s definitely something I want to think about some more. So, thank you for that.

SAFIA: Awesome.

JASMINE: I want to thank you for diving into your feelings around representation, specifically in public events like conferences and speaking and things like that. It’s something also that I’ve struggled with when an organizer reaches out to me and asks, “Hey, can you do this? Because we need more women,” or they’ll explicitly say that. And I’m like, “I understand but it also feels almost like,” you were mentioning ‘ingenuine’ in a way. And it’s really great to know that that’s not… that’s a common feeling and that I feel like I can really explore those thoughts without feeling… that’s not unique. It’s something that we all struggle with. And so, thank you for that.

JESSICA: For the record, I don’t have any problem when conferences ask me, and I know they’re asking me because I’m a woman. Because I’m like, “I’m glad that y’all noticed that you needed more women speakers. And I’m glad conferences do this.” But I also don’t feel bad at all if I’m like, “No, sorry. Busy.” But my reflection from this episode goes back to something you said pretty early. You said that when you came to the US at 7 you learned to conform to standards and that now you’re returning to a more international focus. You’re able to, your phrase I think was go back and widen. You’re able to broaden your perspective because you remember reaching the perspective that most of us were born into. And that’s wonderful. That’s its own power that you came by through a lot of effort and continued effort. And the rest of us can gain that breadth too of both being able to meet American standards and understand and work with people outside of the US. We have to put in a lot of effort for that and I hope we do.

SAFIA: So, I guess in chronological order, I think it was really great that we had the chance to talk a little bit about the fact that the Silicon Valley mono-culture doesn’t capture everything. And as connected as we think we are with the internet and social media and all that, there are still experiences that we don’t capture, even within our own borders in the states, that we need to think about. I also like Coraline thought our discussion about content versus happy was really great. And Jessica, you did a great job of just making me feel better about what I was going through and showing me that I was not alone and just expressing some of the ideas that I had in different and interesting ways. And finally, I thought our discussion about tokenism was really great and addressed the difficulty of the conversation for underrepresented individuals. And that it’s an ongoing journey for me and I’m sure many others. So yeah, thank you for an awesome conversation, everybody.

CORALINE: Thank you, Safia. It was so wonderful to have you on the show today.

JESSICA: Thank you, Safia.

JASMINE: Thank you.

CORALINE: I want to remind our listeners that we are listener-supported. And if you want to support conversations like the one we’ve had today with Safia, go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, pledge at any level, and get access to our exclusive patron-only Slack community, which is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful place to continue conversations and have conversations like this. So, please think about supporting this. If your company wants to support us, we have a prospectus for sponsorship on our website at GreaterThanCode.com. And thank you all and we will talk to you again very soon.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.

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060: Coping with Complexity with Kent Beck

Mandy Moore — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 05:00:01 +0000

This episode is sponsored by Cohere!

Cohere believes better teams make better products.

Visit wecohere.com/greaterthancode to learn how your team can become greater than code.

Panelists:

Jamey Hampton | Sam Livingston-Gray | Rein Henrichs |
Coraline Ada Ehmke | Jessica Kerr

Guest Starring:

Kent Beck: @KentBeck | Extreme Programming |
The Agile Manifesto | Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns

Show Notes:

01:19 – Kent’s Superpower: Putting Things Together That Don’t Necessarily Go Together

Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
by Douglas Hofstadter and‎ Emmanuel Sander

04:01 – Metaphors in Software Development

07:32 – Writing Tests and Keeping a Journal

The unit/integration distinction confuses me. I test at the level of, “Here’s a thought I need to capture.”@KentBeck on @greaterthancode

— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) December 5, 2017

10:58 – Complexity Partitioning

One Bite At A Time: Partitioning Complexity

Kent’s musings on the topic of unit versus integration testing after the show.

21:59 – The Way Systems Change Over Time as an Important Part of How We Design Software

27:20 – Changing Culture Vs Code and Storytelling and Succession

Join Our Slack Channel!
Support us via Patreon!

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Reflections:

Jamey: Thinking about the reasons why we do things.

Rein: How computer systems are beginning to take on the complexity of biological systems.

Coraline: The concept of lumpers vs splitters.

Sam: How strategies for dealing with complexity don’t just have to be about the problem itself, they can be about the emotional response of the programmer who has to get some work done.

Jessica: The for-allers vs the for-eachers; universalist vs existentialist.

Kent: Not being bothered by culture change and helping people feel the same.

Transcript:

JAMEY: Hi everyone. Welcome to our 60^th episode of Greater Than Code. I am Jamey Hampton and I’m here with my great friend and fellow panelist, Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Good morning from sunny Oahu. I’m here also to welcome my good friend Rein Henrichs to the show.

REIN: Good morning. And I am super excited to be here with my friend, Coraline Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hey, everybody. It’s super cold here in Chicago so I’m very jealous of Sam being in Oahu. I’m happy to introduce my dear friend, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Good morning! I am thrilled to be on Greater Than Code today. We have a very exciting guest. Please welcome Kent Beck. Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming and one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, the founding document for agile, lowercase A, software development. He’s a strong proponent of TDD. He pioneered the software design patterns and he was responsible for the commercial development of Smalltalk. Kent lives in San Francisco and currently works for Facebook. Kent, welcome to the show! What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

KENT: Jessica, thank you very much. My superpower is putting together things that don’t obviously go together.

JESSICA: Like metaphors?

KENT: Like metaphors, yes. That’s a thing that I seem to be able to do that other people don’t do as regularly.

CORALINE: Was that something you were born with or was that something you developed over time?

KENT: Some of each. My mom used to play a game with me where we would take a random two pencils and then we would pass the two pencils back and forth and make out of it the most bizarre possible thing. So, walrus tusks, and then somebody else would use them as chopsticks, and then back and forth. And we used to play this game for hours. And I think there’s a big part of… I’m just a curious person and I learn lots of stuff. But there’s also kind of a habit to it where I hear something and I immediately compare it to other things and things that rhyme with it and things that sound like it and stories that I remember and so on. Does that answer the question?

CORALINE: Sure. It reminds me. I just recently read Douglas Hofstadter’s new book which is all about metaphors and analogies. And his basic premise is that we think in metaphors, we think in analogies, and that’s the basic mechanism of thought. So, being able to make associations between things is the source of innovation. And I kind of contrasted that with Dijkstra who said that it’s not advisable to approach new things with relating it back to things you already know, because new things need a new language, which I pretty strongly disagree with. But I’m curious if you have an opinion on that.

KENT: Yeah. So, I go back to the ‘Embodied Mind’ from, I think that’s [inaudible], where I agree that all abstract thought is metaphorical. And his premise goes further and says that the fundamental metaphors are physical. So, we know about inclusion and exclusion because we have a body. And the way we think about up and down even metaphorically is grounded in our physical experience of standing up and sitting down. Of course, saying that abstract thought is metaphorical is a metaphor, since we’re computer scientists. We can’t avoid that conclusion.

CORALINE: Meta metaphor.

KENT: Yes, because thought is actually this electrochemical goop in our brains and we use metaphors as a metaphor for thinking about it.

CORALINE: Wow.

SAM: Okay, I’m going to go. I’ll be back and I’ll be thinking for about five days.

[Laughter]

KENT: I couldn’t believe that I could shut up the entire panel.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: [Laughs] In terms of metaphors and software development, I think a lot about metaphors. I’m working on an AI project to write a program that understands and can generate metaphors. And I’ve thought a lot about how we borrow metaphors from other disciplines. And for the most part, we borrow metaphors from engineering and construction and science. Do you think that there are metaphors in other fields of study that are applicable to software development?

KENT: Sure. I think there are some metaphors that so built-in that we don’t even recognize them as metaphors anymore, like table or stack or…

CORALINE: Data store.

KENT: Association.

CORALINE: Scaffold.

KENT: Yeah, yeah. And so, I think we already have metaphors from lots of different sources. And every metaphor’s a two-edged sword, to use a metaphor.

JESSICA: [Laughs]

KENT: I’m sorry. I’m a computer scientist. It’s just a reflex. That it both reveals and conceals. And you say, well these two things are alike but they’re different. And if you get trapped into thinking that they’re exactly alike when they’re different, you’re confused. But if you think that two things are completely different when there’s actually similarities that would help you make some predictions, then you’re also losing.

CORALINE: I remember when I was doing some research from category theory. I wish I could remember and/or pronounce the name of the person who presented this YouTube series. But one of the things I took from my study of category theory is that traditionally, in science, we try to break things down into atomic parts and solve small problems and compose small problems into a grander solution. And category theory seems to take the opposite approach of taking a very high-level view of things, looking for ways that they are the same, and taking a macro as opposed to a micro approach.

KENT: I think there’s an analogous split in programming where you have the ‘for all’ people and you have the ‘there exists’ people. The ‘for all’ people want to make universal statements about programs and derive their understanding of some particular situation from the universals. And the ‘for each’ people are, which is my camp, as the TDD works by induction. You say, “This works. And this works. And this works. And therefore by induction, a whole bunch of other things work also,” which we don’t have to exhaustively test all customers. We know that if they have a name and an age then this computation’s going to work correctly.

JESSICA: Whereas that deduction is not mathematically valid. It is not literally a proof. But it’s darn well good enough for business software.

KENT: Yes.

REIN: A thing that I think is really interesting is that even in mathematics, what constitutes a proof is determined by humans being confident…

KENT: [Laughs]

REIN: That a certain thing is valid.

KENT: Sure. Proofs are about convincing other mathematicians. They’re not about universal truth.

JESSICA: I read somewhere the other day that reasoning is a social activity. We choose our beliefs based on whatever we do, usually people. And then we invent reasons for them in order to socialize them with other people.

KENT: Yup, I would agree. And the same is true in programming. You make a change to a program and it’s the beginning of a social process. It’s not the end.

JESSICA: Right. And I make tests and check them into the test suite for social reasons. As in [Laughs] I am going to make you uncomfortable if you change this.

KENT: Yeah.

JESSICA: Where by change I mean change the particular feature that I’m testing, if you change how that works, because I don’t want you to.

SAM: And we write tests because we’re embarrassed not to.

JESSICA: Oh yeah.

KENT: Oh, that’s not why I write tests. But I can have many reasons for a thing and that is one of them.

SAM: [Laughs] Fair enough.

JESSICA: That depends completely who you are, because yes, as Kent Beck, or as we, I don’t have to write tests and I can say, “I didn’t test this one thing because it was too hard.” But I have a friend, Amy, who just started as a developer and she’s got a PhD in History. She knows what she’s doing in life generally but she’s got to build up this credibility as a developer. And she was telling me about this test that was being difficult and, “How do you mock a void method in Mockito to throw an exception?” And I was like, “I would not test that.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I know. But my job isn’t to write good code. My job is to get it past this particular code reviewer.”

KENT: Yeah. And fair enough, if I was the code reviewer, I would want to know that somebody had taken care.

JAMEY: I think tests are interesting because I find myself, when I have [failing] tests, staring at them and going, “Okay, the first thing I need to know is, is this test showing me that my code is failing or is there something broken with the test itself?” And then once you determine that, you can proceed. [Chuckles]

KENT: Right.

JAMEY: I find sometimes I’m like, “I cannot proceed because I have to figure this out.” [Laughs]

KENT: Right. Have you ever kept a diary of unexpected test failures? This is a really fun exercise. Just keep an index card and even as simple as, “Was it the test?” Unexpected Failing Test: Was it the test or was it the code? I found that I had about one-third the test was wrong and two-thirds the code was wrong.

JAMEY: That’s interesting.

REIN: On that one I want to mention that I’ve been keeping a work journal for the past five years. It started when I had a very picky client who wanted me to account for every minute of my day. But what I found is that going back to it, it was the same thing you get from keeping a diary in life. I found it helped me understand the context of where I was when I made a particular change or how I was feeling or it helped me look back at decisions I’ve made in the past and compared them to what I was doing today. And it gave me a lot of context for my work life.

KENT: Mmhmm.

JAMEY: Do you do that on paper or in [inaudible]?

REIN: I have an… Emacs Org Mode has a journaling subsystem where I just say ‘start a journal’ and it puts me in a file with a heading for today’s date.

JAMEY: Cool. I write down everything on paper. And I get made fun of a little bit by other tech people sometimes. Not all the time. Not everyone is a jerk.

KENT: [Laughs]

JAMEY: But I feel like…

[Laughter]

KENT: [Inaudible] Thank you.

JAMEY: Not everyone. No, lots of people aren’t jerks. And lots of people tease me in a way that’s not mean. But I feel like I’m very often the only person in a room writing on paper while everyone else is typing. I’m doing it write now, too. [Chuckles]

SAM: For our listeners, Kent has held up his notepad as well.

JAMEY: Well then, I’m in good company.

KENT: Notepads. I have a small format Clairefontaine, I’m a stationary nerd, for notes. And then I have a large format Rhodia with the spiral on top, of course, for writing longer form stuff. And everything that I write, the last two books, all my blog posts, everything gets drafted on paper first.

JAMEY: Why is that? I think it’s helpful. What do you think is helpful about paper?

KENT: I can type faster than I can credibly think, but I can’t write faster than I can credibly think. I can get words out typing that I haven’t really thought about. And there’s a sync between my thinking speed and my writing speed.

CORALINE: That’s really interesting. I was doing some [research] recently and learned that in the early days of computers, when the lag between typing a command and the execution of a command was on average between three and five seconds, a lot of people didn’t see that as a problem because they actually saw it as an advantage because it would give the programmer time to think about what she was going to type next.

SAM: I hope you’ll use this time to think about what you’ve done.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: I find it’s often useful to have to think about, “What do I expect to happen again?”

KENT: So, I have a trick when I’m doing TDD that I predict the test run results out loud.

SAM: Calling your shots, yeah.

KENT: Yeah. It’s such a simple change, it makes you sound a little bit odd if someone’s just listening in. But I’ve just come off a stint where I programmed for 30 or 40 hours in a couple of weeks and man, it just makes a huge difference.

JESSICA: Yeah, that makes it an experiment where you’re trying to [falsify] what you think is going on.

KENT: Right.

JESSICA: Also, there’s a big difference between the test is red and the test failed the way I expected it to fail.

KENT: Right. And sometimes I’ll call a sequence of errors. Okay, now I’m going to get a null pointer exception. Okay, now I’m going to get array index out of bounds. Okay now, it’s going to pass. And if I’m making progress on the errors that I’m seeing in a predictable way, it feels almost as good as the test being green.

CORALINE: I have a saying that I never trust a passing test if it passes the first time around.

KENT: [Chuckles] That is a worthless test.

CORALINE: I’m not testing something that I should have been testing. Yeah.

JESSICA: [Inaudible]

CORALINE: If the code doesn’t surprise me, then I’m not thinking of edge cases. I’m not doing something right.

KENT: Mmhmm.

REIN: I think it’s also interesting to talk about this in a more general sense. So, there are systems that take in feedback and make adjustments. But then there are steering systems that have a good enough model of the thing under control that they can make predictions and act on those predictions and verify those predictions.

KENT: Right. And knowing which of those regimes you’re in is really important. So for example, blog posts, I have no mechanism for predicting the viewership of a blog post. So, I don’t bother trying to predict it. I just spew out whatever and then react to the reactions that I get. And sometimes, I posted something last week about complexity partitioning. A set of strategies I use to avoid having to bite off big chunks of complexity all at once. And the viewership was 10 times what my usual viewership is. And I thought it was not really my best work. So, if I’m in that regime where I can’t predict what’s going to happen then I shouldn’t waste any time, mental energy, trying to predict. I should just do something and see what the reaction is. But then the flip side, if you could predict and you choose not to or you just ignore that, then you’re also wasting possibilities.

SAM: Well, it’s interesting that you bring that up because that was one of the things that I was hoping that we could cover a little bit. But now I’m feeling all self-conscious that you didn’t think it was your best work. Do you have a hypothesis as to why that took off more than you thought it would?

KENT: My opinion of the work is kind of irrelevant.

SAM: [Laughs] Fair enough.

KENT: It’s not just that I’m inaccurate in predicting how things will be taken. I can’t. And it’s irrelevant. The other previous big readership blog post was one called ‘Mastering Programming’ that had 10 times what the complexity one had. And that to me was just, I was just spewing out some notes. Did you have questions about the content of the complexity partitioning piece?

REIN: Could you maybe give us a very brief overview as to what that is?

KENT: Sure. So, there are broadly speaking in programming, two camps: the lumpers and the splitters. And the lumpers don’t mind dealing with a bunch of complexity all at once because they can see it all in one place. And splitters, and I’m a splitter, like to take the complexity they have to deal with and break it into parts and deal with the parts. The bet being that if you deal with the complexity in parts, you can do a better job of each thing. And you lose the bet when you break something into parts and it turns out the interaction is more complicated instead of less complicated.

So for example, TDD is a complexity partitioning strategy that says, “I’m going to make this test work and then I’ll make all the rest of the tests work.” So, I’ve partitioned the complexity into this little piece that I have to do right now and a bunch of other stuff that I’m going to do later. Extracting a helper method is a complexity partitioning strategy where I say, “Okay, I don’t want to change this little bit in the middle of this big method so I’m going to pull out a helper so I can just change the whole helper method.” But I’m changing the whole thing all at once. That makes it easier for me to analyze what the effects are.

CORALINE: That kind of requires good integration testing, right? The way I see TDD practiced in the wild, at least for the companies that I’ve worked for, they tend to produce a lot of unit tests and then integration tests seem to be an afterthought.

KENT: Yeah. I’ve always had a hard time with, even with that distinction between unit and integration tests, because my tests skip between different scales with wild abandon. And I don’t even care what I call them. Hey, here’s a thought that I need to capture. This is the need to do this. Adding these two numbers together there gives you the sum, or canceling a subscription results in a rebate. To me, those don’t seem like terribly different things so I don’t make a distinction.

SAM: It’s interesting. I use a taxonomy of unit and integration and short-span integration just because I find that it helps me think about the properties of a test. Can I run this one a hundred times in a second or am I going to have to throw this one at a server and let it run overnight [Chuckles] to do it? And the other thing that I find it useful for is thinking about how important it is to preserve this particular bit of behavior, right? If I’m looking at something that most people would call a unit test, then I can look at it and I can say, “Well, okay. So, this test is probably not terribly valuable. I can feel okay about changing it.” But if I’m looking at something that describes a large chunk of the application then I might be a little bit more cautious about it.

JESSICA: Yeah, because tests prevent change. And like I was saying earlier, I put in a test for stuff I don’t want people to change, but I try to avoid committing to the automated test suite anything that’s implementation-dependent that it would be legit for people to refactor as long as the API-level outcome is the same. Does that make sense?

KENT: Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And I would say that even that is a complexity partitioning strategy where say, I’m going to separate the stuff that might change from the stuff that might not change. Now I can deal with them with different levels of rigor or concern.

CORALINE: Kind of funny. I write tests for completely different reasons. I see the primary value of tests as a form of documentation. I want to capture what the edge cases are so that the developers who come after me are aware of those edge cases. I want to have tests that thoroughly describe the functionality so that someone who goes back and reads the code can also read the accompanying tests and understand what it was that the code was trying to accomplish.

KENT: I think I primarily write tests so I don’t need Zola. I have a lot of anxiety while I program. Like, “What could go wrong?” and “Am I really smart enough to do this?” and blah, blah, blah. And that’s the reason I do all of the complexity partitioning stuff is if I have a flow that lets me take one recognizably chewable bite at a time, then I don’t get overwhelmed. If I can stream a whole bunch of those together, then I have a really effective programming session.

JAMEY: You answered a question that I was going to ask, which was I was wondering if this idea of lumping versus splitting was necessarily just about actual complexity and efficiency or if it could also be about the emotional state of the person who’s doing the programming. And I think you answered that because I agree. I find splitting things into chunks, I do that a lot in my code and it’s not necessarily because I’m making a conscious decision like, “I think this will be better in terms of complexity in my application,” but just like, “I don’t think I can do this unless I split it up this way because it’s overwhelming to me.”

KENT: Yeah. And at Facebook, I’m surrounded by lumpers.

JAMEY: Interesting.

JESSICA: [Laughs]

KENT: Yeah, yeah. I don’t [inaudible]

JAMEY: Lumpers sounds mean. I understand that it’s not mean.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: But it sounds mean.

REIN: So, I know some of the folks at Facebook like Simon Marlow and folks from the Haskell community and I’m fascinated [by code] to hear about the interaction between the Extreme Programming community and the Haskell ‘If it compiles, it works’ community. Because I’ve been a member of both.

KENT: Yeah. I took Brian O’Sullivan’s Haskell course when he gave it at Facebook. I actually took it twice and I still can’t get my head around monads, so there you go. And that was the first place I identified this ‘for all’ versus ‘there exists’ people because the Haskell community is definitely… my first programming assignment for that course, I did it TDD style and Brian used my result as an example of how I had a bug and I missed it and a ‘for all’ test caught it in two lines of code. And the way that I do complexity partitioning test first, there has to be a way of doing the equivalent thing in Haskell. You don’t write a thousand lines at once. You still write them one at a time. So, there has to be some decision criteria for which line you write first and then which 999 you write after that. But I wouldn’t claim to have gotten my head around that.

REIN: Kent, I’d like to maybe make something explicit which I think has been an implicit part of this discussion, which is the way that systems change over time as being an important part of how we design software. I think a lot of people think of systems as how they exist now and then how they exist at some point in the future and spend less time thinking about, “What is the best path from here to there through time?”

KENT: Right. I call that succession, that conscious decision of how you get from here to there. Sometimes, you can have a system in one state and you can imagine another state but you can’t get there and safe steps. And then either you have to do it in unsafe steps or you just have to heave a heavy sigh and realize you’re never going to get there. We talk about, design patterns are snapshots, but we don’t have a good vocabulary for talking about, “And then we… and then we… and then we… and then we…”

So for example, one of those is the, if you’re changing a data store there’s a sequence that works really well which is, you start writing all the new data to the new data store as well. Then once you have that working a hundred percent, you start migrating all the old data in the old data store to the new data store. And once you have all of that migrated, then you start reading from both data stores. And when the answers get close enough and they’ll never be at a hundred percent, but once the answers get close enough, then you can just start reading from the new data store. So, as opposed to the, “We’re going to shut down the system over the weekend, run the migration script, and then magically this time everything is all going to work,” which that trick never works but that doesn’t stop people from doing it.

JESSICA: Ah.

CORALINE: I see that making a lot of sense if you’re doing a very specific task. What I don’t see a lot of is systems thinking in terms of, “How is the system going to evolve over time?” I see a lot of thinking in two-week increments. I see a lot of thinking about “This feature needs to be added.” And I don’t see a lot of thinking about, “Where is the software going to be in a year?” or “What is it going to look like when we’re all finished?” I feel like we take a lot on faith with sprint methodologies that somehow everything is just going to come together and we have the best, the system will be as good as it needs to be.

REIN: And even when you do have the sort of one-year architectural vision, in a lot of my experience, that’s where people stop. They say, “Okay, we know what we want the system to look like in a year and then we’re done.” In my mind, that’s where you get started because now the really hard problem is, “What is the path that’s incremental that we can make changes in a continuous way from here to there?”

CORALINE: And of course, we can’t predict what it’s going to be in a year but we can at least think about it.

REIN: Yeah. And we also have to keep in mind that where we think we want to be in a year is in fact not where we want to be in a year.

KENT: Alright. So, I’ve had seven years’ worth of lessons in this kind of architectural evolution, watching projects and being involved in projects at Facebook. And yeah, there are things you can predict. You can say, “Every user uses this many kilowatts and we have this many megawatts coming into our data centers,” and you can make some predictions based on that. But every once in a while, the users will suddenly get really excited about live video and then all your calculations go haywire. So, you have to have some model for long-term growth, especially for things like building data centers that have a really long lead time. But you also have to recognize, have the humility to recognize the limitations of those models and recognize when it’s time to abandon that path and move onto something else.

JESSICA: It gets back to what you said about the blog posts. You can’t predict what people are really going to resonate with. And so, you have to react.

KENT: Or waste your time. You choose.

REIN: For me in my experience, the only systems that have ever worked under these circumstances are systems that take in feedback and react to feedback on a time scale where that feedback is still relevant. So, that’s why Waterfall became Agile for instance. That’s why SRE is focused on making changes based on feedback. All of these systems are now becoming cybernetic systems. I think that’s the way forward.

SAM: Can I get a definition there?

REIN: Yeah. A cybernetic system is a system that takes in feedback and responds to feedback and makes changes to the underlying system in an attempt to keep it in a certain state or change its state in a certain direction over time. So, test-driven development is a cybernetic system. You write a test, you look at what the test says, and then you make another change.

CORALINE: But all of that is irrelevant if our teams don’t also react to change in the same way as our systems do.

JESSICA: Our teams are part of the system. They’re not separate.

CORALINE: But teams can resist change in ways that software… it’s easier to change software than it is to change people. It’s easier to change software than it is to change teams or organizational structure.

JESSICA: Yeah. [Inaudible]

REIN: Yeah. You’ve been [impunitively] correct.

KENT: It’s easier…

REIN: Change to software may not be correct in your organization. It may fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the correctness of the software per se. I’ve seen that frequently.

SAM: Right. Right. You can rewrite a system that was messy and ugly in beautiful Haskell and if nobody knows how to write Haskell, it’s the wrong thing to do.

JESSICA: Yeah.

CORALINE: Kent, you look like you had a thought about what we were saying about changing organizations versus changing code.

KENT: Yeah, so cultures change, period. And they do it without a lot of conscious thought. I’ve made at least part of my career out of trying to make those changes more conscious. So, I would say that the skills are different. The way you measure progress is different. But it’s… there are ways in which changing culture is easier than changing code. The outcome of trying to change, say a team’s culture, it’s harder to measure. You don’t get red and green. But you can look back and say, “Wow, six months ago this would have been a big fight and now we just had this conversation and resolved in 15 minutes. How did that happen?” Well, it probably didn’t happen at random. Somebody actually exerted some effort and now a team has learned conflict resolution skills.

JESSICA: So, I agree with you at a team level. The interesting bit about changing software is that culture change at an organization level is much harder than as a team and slower. But software change at an organizational level is not any slower than at a team level in the strange way software scales. Like, if I push out a new version of something, I could push it out to a lot places and a lot of customers faster than I can, say, train all those customers in a new way. Or employees.

KENT: I think again, try and change an API. Pushing out a new implementation is one thing. You can… push of a button. But if you have an incompatible API change, that’s a human problem. The human part of that problem is far more difficult than the software part of that problem. It requires completely different skills than deploying and implementation change. But…

JESSICA: [Laughs] Yeah, so maybe which one is easier depends on what skills you have.

KENT: Yes. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. So, I think storytelling is the fundamental skill for change. And once you learn how to, I guess it’s again this complexity partitioning thing, once you learn how to say, “Okay, what’s the next story that I need to tell? How am I going to tell that? Is it going to be literal? Is it going to be metaphorical? How much emotional content? What metaphors do I use?” all of this, once you get good at that, the strategy of storytelling, then culture isn’t scary or complicated or hard. It’s still risky but it’s not fundamentally harder than programming for me.

CORALINE: I think that really depends on the person. We have classes where you can learn Haskell. We have classes where people can go to a bootcamp and learn how to be programmers. What are we doing to promote those storytelling skills?

KENT: I enlisted a storytelling guru. I practice. I read about storytelling. That stuff is out there. it’s just not maybe the classes that I took in computer science school. But people get degrees in Literature, which is all about storytelling. And if that’s not part of what we’re used to, that doesn’t… I realize that I have to play catch-up on storytelling.

REIN: Wait, are you telling me that a Liberal Arts education actually is relevant for a STEM career? Who would have thought?

[Chuckles]

KENT: I was in Computer Science and Music school every other year and I just ended up on the wrong year, so…

[Laughter]

JESSICA: The storytelling, I want to relate that back to what you talked about in terms of succession. Making change in software architectures is also a matter of that path from here to there and then you told a story about a database roll-out with migrations and double reads and dark writes. I injected the dark writes. And it’s the same kind of thing, right? The design pattern books contrast with for instance, refactoring. And the brilliance of Martin’s book there was that it took people step by step and told them the story of how to make the change. So, maybe storytelling is also how we get our software from one point to another safely.

REIN: Can I just add onto that a little bit? I think it’s not just that he told a story but he made us feel safe. He made us feel like…

JESSICA: [Laughs]

REIN: He makes us change… The way he said we can make this change, that we’ll be okay, that things will work out.

KENT: Yup.

SAM: Wait, are you saying that feelings are important?

KENT: [Laughs]

JESSICA: It might [inaudible]

CORALINE: We have to change the nature of this podcast entirely.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: I thought it was all about technology, but I think we’re learning that people matter.

KENT: Oh. Yeah, this is…

JAMEY: Only Jess’s feelings.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: That’s what I learned.

CORALINE: What version of your API are we using, Jessica?

JESSICA: At least 18.6.k.

[Chuckles]

CORALINE: I want to see personal release notes. That’s what I want to see.

JAMEY: Yeah. I want an open source version of Jess’s API so I can feel the same feelings as her.

[Laughter]

KENT: Do you get to submit a pull request?

JESSICA: Dude, if I could [inaudible] what it’s like to be in my head, I would be very rich.

[Laughter]

SAM: Let’s see. Aren’t the feelings an internal implementation detail that only leaks out through the API?

JESSICA: It leaks out pretty loudly in my case.

SAM: [Laughs]

CORALINE: And with great enthusiasm.

JESSICA: [Laughs]

REIN: That actually reminded me of a point I wanted to make about whether the people stuff is harder than the software stuff. And I think there is one objective way in which is harder, which is that software, computers are perfectly rational and humans are extremely not rational. And it’s much harder to predict human behavior on that basis, especially because…

CORALINE: Thank the gods.

REIN: Groups of people are even more irrational than the sum of their parts.

KENT: Well, that good news then is that once you get to sufficient scale, computer systems look like biological systems.

JESSICA: Yeah, because you can’t…

REIN: Wait, is that good news?

[Laughter]

JESSICA: You can’t [inaudible] anymore at scale.

[Chuckles]

JESSICA: Well, it makes our job more interesting.

KENT: Yeah, I remember the first time I pushed code at Facebook and I was watching the IRC channel and it said, “This release has gone out to 6600.” I thought, “Wait a minute.”

[Chuckles]

KENT: And I panicked. I grabbed the person next to me. I’m like, “What’s going on, on the other hundred machines?” They’re like, “Ah, who knows?”

[Laughter]

KENT: It’s not causing any problems. We’re just not going to worry about it.

CORALINE: Those machines are just having a bad day. They need more coffee. [Chuckles]

JAMEY: Coraline, you just got into what I was going to say, which is what… I think it’s really fascinating how people personify their technology.

CORALINE: Don’t personify computers. They hate that.

JAMEY: [Laughs]

JESSICA: All networks are rooted in the physical.

JAMEY: Rein was talking about computers are so logical. Obviously, in my rational mind, in my rational computer scientist mind, I know that that’s true. But when I think about writing code and working with computers, it definitely occurs to me that I often feel like, “No, it’s doing this to spite me. No, it’s fighting with me.” I’m like, “No, it’s doing exactly what I told it. It’s just, I don’t know what I told it because I’m the one that’s stupid.” [Laughs] I’m not stupid. But it’s doing what I told it to do but it feels like it’s plotting against me. I think about that a lot. Because wee all do this. We all give emotions to these things that we work with that don’t have emotions.

CORALINE: We’re very happy that this episode, which is a very special episode for us all, is sponsored by Code Here. Code Here helps teams to be more effective by applying deep technical expertise with the human side of software. Code Here partners with companies to help them achieve their team’s goals through feature delivery, pairing, individual coaching, and group training. They would love to hear about your team and help you get your teams to the next level. For information, visit WeCodeHere.com/GreaterThanCode.

SAM: I would also like to add a personal testimonial that I met several of the principals of Code Here at RubyConf a couple of weeks ago and they are lovely, lovely people.

JESSICA: Also, thank you to all our supporters on Patreon because if you donate even a dollar, you get to be part of our Greater Than Code Slack team, which I really like that Slack team because everyone is nice to each other and we talk about interesting things.

JAMEY: So unfortunately, we’re coming near the end of our show today. And we like to finish off our shows with everyone giving a reflection about something that stood out to them that they’ve been thinking about that we talked about on the show today. So, I guess I’m going to start. And the theme that I really got from today’s episode was thinking about the reasons why we do things. And I started thinking about this right at the beginning of the episode because there was a quote that Kent said about mathematical proofs, that proofs are about convincing other mathematicians, not about universal truth, which I thought was really interesting.

But then as we kept talking I think we talked a lot about why we do things. Like why do we write code the way we do? Why do we write tests the way we do? Why? Is it about our efficiency? Is it about our emotional state? Is it about the future of our codebase? Is it about how other people interact with it? And I think there’s a lot of different motivations that we may have behind doing something that all may be just as valid as another one. But I think it’s really interesting and maybe necessary to be thoughtful about why we’re doing stuff because I think that gives you a lot of insight into your routines. That’s very important. So, that’s on my mind, I guess.

REIN: So, my reflection of all of the really interesting things that were said today is that when Kent Beck talked about how computer systems are beginning to take on the complexity of biological systems, I think this is in my mind one of the most important technical stories of software engineering for the next 20 years plus, which is that the system models that we currently use to understand software complexity that we largely brought from the mainframe era that got us here aren’t going to get us there. They’re going to fall apart when we have to start dealing with computer systems made up of 2000 machines that talk to each other in ad hoc or in emergent ways. These models are going to fall apart and they’re not going to get us where we need to be. And we need to start working on new models that are able to handle this level of complexity.

CORALINE: I think one of the things that stood out to me that I want to think more about is this concept of lumpers versus splitters. As soon as he said that, I wanted to figure out, am I a lumper or am I a splitter? And I think the answer is both and it depends on where in the software development life cycle I am. I think in the beginning of a project, I’m a lumper. I’m thinking of the system as a system, not as component parts. And over time, as I’m building it out, I’m splitting things into smaller and smaller pieces. But at the end I have to come back to thinking of it as a system to determine if the software is successful or not. So, I think that was something that I particularly was interested in hearing about and thinking more about.

SAM: Well, now I have a totally new takeaway, because that is fascinating. I am the exact opposite way. [Laughs] I start out thinking about splitting the system into little bits and pieces that I can actually understand. And it’s only over time that I’m able to put those pieces together and chunk them into something that I can lump together and think about as a whole. But interestingly actually, that does tie into the thing that I was going to use originally as a takeaway, which Jamey is something that you said about how strategies for dealing with complexity, they don’t just have to be about the problem itself. They can totally be about the emotional response of the programmer who has to get some work done. And yeah, that’s absolutely valid and a perfectly reasonable response to the complexities that we have to deal with.

JESSICA: Oh, I have at least three different things I could reflect on, but I’ll go with the one about the for-all-ers versus the for-each-ers, universalists versus existentialists. And the for-all-ers wanted to go so abstract that things become the same. I’ve been thinking lately about the expression ‘It’s turtles all the way down’. We want the same mental model to work at multiple scales. We want to be able to zoom in and out and still think of things the same way. We want Agile to scale.

But the thing is, I started out as more of a for-all-er I think when I was younger and now I’m more of a for-each-er because to actually change anything at every level of scale, you need to get into the details. And most of programming winds up being about the details and the errors cases. And I think the for-each-ing becomes important. It’s different to change an organization versus a team. It’s different to change a distributed system versus a single service, a single compiled unit you can say different things about. So, I find that really interesting. They both have values but it’s important to create those metaphors. And then probably take them too far so you remember they’re just a metaphor. That’s my theory.

[Chuckles]

KENT: So, my reflection from the conversation is that I’m comfortable with influencing human systems to change now in a way that I didn’t realize how comfortable I’d gotten at that. I’m comfortable changing technical systems and have been for a long time. But culture change doesn’t scare me in the way that it seems to other people. So, I need to think about first, whether that’s really true. Am I as good at this as I think I am? And second, if I am, what I can do to help other people learn it.

JESSICA: Awesome.

CORALINE: Kent, thanks a lot. It’s been really great talking to you. I didn’t cover everything I wanted to cover but we only had an hour. So, thanks again. And I think this is going to be a really great episode that our listeners will really enjoy.

KENT: Wow. Thank you very much for inviting me on.

JAMEY: Yeah, it was a real pleasure. Thank you.

SAM: Thanks. Come back any time.

KENT: It’s a deal.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

059: Science All The Things! with Pamela Gay

Mandy Moore — Wed, 20 Dec 2017 05:00:58 +0000

Panelists:

Jessica Kerr | Coraline Ada Ehmke | Jamey Hampton

Guest Starring:

Pamela Gay: @starstryder | starstryder.com

Show Notes:

01:13 – Pamela Podcasting, Since…well, FOREVER!

Astronomy Cast

365 Days of Astronomy

Adam Curry

02:19 – Pamela’s Superpower: Solving Random Problems with Software

05:19 – Becoming a “Reluctant Coder” i.e. Coding Out of Necessity

10:58 – Battlestar Galactica => Greek Mythology => Space => Astrophysics

14:52 – Doing What You Have To Do vs Doing What You Love To Do

20:27 – The Goal of Podcasting and Target Audience

23:57 – Understanding and Knowing Everything: Good? Bad?

26:03 – Outsourcing Work as a Personal Loss and The Internet’s Graveyard of Abandoned Projects

32:06 – Open Sourcing Work Yourself for the Benefit of Others

36:58 – Writing Software to Engage People

CosmoQuest Citizen Science

44:22 – Crowdsourcing Requires Trust but Garners Better Results

48:02 – The Motivation of Citizen Scientists

@cosmoquestx

Join Our Slack Channel!
Support us via Patreon!

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Reflections:

Jessica: The layers of people in software and people in software and how we’re all learning. It gets hard to separate the people from the technology.

Also, having goals you DON’T want to achieve.

Coraline: Seeing crowdsourcing being successful.

Jamey: Curiosity isn’t necessarily about finding out the answer. It’s the pursuit of the magic.

The tenuous path we all take in life, and what decisions cause us to be on the right path to the right here, right now.

Pamela: If we collaborate with the technology, maybe we won’t get silenced.

Transcript:

JESSICA: Good morning and welcome to Episode 59 of Greater Than Code. I am happy to be here today with my fellow panelist, Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hello everybody, and I’m happy to be here with Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. And I’m honored to introduce our guest for the show, Pamela Gay. Thank you for coming on the show. Pamela Gay is an astronomer, writer, and podcaster focused on using new media to engage people in science and technology. Through CosmoQuest.org, she works to engage people in both learning and doing science. She’s the Director of Technology and Citizen Science at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. And we’re really happy to have her on the show today. So, welcome.

PAMELA: Well, I’m super happy to be here. It is awesome to be surrounded by other humans that are dedicated in code, but for more than just code’s sake. And other women who code, yay!

JESSICA: Yeah. Pamela, how long have you been podcasting?

PAMELA: Forever.

[Laughter]

PAMELA: So, the first time I started podcasting was actually…

JESSICA: Since before podcast was a word?

PAMELA: Yeah, yeah. I started back in February of 2005, back when no one knew what this RSS thing was and it was back in the days of Adam Curry being out there as our advocate and shining star, helping light the way for podcasting.

JESSICA: Who’s Adam Curry?

PAMELA: Oh, man! So, Adam Curry was an MTV VJ turned podcaster who turned podcaster to start podcasting as this way that people could talk about their lives. And he’d record himself walking around his house doing his dishes and sharing out all the things he’d learned on the internet and just building a community. It was kind of awesome. So, it was back in the day. I think he kind of faded into oblivion now that there’s more than 12 podcasts out there.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: So Pamela, we like to start every episode by uncovering what our guest’s superpower is. So, if you could explain what your superpower is and when you developed or discovered that superpower.

PAMELA: [Laughs] I’m told that my superpower is public speaking and getting other people totally engaged in science, which is kind of what podcasting is all about. But beyond that, my beloved superpower, the one I like to invoke, is solving random problems with software instead of spending hours and hours and hours trying to do things the hard, manual way, which…

JESSICA: Ooh.

PAMELA: Yeah. I think it’s kind of near and dear to this show.

JESSICA: Automation.

PAMELA: Well, not just automation but crowdsourcing and getting other people involved. So, I think the best example was back in, oh man, it was probably 2009 or so, I was at a meeting with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific before I worked for them, many, many years before I worked for them. And I met this scientists, Stuart Robbins. And this poor guy while working on his dissertation had drawn over three million circles on the surface of Mars. Not like literally on the surface. That would have been cool. But rather, on images taken of Mars. He sat there with his tablet, getting callouses from his Wacom stylus, and traced craters three million times. And I’m like, “Dear god. There must be a better way.”

And the answer is write software that allows anyone who has five minutes to go in and help. Because Mars is cool. People like to draw things on Mars. People like to help us figure out, where is it safe to land a spacecraft? Where is the cool science? And they will help. And so, it wasn’t just automation. It was writing software to allow anyone how had spare time to help and to make his life easier with software, to get other people engaged in doing science through software, and to lighten the load and increase the good for all of us.

CORALINE: Maybe this is a good time for me to confess that I’m the person who put the face on Mars.

PAMELA: [Laughs] Well, you did a mighty good job of it.

CORALINE: Yeah. I just wanted to throw people off a little bit, stir up some controversy. I didn’t use software though. I did it the old fashioned way.

PAMELA: So, you were out there with a shovel and…

JESSICA: [Laughs]

PAMELA: Getting buried in perchlorates as you did it?

CORALINE: Shovel and pail. Thank you very much.

JAMEY: I’m learning so much about you, Coraline.

CORALINE: Yeah.

PAMELA: [Laughs] That was a lot of digging. You certainly gave the Egyptians and the Mississippian people a run for their money.

CORALINE: I try.

JESSICA: [Laughs]

CORALINE: I set my goals pretty high.

PAMELA: [Laughs] We all need to have high goals. You can’t get anywhere without goals.

CORALINE: So, when you recognize this problem that the researcher was having, did you already know how to code and did you already have the inkling of how to help solve that problem? Or is that when you said, “There must be a better way,” and you taught yourself? I’m interested in how you got started.

PAMELA: I am what is perhaps best defined as a reluctant coder. My dad’s a professional programmer. And so, I grew up hearing the pounding of his mechanical keyboard and having to get out of bed and close his home office door so I could sleep at night, because mechanical keyboard. And now I love my mechanical keyboard. The tables have totally turned. And I was like, “I shall not be a coder,” but then I wanted to make a Battlestar Galactica fan fiction video in middle school and needed to do my own early version of CGI which was actually Logo. And so, I wrote code to make a viper and then figured out how to turn the turtle into the viper so the viper could fly around by doing turtle with ‘pen up’ command. I was a weird middle-schooler.

And then in high school I learned Pascal. And when I started university, for a while I thought about getting a dual-degree Computer Science and Astrophysics. But the prof who taught all my algorithms courses, every homework assignment was hockey. And when I found out he’d be teaching Assembly, I was like, “I can’t do it. I don’t want to know how Assembly and hockey will be related.” And so, I didn’t get…

CORALINE: [Laughs]

PAMELA: The CS degree. But at that point I was like, I know how to teach myself code. I know how to read resources. I hate hockey, except if I’m playing it. That was what I learned in my CS classes. I hate hockey unless I’m playing it. And so, I set out to learn how to learn and have been fixing problems ever since. I was a variable star astronomer as an undergrad, so I had to write software to find, how long does it take for this star to go from its brightest point to its faintest and back up to its brightest point? And I had to write code to sort out how different stars change over time.

And then in grad school I was dealing with thousands of galaxies as one does. And I had to figure out how to write software to go through catalogs of data of the entire sky looking for these points where there were overdensities. And so, it’s one of these things where I keep facing problems of, “Well, I could do this by hand. I could do this in Excel. I’m not going to do it in Excel. I’m going to figure out how to linked list the bajeezus out of this,” in the early days.

[Laughter]

PAMELA: And now I figure out how to MySQL the bajeezus out of stuff. And life is better with code.

CORALINE: I’ve often said that every Excel spreadsheet is an application waiting to be born.

PAMELA: Yes.

JAMEY: I like the idea of code out of necessity or at least code out of doing a better way of what you’re trying to do. I actually even like this all the way back to the Battlestar Galactica example.

PAMELA: [Laughs]

JAMEY: Because it’s like, it’s a different kind of necessity but I’m sure when you were in middle school that seemed like something that just had to be.

PAMELA: It was the most important thing ever. I needed to have my vipers.

JAMEY: I have to be honest. I learned my first piece of code that I ever wrote, was for, I had an X-Files fan page on Geocities, which obviously you don’t need to write code for Geocities but I was like, “I have to have a personality test.”

PAMELA: [Laughs]

JAMEY: Where you click the radio button and it tells you which character you are. And I built it in JavaScript when I was in middle school.

PAMELA: Oh my gosh, and JavaScript is black magic. So, you were a high sorcerer.

JAMEY: [Laughs] I’d like to still think of myself as a high sorcerer now. [Inaudible]

PAMELA: If you still do JavaScript, it’s really ‘The Wizarding World of JavaScript’ as far as I’m concerned.

JESSICA: Yeah, compared to MySQL, JavaScript takes a lot of your brain. [Chuckles]

PAMELA: Well, and there’s always those days when you’re staring at your code and either saying, “I don’t know why this works,” or saying, “Why doesn’t this work?” And I swear, there have been times I’ve deleted a line of code and typed the exact same thing back in and suddenly things are bouncing across my screen the way they’re supposed to.

JESSICA: [Laughs]

JAMEY: I find “Why does this work?” much more frustrating than “Why doesn’t this work?”

PAMELA: Yes, yes. We were actually having this discussion yesterday in the office where we’re currently working on a project that will allow anyone with anyone with a camera that they can point at the sky to figure out, first of all, what it is they pointed their camera at, and second of all, if they take more than one image, to look for things that move and vary in brightness and do all the cool things that lead to science. And writing software to handle all this variety of data is an interesting challenge. And we’re trying to do all of this completely open source, building on existing libraries from the NIH. And the NIH wrote their libraries to deal with medical x-rays and MRIs and all sorts of image data than we have off of our telescopes. And so, there’s a whole lot of, “And now I shall hack this to do something it was never designed to do,” which is the fun of open source. And there has been a great deal of, “Why didn’t that work? Why didn’t that work,” random erasing of code, “Oh crap, why did that work?” And this was the discussion of yesterday.

CORALINE: There’s no code like no code.

PAMELA: Exactly.

CORALINE: Pamela, you expressed your early interest in Battlestar Galactica. Obviously, you have a deep love of space. Are those two things related?

PAMELA: Yes. I hate to admit this, but I actually got into space probably in part due to Battlestar Galactica. It all goes back to Battlestar Galactica. So, I am of the age that, I was like four or five when the show originally came out. And so, I grew up watching it in infinite re-runs and I remember arguing with my mother over whether she could use the television to watch Fame or I could use the television to watch yet again an episode of Battlestar Galactica I had memorized. And I noticed when I was little that all the characters had names that were out of Greek mythology, because I had a book on Greek mythology from the used bookstore. And then I discovered that all the constellations were named after the Greek mythology. And then I went down the rabbit hole of outer space. So it went from Battlestar Galactica to Greek gods to all of outer space in this crazy pre-Wikipedia rabbit hole of, well at the time it would have been the library.

CORALINE: So, it probably wasn’t a hard decision for you to go into astrophysics when you got to college?

PAMELA: Well, it was because growing up, when you’re a girl in science, there’s always that person who’s like, “Well, you can’t do that. You’re not good about this.” There’s all that bias that comes down on you. So, my high school physics teacher at one point said he was giving me a C to keep me out of getting into a good college for physics because it…

CORALINE: Oh my god.

PAMELA: Would only lead to disappointment. And you hear all these things over and over again and you get patted on the head as the cute little girl doing science over and over again. And I actually started college thinking I was going to go into Science Policy. So, I started out dual-degree because I had way too many AP credits and it was like, “I shall get two degrees, because AP credits.” It started out dual-degree International Relations and Astrophysics. And by the end of my first year, I was like, “Oh dear, all of these international relations people are capable of dressing up business casual for 9am classes.” And I then learned macroeconomics and discovered I hate capitalism as something I have to understand. It hurts my brain to understand economic theory. And I didn’t want to study that for three more years.

So I was like, okay, I’ll do dual-degree in Computer Science and work on software for astrophysics. And I kept plugging at the astronomy in the background and loving it and loving every part of it. And a lot of my lowest grades in college were in my high-level physics courses because it was a struggle and I enjoyed the struggle. And in the end, I dropped the International Relations degree when I learned that it is economically better to kill someone than maim someone. I dropped my Computer Science secondary degree because I hated hockey, which is a very strange reason to do something.

But I kept going with the astrophysics and then I got into graduate school and I kept going with the astrophysics. And it turns out that I am totally capable of doing this. And I’ve used all those other classes I took because astrophysics is an international topic. And it is something that requires programming. And I love living in this interdisciplinary world where I get to travel our planet while exploring others with my software and the images taken by various spacecraft.

JAMEY: That’s beautiful. I love that.

CORALINE: Beautiful is exactly the word that I was thinking of too, Jamey. I think it’s really wonderful when you have the privilege of working on something that is fascinating to you and that you have skills capable of exploring in depth. A lot of people don’t have that. A lot of people, like I think of my father who just, he was good at electronics and he worked as an electrical engineer and that killed his love of electronics.

PAMELA: Yes.

CORALINE: And I think a lot of people face that and a lot of people get into coding for economic reasons and they get into the job and they find that they hate it. So, I feel very fortunate I love programming, because it is creative and I’m happiest when I’m creating and I don’t care what it is that I’m creating, whether it’s words on a page or pixels on a screen or music in someone’s headphones. But just having that creative outlet is really good for me. So, I definitely feel blessed to find that same satisfaction from creating code.

PAMELA: And one of the things that I find is there are those days that you do something because you have to. For me, those are usually the days I work on budgets which I hate doing. But we all have parts of our job that we have to do in order to do the things we love. And when I get to solve random problems, and sometimes it’s truly random… one of the researchers I work with yesterday was getting extraordinarily frustrated because she wanted to do a pie chart that could then be exploded out to show finer granularity, like DaisyDisk does when you do an audit of your hard drive and it shows you, this is how many files you have that are in your personal documents folder, and then it explodes it out into your photos and your podcasts and everything. She wanted to do that with some research we’re doing into our Twitter audience and couldn’t.

And I’m like, this is a problem I can solve with processing, because it’s just a quick, simple bit of code. And everyone in my team is like, “Yes, but you’re the PI. Why would you sit down and do that crazy stupid little bit of code?” And I’m like, “Because it’s fun and I want to.” And I hate doing budgets, so I’m going to write this software. And finding that ability to solve someone’s problem, because she was getting angry at Excel, and solve it with something that’s colorful and fun and quick and dirty, because that’s what processing is sometimes, yeah I live for those moments.

JAMEY: You told a couple of stories of very specific moments when you were like, “This isn’t for me,” in school…

PAMELA: Yes.

JAMEY: With the hockey and with the people in business casual. And I can tell that you really love what you do with astrophysics and stuff. Was there an opposite moment? Like, maybe you when you were in school or when you were first starting out where you were like, “Yes! This is it. This is the best.”

PAMELA: I think the way it worked was I discovered one day it was possible to get paid to do things that make me giggle. And that’s not the kind of thing that any guidance counselor tells you is possible. And it all came about from becoming an accidental podcaster. It wasn’t like, I have to admit, I didn’t originate the idea to become a podcaster. I had a colleague come up to me at a conference and he’s like, “Hey, I read this article in Parade magazine about this new thing called podcasting. You have a great voice. We should do this together.” And I was like, “Yes. I like doing things with my voice. It is fun. We shall do this thing.” And I wrote the website and I actually did that while watching the new version of Battlestar Galactica, because it always comes back to Battlestar Galactica. And so, Friday nights would be getting the new posts up, updating the RSS, updating the website.

And then I started applying for grants and putting out PayPal links and saying, “Hey, will people support us doing this?” And the answer was yes. And then we started looking to see, “Can we use this for astronomy to help promote education and get paid to do that?” And then we find ourselves going to science fiction conventions. And it just kept snowballing where I kept finding people are willing to pay me to do things I love to do. Why would I do anything else?

And back in 2011 I basically did a cleaning and kind of shook off all the parts of what I was doing that I hated and made a promise to myself that other than having to do things like budgets, I would never apply for funding to do something that would make me miserable the entire time I was doing it ever again. And I would never apply for a job doing something just for the money. And I’ve been lucky. Not everyone can do that. There’s been times where I’m really grateful that I have a significant other who can keep a house over our head when I’ve had gaps in my funding because congress doesn’t always support science. But I made a conscientious choice that life is short and right now I’m in a position where I have that ability to do things that benefit science, that make other people happy, and except when I’m doing budgets, make me giggle while I’m doing them.

JESSICA: It helps to have a weird sense of humor.

PAMELA: It does. It does. If you can’t be sarcastic at your code, it will win.

CORALINE: So, with your podcasting, what was the goal that you set out to do? Do you feel like you’re close to accomplishing that goal?

PAMELA: Well, if we were close to accomplishing the goal, we’d be close to ending the show. So, I hope we never get there. So, with our first podcast, Slacker Astronomy, our goal was to basically be the daily show of astronomy where we took on astronomy news items and produced them from a really weird and out there sense of humor, not always rated PG. It turns out there is a star that it’s abbreviated name is actually Tau Boo B. And if you say that quickly, it is worth giggling at.

CORALINE: [Laughs]

PAMELA: And it has a planet. And talking about that planet was way too much fun. And so, we embraced the silly and that’s how we got the start. But sometimes you grow up and get jobs that don’t appreciate you doing off-color science. And we all kind of grew up. And as we moved away from doing that, I started doing Astronomy Cast with Fraser Cane who’s the publisher of Universe Today. And the two of us settled into this format where each week we take on a different topic and try and explain not just what we know, like the cover on all the news articles out there, but how did we figure this stuff out? How do we know general relativity is true? How do we know what color that asteroid from another star system that just whipped through our solar system is? How do we know it actually came from another star system? And because we do science to keep learning new things, if our show runs out of content, it means that we understand the entirety of the universe and that will be a very sad day. And I don’t think we’re actually going to get there.

CORALINE: That could take at least a couple of years, couldn’t it?

PAMELA: Well, we’re now in year 11. So yeah, science is making progress. We’ve had to update some of our episodes. But we’re not quite there yet on running out of content.

CORALINE: And who’s your target audience? Is it other scientists or is it amateurs who are enthusiastic about astronomy?

PAMELA: We try and target our episodes at anyone who has an interest in science and is capable of thinking things through. So, some of the episodes are at a pretty introductory level where we take people through all the baby steps necessary to understand something. And then we’ll do a follow-up episode later. We’ve done this on relativity in particular where we do a deep dive into a particular concept. So, if you go back and listen to past episodes, someone coming in who is utterly non-interested in science and is getting dragged in by their child who’s like, “We’ve got to listen to this,” they’ll be able to follow along and catch up and learn. But someone who’s coming in with a deep passion for the subject already will also find new and interesting things to challenge their brain. We’re here for nerds and people who don’t know that they’re a nerd and are about to become a nerd.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: Awesome . I love that. I also love something you said a little bit ago that I wanted to go back to. Because you mentioned that the day that we understand everything about the universe is a very sad day. And that’s interesting to me, because I totally understand it once you say it, but when I think about science and curiosity, we want to understand. We want to understand everything. And how that intersects with the idea of, “But if we actually understood everything, maybe it would be kind of disappointing.” I don’t know. Do you have more thoughts on that? Because I’m just so interested in that.

PAMELA: It’s sort of like as a young nerdling, I often had people like, “You think you’re such a know-it-all.” And I remember in middle school I thought it was the best retort ever. I was like, “I don’t know everything. But I want to know everything.” And it’s just like, what sort of retort is that? But it was true. It was a bad response but it was true. As a scientist, we don’t know everything and that’s why we science it so that we can discover the things we don’t know. It’s so that we can fill in the gaps and we can figure out the things we don’t understand. And it’s that curiosity that drives us.

So, sometimes you’ll be working on trying to figure out something and solve a problem and you tear apart electronics. You start knitting a new object. Whatever it is, you get halfway through it and realize you’ve figured it out. And it’s no longer interesting because you’ve figured it out. And so, it sits there undone because all the magic went away once it was fully understood. And with a lot of different things, it’s that pursuit of the magic. It’s that pursuit of this thing you don’t understand that drives the action. How do I do this? How does this work? What is the underlying stuff and things that make this go? And once it’s figured out, it just gets pushed aside and never completed because, boring.

CORALINE: I’m curious. I have an ongoing artificial intelligence project called Sophia that I’ve been working on for a long time. And for a long time, I was focusing on natural language processing. And I think I reached a point where it was similar to what you were saying where I recognized, “Oh, there are mechanical ways of doing this and I’m not interested in this anymore.” So, I ended up outsourcing the NLP portion of the project to Google’s NLP API because I was like, “This isn’t the problem that I’m interested in.” Do you run into that? You mentioned that you use libraries developed by the NIH. Did you find that you were in a similar position where you were excited about inventing and then realized that someone had already come up with a solution that was maybe better or more sophisticated than what you would have done on your own and said, “Oh okay, I’ll just use this library,” and was there a sense of loss that went along with that?

PAMELA: So, it didn’t happen with this particular project because it turns out, I had never had the desire to write my own libraries to read in images, because cameras like to do things in so many different ways that it’s just like, “I don’t want to be responsible for keeping up with Canon.” And if NIH is going to do that, more power to the NIH. Not an interesting problem. The place where I ran into that level of sadness was back in the early days of podcasting and website development and starting to develop frameworks. In the days before WordPress, because those days actually existed, I worked really hard to build my own content management system and I was so proud of it. It had a frontend. It had a backend. It had an admin account. It was glorious and it was mine and I used it for my website.

And then WordPress came out with way more functionality. And the things that I was working on, on my own for my own purposes, I realized I don’t need to do all of this on my own. I can hack WordPress. And so, I took to hacking WordPress. And then I was happy and I was customizing WordPress and life was good. And then they launched the ability to have plugins and all of the things that I had hacked into WordPress, I updated and they broke. And there were plugins. And it’s like, “Okay, we have reached a stage in life where I need to search for other people’s code before I try and do anything in WordPress.” Because there is someone out there who has more free time than I do and will have thus done a better job than be. And that makes me sad, because it brought me joy to sit on my sofa and hack WordPress. And now the joy is gone.

CORALINE: I think every developer goes through that phase of…

PAMELA: [Laughs]

CORALINE: Rewriting WordPress and coming up with a CMS. And it’s like, “How difficult could it be?” And of course the devil’s in the details.

PAMELA: Yes. I at least wrote my first CMS before WordPress was a thing. I just decided to recreate the WordPress plugin independently multiple times. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.

CORALINE: [Chuckles]

JESSICA: I feel fortunate to be old enough to have been into programming early enough to have the opportunity to solve some of these classic problems.

PAMELA: It’s true. I remember when a table was a big and exciting new thing to be able to do in HTML. And to have been along for the journey, to evolve past Flash to having HTML Canvas and figuring out the new things that you can do with Canvas. And there was one day we actually found a bug in HTML5’s implementation. And that was an exciting day because it’s like, we found a bug in how to do something that causes a memory overload because we’re doing something they didn’t think of. I love taking these new tools and pushing them to see just how far we can go and how much we can push them and break them in the process. And it’s been a great time to evolve as a web developer who is also working on big data problems behind the scenes, because it’s also been the advent of crowdsourcing and crowd engagement. And I’ve loved getting to weave all these things together from essentially day zero.

JESSICA: I think it’s also made it easier for me to learn than it is for people just coming into the industry now.

PAMELA: That’s true. We didn’t have libraries when we started. We had to write our own libraries and it was uphill in both directions.

JESSICA: Ah, ah. [Chuckles] Okay, this is a personal soapbox.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: It is actually downhill invention, uphill analysis. Creating them is easier than understanding the ones that are out there.

PAMELA: Oh, that’s true so often. Yes, yes.

JESSICA: Which is good news. If you don’t want to ever understand everything, don’t worry. We’ll just create more software and then we can say, “I have no idea how this works.”

PAMELA: [Laughs] And that leads to the whole problem of some developer out there got bored with the library they created and then left it for dead as a zombie project on GitHub and your language of choice updates and your library of choice no longer functions. And then what do you do? I think the true skill set nowadays is figuring out how to pull that repo down and make it work when the developer abandoned it and you need it. And that ability to participate and contribute and be the person who’s capable of understanding somebody else’s code is a truly needed superpower today.

JESSICA: Agree.

JAMEY: I like this image of this graveyard on the web of abandoned projects. I think about this sometimes too when I’m trying to fix a bug and I find a Stack Overflow post or something of someone who had the same bug as me. And either there’s no answers or the absolute worst is when someone’s like, “Oh, I figured it out,” and then they don’t post what they did. And I’m like, “No!”

PAMELA: [Laughs]

JAMEY: Someone I’ve never met abandoned this and they could have helped me in the future. [Chuckles]

PAMELA: It’s true. It sometimes feels like there almost needs to be a plugin for GitHub or an extension or I don’t know what you would call it, but this ability to turn on a red alert banner of, “This code has not been updated in N days, months, years. Use at your own risk. This developer has not even logged on for this period of time,” just so you don’t go down the rabbit hole of, “I tried the plugin that was recommended on the Stack Overflow post that I didn’t notice was written three years ago and the universe has moved on.”

JAMEY: I totally agree. Because if I see something and I’m like, “I’m not going to use this because it’s old,” then it doesn’t feel like a personal attack.

PAMELA: [Laughs]

JAMEY: But if I’ve already gone down that rabbit hole like, “Oh, someone abandoned this project,” like I don’t know them and they bailed on this project, whatever happened, but I’ve already gone down the rabbit hole and I need it, I feel like they’ve abandoned me.

[Laughter]

PAMELA: Yes, it’s true.

CORALINE: GitHub did just introduce a feature where an open source maintainer can archive a project. And that makes it so that you can’t open any issues on it. But the problem is, if the developer has abandoned the project, what motivation do they have to go in and archive the project? Because they’ve probably forgotten about it.

PAMELA: Yeah. This is where you just need some sort of an auto feature that you can turn on and off to, as I said, that “Warning. Warning, Will Robinson. Use at your own peril.”

JESSICA: Or what if you had a browser plugin that recognized you were on a GitHub page and it noticed the commit history and how long it had been and the engagement level and the number of committers and changed the background of the page to get increasingly spooky as it was older?

PAMELA: [Laughs]

JESSICA: And maybe played some scary music?

PAMELA: That is amazing and I want that to be a thing. And I don’t think I quite have the skill set to do that, because music. I’ve never figured out how to play music. But I could. I could.

CORALINE: Jessica, making it spooky would only make it all the more attractive to me.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: So, I think that would have the opposite effect.

PAMELA: It goes to pastel. Would that turn you away? It would turn me away.

CORALINE: Yes. That would definitely turn me away. So, I’m curious. Have you ever taken code that you’ve written and looked at it and said, “This solves a general purpose problem that I think other people would have,” and turned around and open sourced it yourself?

PAMELA: I’ve released a few fairly stupid feeling, like this is not a serious problem but it is a JavaScript problem that has me super annoyed and I figured it out. And I’m posting this on GitHub because if I’m annoyed, somebody else is annoyed. Please steal my code. Right now, I’m in this weird situation where CosmoQuest’s code, we’re working on coming up with various ways to solve different, how do you annotate image issues. And we’ve developed our Citizen Science Builder software. And we don’t have our code public because I work with a lot of students. And our ability to inadvertently commit keys and passwords to the internet is great. So we keep everything locked down in case student has bad day and our AWS keys inadvertently get committed to GitHub. So, I have this love/hate relationship with internet security and open source community. Because I want to put everything open source, and I don’t trust myself to not commit a database password.

So, all of my code is available if you ask. Some of my code is available just hanging out on GitHub. I have code for if you’re interested in not paying someone to tell you who follows you on Twitter. I have written code to solve this problem. I do a lot of data mining of Twitter to figure out if we’re all actually talking to the same 12 people. And that’s all just hanging out because I’m working on that alone and not worried about the keys getting published. I hate internet security. I’m bad at it. I admit this freely.

JESSICA: Pamela, one of the things you talked about really early was writing software to engage people. So, it’s like people writing software that can bring in a lot more people as opposed to a lot more computers doing the work. Talk more about that?

PAMELA: So, it turns out that as good as computer vision is getting, it’s not perfect. One of my favorite ever computer vision flaws was Google Image Search mistaking me for Natalie Portman.

JESSICA: [Laughs]

PAMELA: And you know, I’m good with that. She might not be. And computer vision is hard. And it’s getting far better. We’re getting better with biomechanics. And one of my favorite things I ever saw come up was c

[Catherine Havasi] when she was working on computer vision problems back in the early 2000s, late 90s maybe even. No, it was early 2000s. Her algorithm decided that any triangles that appeared in an image with a lizard must be sailboats. So occasionally, computer vision software just loses its little brain. Because it’s still learning. And with spacecraft we can’t afford mistakes.

And one of the things that is really important is to figure out how to map out other worlds so that we can direct spacecraft to go do interesting things, go pick a rock up off of the asteroid Bennu is one of the problems we’re looking at right now. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is on its way to the asteroid Bennu. When it gets there it’s going to do a touch and go where it essentially zooms in, grabs a rock, and bounces back off taking the rock with it. And we can’t trust computer vision to go, “This is a field of boulders. Let’s go pick one up.” So right now, we have to instead say, “Humans. Humans. We need all of you humans. We have 2 weeks to map out this asteroid and find the place that has the rock we’re going to pick up,” because if the algorithm screwed up that would be a waste of a spacecraft, which is bad. We’re not going to do that.

But at the same time, there are so many rocks. There are so many craters. There are so many fault lines. That we don’t want to spend the rest of human experience asking people to do what Stuart Robbins did and draw millions of circles on these different worlds tracing out craters. And so, what we’re trying to do with CosmoQuest is find that sweet point where we know the algorithms aren’t perfect, but let’s try and train them to do better. Let’s try an get our crowdsourced group of people to mark out the craters in the light-colored soil. Let’s get our humans to mark out the craters in the dark colored soils. Let’s do it with the sun at all different angles in the sky. Let’s do all these different kinds of surfaces and see just how many things do we have to measure in order to get the software to be 99% accurate so that we can trust it whereas currently it’s more like 75% accurate and we absolutely cannot trust it.

So, with what we’re doing, we have this weird suite of interplaying algorithms where we start out by trying to build that user experience that trains the random bored person on their sofa who is looking for something to do that maybe has a little bit of meaning, how do we train them to do the job of a PhD geophysicist and mark out and map out accurately another planet? So we figured out more or less how to do that. And our volunteers are getting the same accuracy as our professional scientists. So, that’s problem one.

Problem two is how do we then take all of these things that they’re marking out on the surface and use that to train our neural net to each year as we get more, hundreds of thousands more, millions of markings, how do we use that data to train our software to do better? And at what point do we get to the stage where we can just go in and correct what the algorithm did and that’s faster than going in and doing it ourselves? When we first started this, we pitched the algorithm versus the humans and it actually took longer to fix what the algorithm did than to just do it from scratch. And my goal is to change that. My goal is to get to the point that we are correcting our robot overlords as they mark other worlds for us and not having to mark three million craters. But at least right now, we’re spreading work out over hundreds of thousands of people. So, it’s a little bit easier.

JESSICA: This is cool. So, we have people who write software that trains people to do the job of a geophysicist in order to teach software algorithms how to identify the rocks in order to teach the spacecraft to grab a rock so that it can bring it back to us so that we can learn about asteroids.

PAMELA: Yes. What’s cool is we’re learning from the robots that are learning from us. And it’s software and humans layered all the way down.

JAMEY: That’s so interesting. It’s so integrated. I like how integrated this technology is becoming with us, because in a way it’s hard… you hit a point where it’s hard to separate the technology from us as the people who put it together, I think.

PAMELA: And what is amazing to me is we’re reaching the point with our technology where it’s starting to free us from the difficult tasks but it hasn’t got there yet. And so, there’s this rich interplay where we still have to use our brains. We still have to keep trying and poking and it requires creativity. It’s not that Star Trek future where we are all mindless slaves to our food replicator, as on one of the alien worlds they once visited they found, where people lost their intellectual drive because their technology took care of them. We’re to the point where it’s us and the computer working cooperatively to figure things out. And what I’m loving is it’s getting to the point where we can have conversations with our computer. No Siri, no. that’s not what I meant. Stop. And she ignores most of those words except for stop. And over time, the AIs are learning. Over time, we’re learning. And it’s a relationship. And it’s a relationship we’re learning as we map worlds and we’re learning as we figure out how to successfully turn the lights on in our house.

CORALINE: It strikes me Pamela that crowdsourcing requires a great deal of trust. And that trust goes in both directions. You have to trust the hundreds of thousands of people who are doing the work. You have to trust that they’re doing a good job of it. And they have to trust that the work that they’re contributing to is ethical, which in the case of astrophysics I imagine is not a very difficult question to answer. But a lot of other crowdsourcing does have that or can have that ethical dilemma as part of it. So, how do you feel about the relationship between the science you’re doing and the trust that you’re placing in the crowdsource?

PAMELA: It’s definitely a two-way relationship. And I have to admit, that’s part of why I love doing this, is our community of citizen scientists, it’s truly a collaboration and a community where we hang out on Slack together some. And just like a student can pop in my office for a question, they can pop in my DMs with a question. And everyone makes mistakes. So, what we found with our first really in-depth statistical analysis was that if you take 8 professionals and you ask them, “Map out all the craters in this part of the moon,” they’re going to hit a point where they’re tired. They’re going to hit a point of, “I am done marking all the little tiny craters. I am done. I am not marking all of them.” And it’s at a subconscious level that they make these mistakes. But when you look at all the results together, you get an aggregate result where maybe only five of the eight marked this one particular crater, but those five when you combine them tells you what’s there and what isn’t.

We then looked at, let’s get a groups of volunteers. Here we got 15, just increased the group size a little bit. And with those 15 you find actually a different set of mistakes. It turns out the volunteers were less likely to make the big craters and more likely to watch where the small ones were, which was an interesting difference between the pros and the volunteers. But when you looked at the aggregate results of getting 15 people who were randomly selected from all over the world to mark an image, versus those 8 pros, it was a one-to-one correlation. There was a greater error between any two pros than there was between the aggregate of the pros and the aggregate of the volunteers.

Now, we don’t have funding to ever get other than for this one statistical case, eight different people who are professionals to spend their professional day mapping the surface of a world. We can get one. We can’t get eight. So, this means we actually get better science by having 15 different volunteers each look at this piece of the moon, this piece of the asteroid Vesta and mapping out these different surfaces than we could ever get with the funding we have by relying on that one professional we could afford. So, we know we get better results. And it’s my job to make sure that those efforts are never wasted. It’s my job to make sure there’s someone out there who’s going to help transform all of these efforts into published new understandings. And all I can do is hope that I don’t disappoint our population who is doing so much to help us out in advancing the science.

CORALINE: What do you think the motivation is of the citizen scientist?

PAMELA: We’ve actually asked that, because to me at a certain level having taught undergrads, it’s like I can’t make undergrads do this for their homework. Why do people do this in their spare time? And I love that people are often honest when you ask this question. And we’ve gotten responses from, “I’m retired. This gives my days meaning.” “I’m on permanent disability and this is something that fills my days with purpose.” And those are those deep, sincere answers that force you to get out of bed in the morning and keep doing what you’re doing. But we also have all of the people who are like, “I always just wanted to be a scientist but I didn’t want to take all that course work. And this lets me say that I’m a scientist. This lets me say I helped with this cool awesome thing with NASA stamped all over it.” And people just want to help and volunteer at the end of the day. While, there’s a lot of people out there that you might want to sweep off the edge of our planet if it was flat but it’s not, it’s a sphere so we can’t sweep them off the edge… while there’s a lot of…

CORALINE: Lies!

PAMELA: [Laughs] While there’s a lot of people you might want to sweep off at least your Twitter list, people in general are good. People in general will help. And this is the one thing I have learned from podcasting, from citizen science, from the open source community, is if you have a need and you ask… it’s the art of asking like Amanda Palmer the musician wrote about. If you ask, people will say, “I will try and help. Let me try and help.” And we can all lighten the load for everyone just by saying, “Yes, I’m here. I have a few extra cycles. What can I do?”

JESSICA: Wow. So, we have to ask. If our listeners want to help with citizen science, what can they do?

PAMELA: Go to CosmoQuest.org. And we have a variety of citizen science sites that you can explore the earth, moon, Mars, Mercury. Click on the planet of your choice and you will be off and able to help us map that world. We have a Twitch account that we go on and I solve random software problems coding live on Twitch, which means you sometimes get to see me make fascinating bugs which I did last night. But you also get to see just how we go through and code what we code, if you want to do that. Once of our postdocs, Matt Richardson, goes on and will math various science problems. So, join us on Twitch. And we talk about everything we do on Twitter. CosmoQuestX is our username on everything because it turns out CosmoQuest was already taken by the time we launched our site. So, look for CosmoQuestX on all the various social medias, new medias, medias of all kinds, and visit CosmoQuest.org.

JAMEY: I’m sold.

PAMELA: Yay!

JAMEY: I want to be a citizen scientist now.

PAMELA: Yay. I love hearing that. And I hope to see all of you out there listening in our community helping us science, science all the things. All the things.

CORALINE: I think the quote is, “We’re going to science the fuck out of that.”

[Laughter]

PAMELA: Yes. I didn’t know if you guys were PG or not, so I didn’t go there. Yes, we’re going to science the fuck out of that.

CORALINE: Nice.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: We like to end each show with reflections on the conversation and highlight things that stood out to us. Jessica, I’m going to put you on the spot. Do you want to go first?

JESSICA: Yes. I’m definitely fascinated by the layers of people and software and people and software and how we’re all learning. And like Jamey pointed out, it gets hard to separate the people from the technology. That’s so true, both in what we work on and in the people who use what we build. I also am really interested in the part about we have goals that we don’t want to achieve because if we achieved them, then our organization or whatever it is we’re building would cease to exist, or cease to be useful. And I think that kind of goal is highly underrated. I don’t even like to use the word ‘goal’ because that implies you’re supposed to achieve it. So, I usually call them a quest. The unreachable star that we aim for because aiming for it gets us somewhere useful. So, I think that’s beautiful.

CORALINE: I’m really interested in crowdsourcing and seeing crowdsourcing be successful. My initial impression of crowdsourcing was pretty negative with what Google did for the gamification of image identification where they had people put in tags. They would show people an image and put in tags and aggregate that data. And it seemed to me like that was a race toward the lowest common denominator because you were rewarded for coming up with a tag that someone else had already come up with. So, it seemed to me that from a game theory perspective, it made the mode sense to produce the simplest possible tag as opposed to anything nuanced. So, I’ve always had kind of a negative opinion of crowdsourcing. But I think you’ve changed my mind about that. And I am definitely thinking about how I could crowdsource certain aspects of my AI project involving classification of concepts. So, that’s something I’m going to be thinking about and might send [inaudible] to follow up on.

JAMEY: The first thing that I’m thinking about is kind of related to what Jess said about the quest that you aren’t actually trying to achieve. And I think that my thought on it is the way that curiosity makes you think differently about things. Because I guess I’ve always kind of thought of curiosity as, “Yes, we want to find out. We want to know the answer.” And so, this idea that curiosity isn’t necessarily about finding out the answer, the fact that it is more about, I believe the phrase you used Pamela was ‘the pursuit of the magic’ of not knowing something is a very different way of looking at that, that I really like. And I also noticed, when you were talking about creating a bug in HTML you were like, “Oh, so exciting!” And my first instinct was like, “Creating a bug isn’t exciting. It’s the worst.” But actually no, I get it. It is exciting. It’s exciting because you’re doing something new and you’re pushing the boundaries and that means breaking something. But I think that’s related again to curiosity making you feel differently about things.

And then there’s one other thing I wanted to mention, which was I’ve been thinking a lot in general lately in my life about the tenuous path that we all take. Like, how did I end up here right where I am now? And what decisions in my life caused me to be on the correct path to be where I am right now? Because I feel like a lot of those decisions are at the time, they’re flippant or whatever. And it means that this path that I’ve taken to my current life was kind of tenuous in some ways. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot and I was thinking about it very strongly while you were talking about your background.

Because you mentioned that you didn’t get your CS degree because you didn’t want to do homework about hockey. And I feel like that’s one of those moments that I’ve been thinking about that’s like, “Well, if this had been a little bit different, everything could have gone in a different direction and it would be totally different.” And we talked too about loving Battlestar Galactica and getting interested in space. And it’s these little things that seem flippant or seem maybe inconsequential at the time are big things on the path of your life and how you end up at the destination that you end up. And so, I guess I don’t even necessarily have a thought about that. But it was playing into something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, so thanks.

PAMELA: Well, in having this conversation, one of the things that keeps being brought home to me is the importance of not being in isolation. The importance of talking to other people, bouncing ideas around, of coding within an environment, of recognizing GitHub and staying engaged and staying active and not having zombie code. The importance of recognizing I can’t do everything with my software. I need to reach out whether it be to get help with my software or to crowdsource the thing the algorithm can’t do. It’s all about collaboration with people. It’s about collaboration with the technology. And to go back to Battlestar Galactica because everything goes back to Battlestar Galactica, if we collaborate with the technology maybe we won’t get Cylons.

CORALINE: Our podcast is all about what you just said. It’s all about the combination of people and technology and technology as an extension of who we are as people. So, I think that’s a very fitting end to our conversation. I want to thank you so much, Pamela. This has been absolutely wonderful and very eye-opening. So, thank you so much for coming on the show.

PAMELA: It’s really been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

CORALINE: I just want to remind our listeners that if you believe in the kinds of conversations that we have on this podcast and want to support us, you can support us at any level on our Patreon at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. And if you support us at any level you get access to our Slack community where you can have conversations with our guests and other members of the community about the topics that we’ve talked about or about whatever is on your mind. So please, visit Patreon.com and support us. And if your company is interested in being a good citizen, we’re also looking for corporate sponsorships and we have information on that at our website at GreaterThanCode.com. Thank you everyone and we will talk to you again soon.

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058: Kindness and Patience with Tara Scherner de la Fuente

Mandy Moore — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 05:00:31 +0000

Panelists:

Coraline Ada Ehmke | Astrid Countee | Sam Livingston-Gray

Guest Starring:

Tara Scherner de la Fuente: @MediaRemedial | mediaremedial.com | @GoatUserStories

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast!

02:09 – Tara’s Superpower and Origin Story: Patience

04:56 – Conflating Patience with Kindness

07:39 – Is writing code making us less thoughtful? AKA Patience in the Workplace

The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (The Doherty Threshold)

16:22 – Warning Signs that a Company’s Culture is Not a Good One; Also, is it the company or is it individuals within a company?

22:59 – Looking for and Interviewing for a Job at a Less Toxic Environment

33:20 – What does it mean to be a developer?

36:33 – Interviewing and Privilege

39:35 – Advice for Early Career Developers

44:10 – Remote Work Culture

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Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Reflections:

Coraline: Being patient and kind.

Astrid: Software development is always something you can continue to improve at.

Tara: People don’t have to be exactly like us to be a person that we want to work with. Being different can be an asset.

Sam: Interviewing somebody should be able finding out how they think and not about what they necessary know at the moment.

Transcript:

CORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast. I am Coraline Ada Ehmke and I am joined by the lovely and talented Astrid Countee.

ASTRID: Thank you, Coraline. And I am also here with my great friend Sam Livingston-Grey.

SAM: Hello, thank you. And I’m here to introduce our guest today. Our guest, Tara Scherner de la Fuente is a Ruby and Rails developer at Allovue. She’s had other careers in academia, human resources, and private investigation. And she has an expensive t-shirt collection and masquerades as a goat for the Twitter account @GoatUserStories, which if you’re not following it, you really should be. Tara pair-programs with her cat Lulu via a remote/distributed/caffeinated living room office in sunny Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the show, Tara.

TARA: Thank you. It’s really nice to be here, especially since it’s not sunny. I’m really not a fan of the sun.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: I’m not either.

TARA: Is that okay to admit here? [Laughs]

CORALINE: I was in South Africa in February and, very sunny. We were on African savanna. I had to wear a cardigan everywhere I went to keep the sun off of me. One day in a cab I forgot my cardigan and I was sitting on the side of the car and the sun was shining through the window onto my arm. And I ended up breaking out in hives. And when I got back from South Africa, I had an appointment to get a tattoo on my right arm. And luckily because of my sleeve length or the way the car was designed, the hives stopped just below where my tattoo was going to go, which was very fortuitous.

SAM: [Laughs]

CORALINE: And my tattoo artist was like, “Coraline, what’s up with the skin on your arm?” And I was like, “Oh, I’m allergic to the sun.” And he just looks at me and says, “You are so fucking goth.”

[Laughter]

SAM: Took the words right out of my mouth.

[Laughter]

TARA: You really don’t like the sun. [Laughs]

CORALINE: [Inaudible]

SAM: It burns.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: So Tara, we like to start off every episode asking our guest what their superpower is and how they discovered it. So, what do you think?

TARA: Honestly, I think my superpower is probably patience. It sounds awful actually, in some ways, to talk about having a superpower. But I think that superpower is mine. I can appreciate standing in a long line because it gives me an opportunity to think. I need a ton of patience with myself and with code when I’m working on it. And so yeah, I think patience is my superpower.

CORALINE: Were you always a patient person? Or is that something you developed as you grew up?

TARA: Except with the sun, I think I am [Laughs] very patient. Sun, traffic, and bad internet connections are the only things that really throw me off. But I think even as a child I was a patient person, other than that first trip to Disneyland, which then I actually don’t really like Disneyland anymore. Man, I’m talking about a lot of things I don’t like today. But [Laughs]

SAM: Well, just go with it. Just go with it.

TARA: [Laughs] I’m just going with it.

CORALINE: It’s my negative influence. I’m sorry.

TARA: [Laughs] I’m getting more goth as I sit here.

[Laughter]

ASTRID: I actually think that is a really great superpower. I was listening to a podcast the other day and it was talking about crime as a disease. And it was describing a program that they were trying to do some sort of intervention with kids who were growing up in areas where there’s a lot of violence. And one of the things that they described was how important it is to take a moment. So, something happens, take a moment before you respond. Because the people who do are way less likely to do something that’s going to cause violence, that’s going to cause them to do something that’s going to change their life in a negative way. So, I think patience is kind of not really talked about that much but it’s actually a huge superpower that I don’t think most of us have, honestly. Because we’re not really socialized to care.

TARA: I remember thinking that when smartphones were really popular, it took a long time for me to even get a cellphone, and then a long time for me to get a smartphone. And I remember thinking that I didn’t want a smartphone because I thought it would take away from my ability to be patient while standing in lines [Laughs] because I would no longer have to rely on my own thinking and my own ideas about what was going on in the world. And I knew that that would probably disappear. And it’s true that sometimes even when I’m waiting in a line and I pull out the cellphone, I think, “You really didn’t want to be doing this [Laughs] back in the day. And now here you are. Oh well.”

CORALINE: Tara, I tend to conflate patience with a sense of kindness toward the world and kindness toward yourself. Do you feel like there’s something to that in your own life?

TARA: I think that patience does provide a sense of quietness and thoughtfulness about the world at times. And I think that those two ideas can be conflated and they can work in tandem with one another. I’m not sure that I’m as kind as I’d like to be. [Laughs] So, maybe I hope that patience will help build that into me. But kindness, I wish that was my superpower. It’s certainly one I strive for.

CORALINE: And it’s really difficult I think as a software developer. We’re often placed in situations where patience is not expected and in fact is not rewarded. And really, neither is kindness.

TARA: That’s a good point. I’ve certainly experienced that in my coding life, both simply internal [Chuckles] when I’m sitting there with just me and the code. But also, in some of the environments that I’m in. You know, kindness and patience can do wonders for a working environment and also even just a personal environment.

SAM: Yeah, that’s kind of sad though, because patience is a trait that we often have to have if we’re going to become programmers because we have to be willing to sit there and struggle with the computer for hours at a stretch and try to figure out what the heck is going on. And kindness is one of those things that if you can summon a reserve of kindness when you’re reviewing some code that you can’t figure out what the heck it’s doing, that really helps you figure it out and have some patience to be able to deal with it and to be able to essentially forgive the person who wrote it, especially if that person is yourself.

TARA: That’s a good point. I do actually, I live alone and I only work remotely. Well, I live with Lulu the cat. But I live alone and work remotely so I do find myself talking to the code. And I would say that I’m rather kind with the code…

[Chuckles]

TARA: When I speak with it. And I do ask it questions about what it’s doing and what it thinks it’s doing or where it’s hiding its secrets. But that patience is truly important as you mentioned, Sam. You’ve always got to try that one more thing, right? And you have to have the patience to think of the next 43 one -more-thing’s and keep trying those as well. So, it’s important to be kind with yourself too, when you realize it takes into the 40 tries to get the thing working.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: I recently was reading about the Doherty Threshold which I learned about by watching this amazing show called Halt and Catch Fire which I highly recommend.

ASTRID: I love that show.

CORALINE: Yeah. So, the Doherty Threshold came out of this paper by a couple of IBM engineers. And the prevalent thinking before their research was that the time it took for a computer to respond to a typed command which back in the 80s was between two and three seconds, the prevailing wisdom was that that gave you time to think about the next thing that you would tell the computer to do. And this paper dispelled that myth and said that the faster the computer responds, the more productive you would actually become as a programmer. And there was like a 130% increase in developer productivity when they got the response time down to 0.3 seconds. But I really wonder if we lost something by having this immediacy to the way we write code. Is that making us less thoughtful?

SAM: Well, my own personal experience in dealing with unit testing is that when the tests take a couple of seconds, I’ll sit there and deal with it. But if they give me immediate, instant feedback as soon as I hit enter, I can keep my state of flow much more easily

CORALINE: That’s true.

TARA: Yeah. I think there are trade-offs. I really like narrowing down my test to that one test I can run locally that’ll pop right up. But on the other hand, Sam introduced me, as a Ruby on Rails developer, I am now a Ruby, Rails and Ember developer theoretically. I think I have now written two things in Ember and it has been with assistance. But I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but restarting the Rails Server happens pretty quickly. Restarting the Ember server, I can make some coffee and I can go and I can pick out a snack. And I have time to think about things.

So, I think there are a couple of things happening. I can stay in that flow when I am working in Rails, especially since I know it well. And maybe it’s because I don’t know Ember well that I appreciate how long it takes for the Ember server to come back up [Laughs] because I have that time to think to myself, “Okay. There are about 50 things I don’t know how to do. How am I going to do those [Laughs] when this server pops back up? And do I even know what I’m checking next? I’m not sure.” So, I can appreciate the different levels that technology has changed.

You did make me think that I’ve heard a similar story about typewriters and about how that’s why they made the keyboards like they did for typewriters because back in the olden days I guess when the keys would hit the paper they’d get all tangled up if they were say, laid out alphabetically, if people were going in the right order. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I love that we keep retelling stories and they change with time.

SAM: I have heard this particular apocryphal story as well. So, it must be true.

[Laughter]

TARA: There you go. That’s it. Abe Lincoln said it was true on the internet and there we have it.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: So, the thing I was alluding to before is that patience isn’t always rewarded in the workplace. I think a lot of people work in so-called Agile shops where you’re expected to deliver a certain number of points every sprint and the pressure is kind of on and you might have a Scrum master who’s tracking your velocity and saying, “Tara, we expect you to deliver 12 points this sprint. And so far, the burn-down looks like you’re only on track to deliver 8.” How do you communicate that sometimes these things take time and that estimation is a lie and that you need other people to be patient with you too?

TARA: The wild guess form of estimation. Yeah, you know it’s interesting that you ask that question because I did recently leave my former employer. And we didn’t have a problem so much with the “guesstimation” of the work that needed to be done or the drive, but there was a serious drive often driven by one particular client. And it drove some folks so hard. We had two different employees be hospitalized as a result of the stress. And some people might argue that it wasn’t just as a result of the stress, but I think it was pretty clear that that was a large contributing factor. And to be in an environment like that is incredibly stressful.

It does require… honestly if you’re going to do your best work for an employer, and I honestly believe that if I have accepted a job and said that I’ll do it, that I want to give that my best effort, my best work. And if I’m in, then I’m in. And if I’m not in emotionally or mentally, then I’ll get out. And I think that that requires patience with the employer and the environment that you’re in when you come across situations like that where there is an immense amount of stress. And to be patient with the environment and just to be able to accept your limitations and just do your best work and filter out what is happening there is a very difficult skill. And it’s not even just a skill. Sometimes, we simply don’t have the resources to be able to manage that kind of stress. But I think patience and kindness come into play quite a bit.

And I will say, I am so pleased with the coworkers that I had at that last position. Because everyone was so supportive of the people who needed to step away and take care of themselves physically and mentally and emotionally. And everyone was really rallied around those folks. And that was wonderful to experience.

CORALINE: Anyone who knows my story knows that I had the opposite experience with a big company recently where I too was hospitalized and I did not get that kind of support. So, it’s amazing and wonderful that you did feel supported like that. But at what point are you punished for that patience? At what point do you need to decide, “This is not a good environment for me,” and what do you do?

TARA: You know, that’s absolutely an important question and I think it definitely varies with the individual. I’ve now left that particular company and one person who was in that situation chose to leave and one person has chosen to stay. And so, it’s definitely a very personal experience and a personal decision to make. And I don’t think there’s one right or wrong answer. As you spoke, I began to think that what I felt was support from the individuals that I worked with. But of course, individuals make up that collective company experience, right? And where is that boundary between, “Here are the people that I work with who I feel supported by,” and at what point is that the company where I’m not feeling the support? And I think some of that probably comes into play as well.

SAM: I really like that you’re trying to find that distinction between the people and the company because it is absolutely okay to have loyalty to people. But a company, a corporation, cannot have loyalty towards you. And so, it shouldn’t be reciprocated because it can’t be. And yeah, I struggle sometimes to figure out where to draw that line as well. Although sometimes, I draw it along hierarchical boundaries. Like, the people who are my peers, they can be my friends, but the people who are one or two levels of management up, I need to treat with a little bit more care.

TARA: I think that’s an important distinction. And it’s difficult, at least I’ve found it difficult, to figure out where to draw that line and where that loyalty lies, especially in a smaller company where you know the “sea-level employees” as it were. You’ve maybe sat next to them at dinner or traded, I don’t know, goat noises with them.

[Chuckles]

TARA: Hypothetically, that could have happened, and compared your best bleats with somebody at that level. It’s hard at that point to really say, “You know what? I like this individual person and this is a person that I feel some affection towards,” and then these people make up this company that is maybe doing some things I’m uncomfortable with. And that is difficult to navigate.

SAM: So, one thing that I was thinking about when we were talking about possible topics for this show is, are there warning signs that people should look for that may indicate that the company’s culture is crossing a threshold from healthy into something that you need an extraordinary amount of patience to deal with?

TARA: There are certainly warning signs. I would say in the last experience that I had, it was a struggle to see those warning signs until things were changing. But it wasn’t completely clear. And then as I described it to someone at the time, suddenly I was Bambi in the forest and all the animals seem to be running past me, fleeing from the forest fire. At which point I thought, “You know, I should probably look around a little closer.” And so, that was beyond a warning sign.

But really, most of the people and the women had left, especially the women leaders in the company. We had had a really strong woman leadership and we had had really strong people of color leadership and they were fleeing the company. And if that isn’t a warning sign, I don’t know what is. I think if your strong leaders who are not in say, the majority vision of the company, if you’re non-white male colleagues, that’s probably a sign. And of course, it’s not just them. But that is probably a clear warning sign that the folks who maybe feel marginalized in different ways in the world begin to leave the company and they are leaving in droves, there’s no better warning sign that you can get, that the people who get the shaft on a regular basis in life are suddenly leaving the environment that you’ve been working in and striving towards, that is probably a clear warning sign.

ASTRID: So, I have struggled with this in some of my own experiences of trying to understand, “Is it the company? Is it certain individuals?” Because it could be really hard to tell. And I was wondering Tara, what you thought about when there are certain people who may raise a flag and say, “I have a problem,” or, “Something is going on that I think is wrong,” that are not necessarily the most reputable, then how much should you really take that into account? Because I wonder sometimes. Like, I’ve had that experience where everything was good until it was really, really bad. And then I was trying to understand, did I just miss all the signs or did it really change that quickly? And one of the things that I realized was that part of the problem was some of the people who were saying that there’s a problem are people who were not very reputable employees themselves. So, it’s hard to tell. Are you complaining because you complain or are you complaining because there’s something real going on? So, if you have any ways to try to suss out the difference?

TARA: It’s interesting that you bring that up because I was just having a conversation this morning with a former colleague of mine. Well, there are a couple of things going on there. First of all, I think there’s one thing when say, someone brings up some issues and it’s someone I haven’t necessarily bonded with or I don’t necessarily view them as a reputable source. And then there’s also the person who’s bringing up issues who isn’t seen necessarily as valuable or important, it would seem, to the employer and doesn’t have the reputation or just the perceived value from the employer. And I think there can be a couple of different things going on there.

So certainly, if it’s someone who is raising concerns where I’m not really sure what to believe, I would say right now we’re seeing a whole lot of assaults on women being reported in the media right now from really well-known people. And I think it’s incredibly important to believe what we’re hearing when we first hear it. And I think it’s certainly important that just like a lot of these things aren’t look into when they happen, that we do look into them. But I think believing when somebody says, “I’ve been hurt,” or, “I’m experiencing something that isn’t right,” I think it’s important that we step into that with the belief that there’s somebody who needs protection or there’s somebody who needs an ally or there’s somebody who needs support. And I do think if we can do that, that that’s best.

Now, in terms of when action really takes place, it probably takes at least two people in either of those scenarios to say, “You know what? There’s something that isn’t right that’s happening.” And it can be somebody who you’re not sure you believe but you want to be open to that at the beginning. But I do think it’s human nature maybe to want some backup or you want somebody else to say, “Well heck, the #MeToo hashtag.” Maybe if one woman says it then it’s one woman and you want to support that person and you want to believe that person. But it does help just because we’re human beings to hear it from more than one source. And so, that is a big thing.

But I do think it’s really important especially as I think about my colleague who didn’t have the reputation as a solid, say, a tech leader. She reported some things and it wasn’t taken seriously by her supervisor, by human resources, by anyone. And I think it’s so important that as colleagues we at least try to support one another. We don’t need to require all of the forest animals to run past us.

[Chuckles]

TARA: That we should be able to reach out a hand and say, “I don’t know what you’re experiencing. I haven’t experienced it. But let’s figure this out.” And at least to be able to listen at the very beginning [Chuckles], to be able to listen. And certainly as more and more people left my company for example, each one was at least a yellow flag, if not a red flag. So, I think in some ways you start that way. There’s one person or there are two people, or there’s more talk about a thing and your eyes get wider and wider. And hopefully, you know something is going on before the forest fire whips you in the ass.

CORALINE: So Tara, we talked about work environments and warning signs and when it’s time to get out. I’m curious about the natural consequence of finding yourself in a toxic environment and that is looking for a new, hopefully less toxic environment. So, when I’m interviewing, one of the things I’m definitely trying to figure out is, “Does this company value the things that I value?” and “Are we aligned in our values?” And that’s a very difficult thing to suss out during the interview process.

TARA: I think you’re absolutely right that it is difficult. I’m not sure I had the best approach to looking for a new job while working in a toxic environment, which is to say I never reached the point where I began looking for new work. And I know plenty of people did and they got out. And plenty of people have done so since I left, and they have gotten out. But I sort of go from, “I am here and I am giving you my best work,” to “If a position comes across my plate, I am going to look at it. And I’m going to see what it is that you’re offering.” And it could be a technical recruiter reaching out or in my most recent case, it was former colleagues that I had worked with at a previous position.

And what happened is apparently I really like animals rushing past me, because I had a former colleague reach out to me about a potential position and wanted to meet up with me and I made that arrangement. And within the same week, three different former colleagues in addition to that person reached out to me about positions, all from the same company. So, let me tell you, networking is important. [Chuckles] It is important, too.

SAM: [Chuckles] Yes.

TARA: To bond with your colleagues in at least natural ways, in being yourself, because four different colleagues, four different companies reached out to me, all in the same week. Which is again, I was not looking for a position. So for me, this happened very naturally. And I talk with inanimate objects and I also believe that the universe was talking to me. there’s no clear sign that the universe is saying, “You don’t seem to be actively looking for a job so here are four people who would like to work with you again. Why don’t you speak with them?” And so, that is exactly what I did.

And I do think for me, the experience of interviewing again was thank goodness not as stressful as the first time I was looking for jobs and not as stressful as the second time I was looking for jobs. And it certainly helped that I had been referred by somebody at each of these positions. That was a big thing. But I was still looking for the same thing I think all of us look for when we are going through the daunting technical interviewing process, which is just often torment. And I think it’s easier when you’re less stressed and you can’t regulate that necessarily.

But it’s easier to spot some of the things, some of the warning signs in the interview process about, “Here I’m with, this is the type of person that I’ll be working with.” And this person maybe asks questions that aren’t necessarily relevant to what I’ve been doing or even what I’ll do at the next company.” And that’s a big warning sign to me. Someone who cares about those technical questions more than they care about what I’m like to work with is a warning sign for me.

I actually was invited to reinterview with a company that I had interviewed with before about a year and a half earlier. And I actually remembered one of the interviewers’ questions before I went into that interview. And I thought it would be really interesting if that person interviewed me again and asked the same sort of gotcha question. And I’m going to look up the answer. And I looked up the answer so that I was ready for it. And sure enough, there he was, and there was his gotcha question. And I came off looking awesome. And I thought, “I don’t want to work with this person.”

[Laughter]

TARA: Is what happened.

SAM: Was it a gotcha that was relevant in any way to the work? Or was it one of those invert a linked list in linear time kind of a thing?

TARA: It was minorly relevant to the work…

SAM: [Laughs]

TARA: In that it asked basically about the difference between include and extend in Ruby.

SAM: Mm.

TARA: Which, I mean, it’s in Ruby. So, that is the programming language that I use. But do I ever necessarily need to think about that or can I ever not just look that up if I need to know that know? [Chuckles] And…

SAM: Mmhmm.

TARA: Is the difference really important to discuss? Not really. And somebody else had me, somebody else in that same interview session because of course I met with, I don’t know, 50… no, I didn’t meet with 50 people. I think I met with four or five. And I was asked a lot of questions about things I don’t necessarily do or haven’t done, things like in the Inspector in Chrome and where to find different things. And you know, I mean I can figure that shit out if I [Laughs] Find something out in the Inspector, in the Developer Tools. I mean, I can figure that out if I need to find out where the Console is or need to find out how fast something is loading on the page. That just isn’t the key things that I’ve been doing. If I’m a Ruby on Rails programmer, that isn’t the key thing. It is something that I might check later. I might say, “Oh, is this faster than this?” But that isn’t a key element of my work. And so, even some of those clues like the things that are being asked of you, do they know what you do day-to-day? Do they have questions that are going to be relevant with what working with you is like? Those are the things I care about.

And I was very fortunate the company that I did end up accepting a position with, I think part of it was their warm, relevant, technical interview style. I did also meet with four different people with that experience. But some of it was, “Bring us some code that you have worked on and talk to us about why you made the decisions that you made. And walk us through the code.” So, some of it, they got to see some of the technical things that I’d done. But it was also very relevant to what I’d done, including my decision-making process, which is really important. They had me pair with a junior developer to see what my patience is like with a junior developer. And as we know, that’s my superpower. So, it went really well. But [Laughs] But also, what pairing with me is like. And so, that was a great experience. And I think one or two of the other conversations were conversations, not necessarily, “Do you know the difference between include and extend?” And so honestly, that interviewing style, they were selling themselves on me, because they cared about what was relevant to me and to my life. And one of them said the word “guys” and corrected himself.

CORALINE: Nice.

TARA: Without me prompting him. And I have found that after joining the company, that I see similar senses of awareness of things that have happened among more than just the one awesome person. But there are many awesome people within the company. And that interviewing style really reflected what I’ve found now that I’ve joined the company.

So, I do think that even if you don’t get somebody who’s like a total A-hole during an interview, you can pick up on how they’ve thought about their interviewing process. Maybe it’s that private investigator background that I’ve got, but those are the clues I’m looking for. there’s nobody who’s going to say straight-up, “I hate cats,” or something. But they’re going to give you clues as to who they are and what that environment is going to be like. So, I’m sorry. I kind of went on there for a while. But that interviewing experience, it is daunting. And you have to look for those clues and not rely on just the animals fleeing the forest. [Laughs]

CORALINE: Yeah. My most recent interview experience, I work at [Stitch Fix] now. And [Stitch Fix] has what they call their OS. And it’s based on kindness, being bright, and being a leader. And I found that that was really reflected in the interview process. And I always felt really well-treated. And those were the criteria they were evaluating me on. So of course, there was a technical exercise and did have to walk through code because that’s a core skill set. But that wasn’t the majority of the interview experience.

And I got an interesting reminder of that as I started taking part in the interview process for new candidates. There was a pairing exercise that we did. And I was shadowing the main person doing the interview to be able to huddle after the interview. And this person was like, “Well Coraline, what did you think?” and I said that I was alarmed at some of the mistakes that the person had made and I had questions about the depth of their technical knowledge. And the other interviewer was like, “Yeah, but did they seem bright? Programming can be improved really easily and they’ll learn from their peers and there will be code reviews and they will learn and grow on the job. But did they meet our criteria for kindness and brightness and having leadership qualities?” And that was a great reminder to me that that’s what we value, that’s what we interview for.

TARA: That’s a great response.

SAM: Yeah.

TARA: For an interviewer to have. So, I’m thankful Sam was one of my first interviewers for my very first engineering position. And I’m [Laughs] I’m really grateful that he leaned on appreciating my person and potential more than my ability to code.

SAM: Aw, shucks. Yeah, it’s interesting. Yeah Tara, you were talking about people who ask just little detailed questions about the Chrome Inspector or include versus extend. And I feel like that belies an understanding of what it is to be a developer. Is a developer somebody who has a vast collection of tricks and individual bits of trivia or is a developer somebody who has a mindset that they can use whatever tools are at their disposal to build something useful for another human being? And it sounds like Coraline, at [Stitch Fix] you’re aiming towards the latter as well. So, that’s really cool to hear.

ASTRID: I would agree with what you said Tara, about it being about the conversation. Because when I think back on some of the best job experiences I’ve had, the interview was getting to know me in some sort of way and not just a ticking off of, “Do you have this, this, this, this, and this?” And then having had other experiences and also helped with hiring, what I think about now is if you’re calling me in for an interview, how are you spending our time? From the interviewee perspective, I think about that, because I feel like there are some things that you can determine prior to asking me to come in for an interview.

So, if we’re going to spend an hour together and you’re going to spend 45 minutes of that going over things that are something that’s not really relevant or something that’s just about trying to assess me, then it makes me question as a manager, “Are you going to do that too?” Because I don’t really want to have a manager who can’t see the forest for the trees. I’ve been in those experiences where you’re really a good team player, you’re working hard, you’re helping other people, and then when it comes time for evaluation it’s like, “Well, you needed to do this many. You didn’t do this many.” And it seems like that’s not the big picture. And although I do understand having to meet certain things, you should think about, you should weigh that against the impact somebody has on the team.

And I think one of the things that I’ve started to do which has also been helpful is in the interview process I try to ask them a question about something that would be related to their management style that would help me understand how they think about assessing people. So, it’s usually something like, “What would success look like?” because their version of that answer varies a lot depending upon how they think. Usually, I think people don’t get to ask these questions because they usually sit back and like, “Whoa.” But it helps me try to figure out how you think about me, like how you spend the time. And then how you answer questions that are qualitative, not just a yes or no or a specific answer.

It matters to me because then it tells me something about what you’ll probably do when I’m working there. Like, if I have a question, are you going to spend time to actually give me a thoughtful answer or are you going to push me off and tell me to just not worry about it? Because I think those types of things contribute over time to that toxic culture that you try to get out of and you can’t always see when you first get there.

TARA: I love how you framed that. And that’s such a specific piece of advice that’s work taking, asking that open-ended question like “What does success mean to you?” You can get so much information just from that question, not only the content but how they communicate with you. And that’s a great tip right there.

CORALINE: One of the things that I struggle with in working with early-career developers and mentoring them is I became very aware that I have quite a bit of privilege when it comes to interviewing because as someone who is highly experienced, who’s been in this industry for over 20 years, I am easily valued, that I’m in demand and I can pick the company I work for. But early-career developers, they’re looking for companies that are willing to take a chance on someone who doesn’t have that experience and they’re much more limited in the companies that are willing to do that, willing to hire someone who’s early-career and develop them and provide a fostering environment. So I’m really torn about telling them questions they should ask to evaluate the environment when I know that their choices are going to be so limited.

TARA: That’s a really important awareness to have, because it’s true. I would consider myself still in those early years and person who has to look up the difference between include and extend before getting that anticipated question. So, I definitely don’t have my pick of places. But it is important to have an awareness of things that should be red flags and things you can work with, and things that you can actually maybe improve and/or it can be a really great experience, even if there might be… it’s not the ideal interviewing scenario, for example. Not everyone can work for a warm company where people are aware of all the things. But can you thrive there? Can you learn? These are important things to consider, depending on what it is you’re looking for.

Certainly, you still don’t want to work with A-holes. And I have… I don’t know why I’ll say ‘fuck’ but I won’t say ‘asshole’. That makes no sense. [Laughs] But I did have an interview way back in the beginning, looking for my first job, and I had an interview with somebody who just went on for about 20 or 30 minutes before he passed me off to the coders who would actually evaluate my skill. But he just went on this monologue for about 20 to 30 minutes. And so at the end, he literally sat back in his chair and went, “So, why should I hire you?” And I just thought, “Oh please, don’t.”

CORALINE: Wow.

TARA: Do not hire me.

[Laughter]

TARA: Do not.

SAM: Can I go now?

TARA: [Laughs] Yeah. And then I did have to go do some Fibonacci in the next room. But I just thought, “Please, do not like me. I want to leave. Now.” Sometimes even when you’re looking for your very first job, there are places you [Laughs] should not go.

SAM: [Chuckles] Yeah.

TARA: And that would be one. I went back to my coding bootcamp and reported that no one should go for an interview there. [Laughs]

ASTRID: Coraline, what kind of advice do you give right now?

CORALINE: I think it’s really critical, especially for your first or second job, that you’re in a nurturing environment. And I don’t believe we have a pipeline problem so much as we have a retention problem. And people who have taken a chance, people who have invested in learning and getting themselves in the position where they’re ready to be a developer, I hate it when I see those people saying, “This is not for me,” and it’s the result of a toxic workplace. So, I do share tips for trying to figure out if it’s going to be a nurturing environment for you. I tell them, you don’t want to be the first early-career developer at a company if you can help it. You want to talk to other people who are in a similar situation and find out what they’re experience has been like.

And use the whisper network. Early-career developers don’t have access to that whisper network necessarily because they haven’t had the networking experience and they haven’t built up that collection of trusted people in their professional lives. So, one of the things that I try to do is get them connected as quickly as possible so that they do have people they can ask those questions of. Like, “Has anyone here worked at X company and what was it like and would you recommend that I work there?” Those personal experiences that their peers have had I think are the most critical questions that they should be asking even before they get themselves into an interview situation.

TARA: I think that’s really great advice. you’re absolutely right. It’s so hard to establish that network of people who can give you that key advice. And it’s also sometimes hard to discern whether they’ve had experience with a newer developer. And it’s important to be able to ask those questions. That’s probably a good question to ask in an interview for a newer developer, is whether or not the company has had experience developing developers. [Laughs]

SAM: Or have they even thought about what it’s going to take for them to be able to support a new developer?

TARA: Yeah. I’ve heard some rough stories out there. I was very fortunate to come into that first position. Thank you Sam, again, for hiring me. [Laughs]

SAM: Happy to do it.

TARA: Or speaking up for me. And you know, I think that was a really unique situation also to join a company that had developed its own internal bootcamp and so had had some experience with bringing on junior developers, some of whom they raised from infancy development, as it were. And so, that was a very unique experience. And I really hope that more experiences, not necessarily an internal bootcamp, but more companies do think hard about what it will be like to bring on a junior developer and what do we need to do to build that infrastructure to make that a successful experience for a developer.

CORALINE: On the other side of that, I find that injecting early-career developers into a development culture, those are the people who are going to make the biggest changes. Those are the people who can see their culture for what it really is even before day one, even during that interview process. And it’s really important to listen to them and ask them questions about, “How is it here?” and “How are you being supported here?” and “What do you like about it here?” and “What should change?” Because those are the people who have the perspective that as a more seasoned employee or someone who’s been there for a couple of years, you don’t see these things. You need that fresh perspective. And early-career developers bring that perspective to you. They’re such a valuable resource on so many different levels.

TARA: Yeah, I would agree with that. Even though as I was thinking about it, in some ways your junior developers are going to be the canary in your company, right? And hopefully, they…

CORALINE: Yeah.

TARA: Hopefully they thrive. We don’t want to go around… oh dear, I’ve stumbled into a metaphor about killing junior developers.

[Laughter]

TARA: But hopefully the canary thrives. Let’s just focus on that. We want the canary to thrive at the company. And if your canary is not thriving, there are changes that need to be made, absolutely.

CORALINE: Tara, are there things that we did not cover yet that you’d like to have us talk about?

TARA: There are so many different things. You know, I will say that we touched a little bit on the fact that I work remotely. And that is another thing that can be revealed in a technical interview about what technology is set up for that interview experience. How thoughtful are the people interviewing you about timezones, if timezones are going to play a part in the role. And how well does the company work asynchronously? Those are some good questions to ask in a tech interview if you are in a position like I am where you’re going to be working remotely, and how does the company thrive like that? I think we’ve come up with some good questions both to ask and be asked and some not-so-great questions about that.

But some of those good questions to ask, if being a remote employee is important to you, is going to be, how do you work asynchronously with your colleagues? How is that supported? For example, in my current place of business there’s a strong focus on working asynchronously and stand-ups are done via a Slack bot sort of an experience. And they fly all of the remote employees or whatever means of travel, horse I suppose if you wanted to travel by horse, that could happen. But everybody comes to the headquarters in Baltimore quarterly. And I think having some awareness of the importance of bringing people together is also an important thing to ask. So, I suppose I’d just throw that in, since we did talk about tech interviews. For me, how the company is going to work with remote employees is a really important factor.

CORALINE: That’s such an amazing point, because the interview experience itself can tell you. Like, do they expect you to interview at 8am Eastern Time?

SAM: [Laughs]

CORALINE: Is it ironic when you’re interviewing for a remote position and they want all the interviews to happen at headquarters?

TARA: Yeah. And you know what? You bring up a very specific example. When I did accept the position that I am currently in, I had made it through the on-camera and phone interview experience and they wanted me to fly out to New York. And part of me really wanted to not fly to headquarters. And in fact, I’ve actually never gotten a job after an in-person headquarters experience. I’ve certainly gotten in-person interviews, but not flying to a headquarters that isn’t in my city. And part of me just thought, “You know, if we can’t make this decision without me flying across the country, then maybe that isn’t a good fit for a remote employee.”

SAM: Yeah. Another really, like this is really basic one, but one conversation that I have had in the past is if I’m interviewing for a company that happens to be located in my hometown and I ask them how they feel about working from home, that’s going to give you some information, too. It’s like, “Oh yeah, we work from home whenever it suits us and however it works and we’ve set ourselves up in such a way that it doesn’t really matter that much where you are because we have a remote-first approach,” versus, “Well, you know some people work from home one day a week. And we could see about maybe getting that to two.” Even that will tell you something about how they approach remote work and to some degree what their level of trust is in you as a potential employee.

ASTRID: Yeah, I never understand why it’s such a big deal. I always feel like if I come to work and I put my headphones on and I sit here all day and work, then why do I have to be here to do that? Especially if I have to commute to do it and now I’m taking time to get there, and then because the commute is bad I have to take time to get into the mode of working. And then I have to gear up for the commute later. I mean, why would you… I guess it’s just hard for me to understand why there is this resistance to having employees work remotely. Like, what is it that you think is happening that you can’t see? Because the way I feel about it is, if you have employees who aren’t working, they can not work in your office. That happens all the time.

SAM: [Laughs]

ASTRID: But you should deal with those employees, as opposed to make some sort of big company-wide rule as though it’s kindergarten and we want to make sure everyone plays inside the fence. I really hate that kind of mentality.

CORALINE: But Astrid, how can they look over your shoulder and see what website you’re browsing if you’re at home?

ASTRID: [Laughs]

CORALINE: I know, spyware.

SAM: Corporate spyware.

ASTRID: [Laughs]

CORALINE: Yeah.

ASTRID: I need to browse those websites. They’re important for my process.

TARA: You know, I need to check in on social media before I dig into the next big project. That’s just how it works. But I will say, actually that experience is how I got into tech. My last position where I worked for somebody else before I got into tech, I was an Assistant Dean for a university PhD program. And we were not allowed to wear jeans to work. And there was one day that just stands out into my mind where I got dressed in the… there was a skirt involved and there was I think, I don’t know if it was a blouse, but it was a shirt of some sort. And I got…

SAM: Battle gear.

TARA: [Laughs] Battle gear is what I got into. And I parked my car. I walked up the back stairs into my office, which it happened that nobody else in my particular large room was working that day. They were off-site or something like that. So I went into my cubicle and I sat there and I did my job all day long. And then I departed in my skirt. And nobody saw me even once. No one saw me at all. And I thought, “Why did I show up here? Why couldn’t I wear jeans here?” And I made it like a career goal. I wanted to wear jeans and t-shirt every day for the rest of my life. And I thought, where can I do that? And I thought, tech. Those tech folks know what’s going on. They are wearing…

SAM: [Chuckles]

TARA: Jeans and t-shirts. And then it sort of built up on that that I became a remote employee as well. But I still wear jeans and t-shirts every day. And I have made that a career goal and a career achievement. So, I’m pretty excited about that. But honestly, that remote, I don’t know why people want to drive into a place, especially if there’s no one there to see you and what websites you’re surfing. I don’t know why people want to do that.

SAM: And for all you listeners who can’t actually see this, Tara is in fact wearing her Greater Than Code t-shirt today. Thank you, Tara.

TARA: I am happy to do so. I’m also wearing jeans. I realize they’re off-camera. But trust me, it’s happening.

SAM: I believe you.

CORALINE: Sam, for those listeners who want a Greater Than Code t-shirt, what are their options?

SAM: Well, one of their options would be to go back in time to last week and catch up with me at RubyConf. Mandy shipped me literally 22 pounds of t-shirts to give away and I’ve spent two days of RubyConf dragging my carry-on around full of t-shirts and giving them away to anybody I could find. But perhaps a more reliable and non-causality-violating way to do that would be to join us and sponsor us on Patreon. If you go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode you can sign up at any level and we’ll get you into your Slack community. But I believe $25 a month is the level at which we will send you your very own t-shirt. Somewhere in there, there’s a level that will get you stickers as well.

CORALINE: Awesome. Tara, it’s been a great conversation. We always end our conversations with our guests with taking time to reflect on the conversation that we’ve had and think about what stood out for us and things that maybe we want to turn over in our brains a little while after the conversation is over. And I think one of the topics we opened up with really touched me, and that’s talking about patience and kindness. And I worry that I’m not as patient as I should be. I’m definitely not very patient with myself. I get frustrated with myself very, very easily. I’m definitely kinder to other people than I am to myself. And you immediately focused on being kind to yourself when we were talking about that, and being patient with yourself, and being comfortable being still with yourself. That’s something I really want to work on and that’s something I really want to reflect on. So, thank you for bringing that to the conversation.

TARA: I have been thinking about that quite a bit. And because I think I also mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that I do sometimes have trouble with kindness or I struggle with things that I don’t necessarily like. And I’ve come to realize that especially with people, that the things that I don’t necessarily like in another people is something that I don’t like in myself. And so, I’ve found that if I’m kinder to myself, I can be kinder to other people who reflect those qualities that I struggle with in my own world. So, what you’ve just said and our conversation that we had earlier has made me really think about that a little more. And I too am going to work on my own kindness.

ASTRID: So, mine is actually something that you said, Coraline, when you were relaying the experience that you had for the person who you were interviewing. And what I like about that conversation you had with the other interviewer regarding that junior developer is that it’s a great reminder that software development is something you can always continue to improve at. But being a certain type of person who is easy to work with, someone who is open to learning, that’s something that you really need to put as a priority number one. Especially as someone like me who’s newer to this whole environment, there’s a lot of emphasis on specific skills and wanting to master those skills and less emphasis on being, I guess having a certain mindset about what it means to be a software developer. And I think it’s good to have a reminder that being a certain type of person can be in a lot of ways more valuable than just a specific skill. Because being a certain type of person will allow you to gain those skills in a meaningful way that can be used and then also be useful on a team.

CORALINE: One point of clarification. This was not an early-career developer that we were interviewing.

ASTRID: Oh, okay.

CORALINE: Which is why… I would definitely be more patient with someone who is earlier on, but I was like…

ASTRID: No shade, Coraline. No shade.

CORALINE: “This person is going for a mid-level role. Shouldn’t they know this already?”

ASTRID: [Laughs]

CORALINE: And I was happy to be corrected on that point. But, thank you.

TARA: I do want to hear Sam’s reflections, but before we do, I want to say that you did make me think about how important it is. We do need to build up our skills that make us the kind of person that we want to work with. We want to be the right person for the right company. But at the same time, I do think having that awareness that especially when we’re interviewing people, that they don’t need to necessarily be like us to be a person that we want to work with, and that even being different from us can be an asset to the company as a whole, just having those many different perspectives and those many different assets and strengths. I want somebody obviously who I can get along with and work well with, but I am trying to be more cognizant of the fact that someone who isn’t like me is still bringing strong, important strengths to the company, or could if we hire them.
CORALINE: Yeah, definitely.

SAM: Well, after all that mine may be a little disappointing. But let’s go ahead anyway. So, one of the things that I took away from this is that apparently I really need to watch the show Halt and Catch Fire.

ASTRID: It’s an awesome show.

SAM: So, I have added it to my Netflix list and will sit down and try to watch it sometime soon. I also really liked, really to echo what we were just talking about, this idea that interviewing somebody should be about finding out how they think and not necessarily which set of facts they happen to know at the moment, or even which set of facts they can retrieve at the moment. And I have a lot of experience on one side of the interviewing table. But as I spend more time interviewing other people, that’s something that I really could stand to remember. So, thank you for highlighting that again.

CORALINE: This has been a really great conversation. Tara, I want to thank you for coming on the show and for being so open and being so honest and sharing your experiences and your thoughts. And just, thank you.

TARA: Thank you so much for having me. It’s not often that I get to talk with people who aren’t Lulu the cat [Laughs] during the day. So, this has been a delight.

CORALINE: And thank you to all our listeners and we will talk to you again very soon.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

057: Everything is UI with Christina Morillo

Mandy Moore — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 05:00:10 +0000

This episode is sponsored by Upside!

Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.

Panelists:

Rein Henrichs | Janelle Klein | Jessica Kerr

Guest Starring:

Christina Morillo: @divinetechygirl | christinamorillo.com | WOCinTech

Show Notes:

01:08 – Christina’s Background and Superpower: Multitasking and Automation

04:42 – Automation Processes: Discovery and Reconnaissance, and When Human Judgement and Input is Necessary

10:03 – Multitasking Timescales and Context Switching

16:39 – Decision-making Functions

23:28 – Being Kind to Your Busy Self and Choosing What NOT To Do

We’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True by Gabrielle Union

32:03 – Making Accomplishments Visible to Yourself and Having a Culture of Acknowledgement

For more discussion on congressive/ingressive behavior, see also:
GTC Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng

Operant Conditioning Chamber (Skinner Box)

Reflections:

Rein: Being self-aware of how much is on your plate, how you’re feeling about it, and then being able to say no, which is really saying yes to what YOU want to do, what YOU want to spend time on, and how YOU want to live YOUR life.

Janelle: Taking the time to remember and that remembering takes time.

Jessica: Choosing the group that you’re being generative with.

Christina: UX is everything and everywhere.

Join Our Slack Channel!
Support us via Patreon!

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

REIN: Welcome to Episode 57 of Greater Than Code. I’m your co-panelist, Rein Henrichs and I am happy to introduce Janelle Klein.

JANELLE: Hi and I’d like to introduce Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Good morning and I’m really excited to introduce our guest today. She is Christina Morillo. Christina is an information security and tech nerd with a background in enterprise identity and access management, network administration and information security. By day, she works as a senior program manager at the Azure Information Protection Cloud & Engineering Team at Microsoft. You might know her as the co-founder of a community for women of color in tech, which produced some wonderful stock photos of women of color on computers, which was remarkably lacking in the world and it’s a great resource. Thank you for that, Christina.

CHRISTINA: You’re welcome.

JESSICA: But today, we’re here to talk about many things, starting with what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

CHRISTINA: My superpower is multitasking.

JESSICA: Really?

CHRISTINA: Yeah and how did I require it? Just being in the struggle, not by choice.

JESSICA: You are a mother.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, among many other things. It came about before I was a mother. Back in my college days, I was actually working on two degrees simultaneously while I work in the full time. That’s where my ability to multitask came about.

JESSICA: How do you define multitasking?

CHRISTINA: I think for me, it’s the ability to shift your focus or slice up your focus and priorities into different chunks like a pizza. You have a full pie of things to do and being able to accomplish pretty much all of those things. A real world example would be like working full time, studying for professional development, so to speak, having more than one child, a husband, a household and having to do everything in between that comes along with that and only having one you. Unfortunately, I don’t have a [inaudible] yet to help me out so I just have to figure that out on my own.

JESSICA: You are into automation, though.

CHRISTINA: Yeah. I love to automate things or processes that don’t need to be manual. For example, if I can automate emails or even use Alexa to remind me of things. I love those things just because there’s so much to do. One of my positions, my job was to deploy an identity and access management application globally across an enterprise. Part of that was automating their on-boarding, off-boarding and access request processes like taking them from phonecall to helpdesk, helpdesk to data entry, taking that from that to click, approve, done, which saves time, more productive and saves money in the end.

JESSICA: Yeah, totally. I like it at enterprise scale when a task is repeated so many times that obviously should automate it. But I also like your examples of things that only you do and yet, automating helps you be able to do more things.

CHRISTINA: Exactly. I think it’s important when you think about establishing a new process or revising a process to start from the beginning of your thought process and think, “Can this become a repeatable a process?” or, “Is this a repeatable process?” and that’s how you know you can automate it or not. It doesn’t apply everywhere and to all the things but where it applies, I think it’s extremely helpful.

JESSICA: That ties in to the last show. Kronda is talking about making systems for herself and the first step is writing down what she does and making it repeatable, even if she’s the one who’s repeating it and then she can ask someone else to repeat it for her.

CHRISTINA: Right and I would say that’s a form of automation. I think we like to tie these words to systematic processes or applications but that’s a form of automation. As long as I am not doing it and someone else is doing it for me, I’m automating my processes.

REIN: Delegation is a form of automation. That’s interesting.

CHRISTINA: Exactly. Why not?

REIN: In my mind, when it comes automation, I’m curious of what are your processes. In my mind, you start it with writing a script for a human to do and then the human does the things in the script and then you make a computer do some of those things and the human now tells a computer to do the things and then eventually, the computer does all of the things and then you can just have a computer do the thing automatically somehow. What process do you go through, from start to finish when you have some manual task that no one really knows how to do and when you want to turn it into a thing that a computer does for you?

CHRISTINA: From experience at that company where I had to automate the processes, I first try to understand what the process is today, like what is the current state? How do you do this today, whoever the human is that’s actually doing it? I look at all the stops. Step 1, the stops. Step 2, the stops, then three, the stops and what is required from a manual perspective. I try to understand what systems we have in place today that can help me clean this manual process up.

It’s pretty much like doing discovery. I learned this new word last week — reconnaissance — so I’m going to start using that in my vocabulary because I think it’s awesome. In doing that, you have to do that recon. You have to first understand how is this thing done to then, being able to give the computer instructions. I always like to say, “You don’t understand what you’re doing.” The tech is not going to help you. It’s pretty much the people that like to throw a technical solution on top of a broken process. To try to fix something, you just end up getting garbage-in/garbage-out. The tech doesn’t fix it. I think it’s a combination of both. That’s actually is my process. I do a lot of the discovery first to understand the problem, understand how I can fix the problem. First, manually and then, how I can fix it via automating.

REIN: It’s interesting that you were talking about if you don’t know what the process is and try to tell a computer to do it, the computer will just do the wrong thing. The greatest blessing and curse of computers is they do exactly what you tell them to do.

CHRISTINA: Exactly.

JESSICA: Yeah and the hard part of programming is figuring out what you want the computer to do. Telling it is easy after that, possibly.

CHRISTINA: Exactly. I think that’s the hardest part — understanding and then translating that. Not to say that coding it is not difficult because it can be in certain situations but depending on how intense a solution is, it shouldn’t be but it can be. But I feel like using our human brain to think these things out or through, that’s hard.

JANELLE: I think that’s beautiful. Just me talking about the first step is to understand the problem, figure out what problem are you trying to solve and then come up with a way to first solve it manually and then automate it. If you jump too fast in implementing the solution, it’s really easy to miss the problem altogether.

CHRISTINA: Yep and we see this often, even today.

JESSICA: Yeah and if nothing else, if you threaten down the repeatable process, even if you still do it, every one of those things you wrote down as a decision, you don’t have to make again.

CHRISTINA: Exactly.

REIN: Yeah. It’s also interesting to me how valuable human judgment still is despite computers being able to do things a million times faster than us.

JESSICA: They can do the wrong thing over and over and over.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, exactly. I think we’re not there yet with artificial intelligence, where computers can make some judgment. I think we will be and I know they’re working on this but we’re just not there yet.

REIN: One of the hardest things for me is trying to automate processes that require human judgment. Usually, when that’s the case it’s because there is something that you can’t tell a computer to do, which there’s a lot of factors that go into making that judgment. It might be hard to just say, “Here’s a checkpoint. Talk to a human.”

JESSICA: Yeah but one thing that we forget sometimes about automation is it is totally fine to use humans to do what they’re good at like, “I’m ready to do this deployment. Somebody watch these graphs for me,” and let the human make the decision that people need to.

REIN: Yeah.

CHRISTINA: It’s not to say that you may not automate an entire lifecycle. It could be that there may need to be human input at some point or maybe like first stop human, then Steps 2 to 10, computer and then Step 11 maybe, output human like go pick up that paper at the printer. I don’t know. Just an example.

JESSICA: Yeah and then the automation becomes about supplying the human with the reminder like Alexa will do. Also, if it’s a decision that we need to make all these supporting information.

CHRISTINA: Exactly. Sometimes, that’s what it takes. You can take that type of shape where it’s like half-human, half-machine, like in stages. Stage 1, it can be human and machine and then Stage 2, maybe all machine, no human. It can take different shapes, I guess.

JESSICA: Yeah because we can work best when we do it together. I want to get back to the multitasking as humans thing. I had a question, when you talk about multitasking, you’re talking about doing a lot of different things in a one life. What time scale are you multitasking in? Are you doing a lot of things in a week? In a day? In a minute?

CHRISTINA: I would say, all of the above. If we’re going to break it down granularly, it’s in a day and by hour. I rely heavily on my calendars. I try to merge, instead of keeping a personal and a business. A lot of people like to separate it but I like to see my full day at a glance so what I do is I just input both of my personal to-dos tasks and reminders in my work calendar so that I can see my entire day and plan it out by hours.

I’m not extremely like one of these people that has planned every second of their day but I try to do it in half-hour to 60 minutes slots so I know that I have allotted two hours for, let say this conversation to me. But I know that at three, I have a meeting and I know that at 3:30, I have to pay a bill. Then I know that at five, I have to remember to book that appointment. That’s my process and flow and that’s what allows me to multitask so I can do a little bit of personal and some business throughout the day so that I can focus and be productive and then sprinkle some more personal around my afternoon, evening and stuff like that.

REIN: Do you have any suggestions for becoming better at context switching?

JANELLE: I was going to ask that same thing. Essentially, I was just sitting here listening to this thinking, “Wow, this is a major superpower,” because I imagine if I try to apply what you just described to my life, I would explode because I’m so not used to operating that way with larger task that require a lot more focus. I’m just curious what type of impacts you’ve seen from shifting focus specifically on restarting a task and refreshing your brain with that context? Are there things that you do to make that brain-refresh easier?

CHRISTINA: I wouldn’t say that it’s all easy. I think it is difficult. I had grown used to it. I think at times, I make sure that I do take a break. I think that’s super important to me. I actually taking my time for lunch because what I notice is that when I try to multitask too much and let’s say I’m eating while I’m working, I just get burned out. My goal every day is to try to avoid getting burned out because I feel it. It really takes a toll. I try to take a break. I work at my own pace.

I think it’s important to understand that you have this schedule but you may not accomplish everything that you plan today and that’s okay, unless you have a deadline, where you may have to pay your credit card bill today because they’re going to charge you with late fee, then get that them today. But if it’s something that can wait until Friday or maybe you’re free to do it on Sunday because you have more time on Sunday, then be flexible. I just think it’s important to be flexible and not be so hard on yourself. That’s what works for me. It doesn’t make me feel like a failure if I can’t accomplish everything on my to-do.

A friend of mine is actually doing it and she went analog. She’s doing it on notebook and she carves out her day in squares, like by priority level. That’s a lot for me. I’m not there yet. She’s very, very strict and disciplined. I just try to play it by ear and see how am I flow with the day, so to speak by just keeping my top priority items, top of mind.

REIN: It’s interesting for me because when I was younger, I used to think that making a reminder for myself was a sign of weakness like my brain should just remember all the things at all times. As I’ve grown older, I realize that I need that help. I need the assistance to be able to keep everything all the plates spinning at the same time. I’ve been in a situation where I’ve come from a meeting directly into another meeting and I’m the one owning the agenda for the meeting but I don’t remember what the meeting supposed to be about because I didn’t take good notes or there wasn’t a clear agenda set and I just floundered for the first five minutes and it was a really bad meeting.

CHRISTINA: Yeah. That’s difficult. First of all, I never try to put back to back meetings. Sometimes it happens but what I do try is I try to take, even if it’s just bullet points. I tend to overprepare. I’m a little bit typing when it comes to stuff like that. I don’t like to get caught. I try to prepare as best as I can. For some reason, I don’t like to wing it. Do you know what I mean? I like a little bit more structure. I can wing it but it just takes too much energy so I like to be a little bit more set up but I totally understand what you’re saying. It’s difficult, especially when it’s a meeting that this could have been accomplished in four bullet points.

REIN: One tip that I’ve learned is always try to keep a five-minute buffer in between meetings so when meetings end at 55 till and not on the hour.

CHRISTINA: Exactly. I agree. I’ll be [inaudible] to 10 minutes. I try at least 30 minutes but I need to do decompress a little bit more.

REIN: Whenever there’s a meeting that really runs on and I show up a minute late, I’m just completely frazzled so I’m learning that I just have to not do that.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, that’s a good point.

JESSICA: Sometime you have to pee.

CHRISTINA: There you go. You know, if I’m feeling like that, I actually walk out and excuse myself from meeting, go to the restroom and pee, wash my hands, stand there and then just to decompressed and then go back.

JESSICA: Totally. I do that.

REIN: One thing I have learned that may be helpful to other people and if you’re in that situation, where you forgot what you’re doing and you’re trying to pick up the pieces. Stop and take the time to actually remember and don’t just try to muddle through it. It will only end up worse.

JESSICA: Oh, yeah. It’s like in public speaking. It’s fine to pause and be silent for a little while. It’s much better than saying, “Umm,” or using filler words. Somebody told me once.

REIN: — Where I come in a minute later because I just got out of a meeting and it was late and everyone was stressed out. I just have to say, “Look, I need to take three minutes to review my notes and then we can get started,” and apologize but if I don’t do that, if I just said, “Try to build the bridge as I’m crossing the river,” that kind of thing is a disaster.

CHRISTINA: Yep, I agree. That’s a good point.

REIN: One thing that I was thinking about is a lot of the times when we are building out automation systems, we think of ourselves as the part of the system that’s in control and what I’m sort of realizing with those systems where the computer does a bunch of things and then it needs a human to help, like a human has to go look at this dashboard or a human needs to make a decision. It’s better to think of it as the automation system is the thing in command and the human is just a decision point because then, I think for a variety of reasons, it helps prevent the human from having to feel like they have to own the entire process and lets the person just take an action and then go back to their day.

CHRISTINA: Exactly. A perfect example of that is in identity access management, it encompasses like when you start a new job and you have to get your log-in and your email set up and all of that stuff, it’s that process. Back in the day, people would have like a helpdesk or system administrator to manually set up your credentials and maybe get a ticket from the helpdesk ticketing system and then close it and get an email approve and all that stuff.

When I say automated on-boarding, it’s leveraging systems API and when I enter these details and I click this submit, what’s going to happen is that the service economy system will automatically go to the system to create the credential using the information that it has and then it’s going to pass an email or a notification to the approver listed based on some tables and complexity and say, “Jane Smith, is it okay for Bob to have access?” and Jane does says, “Sure.” She just clicks on a button that says, “Yes,” or, “No,” and that either let the workflow continue or stops the workflow in its track. Jane doesn’t really have to type anything in. There’s a stopping point where her interaction is necessary. The process is still automated but still with human interaction.

REIN: This is really cool because I think it ties in a little bit to multitasking context switching and how do you present the context you need to make a decision or to switch on to a new task as efficiently as possible.

CHRISTINA: Yeah and I think that one of the techniques that I use is asking in the form of a question. If I say, what do I need Jane Smith to do? What is her involvement? “Jane, I need you to approve this person having access to this resource.”

REIN: We’re literally talking about user experiences on here. We’re talking about, “What does Jane need as a user to do Jane’s job? What should their experience be of doing this in performing this task?”

CHRISTINA: Exactly. I never knew that it was that. See, that’s [inaudible]. That’s in my bio and now I just —

REIN: This falls into my, ‘everything is UI philosophy,’ so I’m happy about that.

CHRISTINA: [inaudible].

JANELLE: I’ve been thinking about this like a chain of decision making functions. For each decision I need to make, I’ve got inputs for that decision and I may need to do some tasks in order to create these inputs that go into that decision I have to make. When I decide something, then I end up with these outputs and I need to make sense of those outputs. I think of this workflow of decision making functions and you’re basically designing this workflow system based on breaking down all these human component parts and stuff. It’s just a brilliant insight. I’m really loving this.

CHRISTINA: Right. It can get complicate quickly or it can look super simple. Let’s say you ordered a pair of sneakers at Nike.com, I’m sure thought that’s easy for them. It look so easy for us, the process is super simple: you pick your size, you add to cart, you check out, input your credit card or your PayPal or whatever and then your order is done. Voila. It’s magic. But imagine the processes that are happening in the background that we never see, where the warehouse gets notification or whatever it takes away from the inventory. It’s just amazing. It’s so fascinating.

JESSICA: Have you ever bought customs sneakers from Nike.com? They are so awesome. I kind of pair it with stars on one side and stripes on the inside. It’s a really impressive UI.

CHRISTINA: No, I haven’t but I think I’m going to have to. I actually ordered a custom sneakers for my husband and he really like them.

REIN: Talking about quality workflows and decision points and all of that, reminds me a lot of state machines and one thing that I’ve noticed is that whenever you’re building out a workflow like this, where there are decision points and you have to choose a path. Then based on where you are, choose another path and things like that. Often, we just do it in an implicit way, where we don’t model the state machine. We just think about the decisions we have to make in detail. One of the things that I found extremely helpful is to just draw out a flowchart, draw out a state machine, look at it, share that, make sure everyone agrees that this is indeed the process we’re modeling and the mental model we want to have of it.

CHRISTINA: I like that. I love flowcharts by the way, especially when you’re building these processes. I love the flowcharts. I feel like I’m a visual person so I like to see, so that I can better understand how things flow from top to bottom or end to end. I think that’s a really brilliant recommendation.

REIN: And you can make this really useful. We have an on-boarding process for a new customer and for that, the flowchart has points where we color it based on like, “This is a thing a customer needs to do so it’s blue. This is a thing engineering needs to do so it’s green.”

CHRISTINA: Yes.

JESSICA: Then there’s this implicit arrow from every shape in that flowchart that says, “In case of failure, contact the human.”

REIN: Yes.

CHRISTINA: I need to take a flowcharting class.

REIN: It’s so interesting to me one of the overall topics so far has been, “How can we present information so that humans can gain context well?” The color coding there just means that you can look at the flowchart and see more in five seconds than you could have otherwise.

JESSICA: I have a question about your experience. One thing you mentioned that’s something that helps you with your multitasking of doing too many things is letting yourself not accomplish everything that you hope to that day. Specifically you said, not feel you’re a bad person for that. What was your phrase?

CHRISTINA: Yes and [inaudible] that you’re a failure.

JESSICA: Yeah.

CHRISTINA: I think we’re extremely hard on ourselves. I know I am personally and I feel like I’m supposed to be doing a lot without taking into consideration the things that happen that are out of my control like one of my children are sick or something or whatever, like the monkey wrench days. Then I feel that I catch myself or I found myself feeling such a failure like, “Oh, my God. I didn’t do everything that’s on my own list,” and I’m just like I have more work to do.

I’ve been really intentional about giving myself that break or that flexibility to say like, “Listen, I didn’t do it today. It’s fine. I didn’t die. The world didn’t end. I could get it done tomorrow. Let it go,” and it worked. It’s actually working because I’m giving myself that room to maybe say, “You know what? I am not going to do A, B and C because I need to focus on this task at work,” or I want to get ahead of my schedule or ahead with this work or this project that I have. I’m going to focus on it for two days and pick other things up in three days and that’s okay.

JESSICA: That’s another thing so you’re deliberately choosing things not to do.

CHRISTINA: Yes, I have. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine and I, we started women of color in tech chat. We started it as a Twitter chat. We initially did it because we felt that we didn’t see representation in tech. We didn’t see this visual representation of people that who look like us. We’re both from New York City. Our family were for both first generation. Our families are from Dominican Republic and we’re both educated and we both have careers in technology.

We started on this journey and out of that came the idea for the woman of color in tech stock photoshoot project and all of that. With that, that took a life of its own. We started getting calls from journalist and to appear in newspapers and magazines and all that other stuff. At that point, I felt like, “Oh, I needed to do this.” I needed to jump into the game full force and attend as many events as possible and say yes to as many panels as possible and do all the interviews and response at every email. What happened was at the time, my job sucked so I got burned out. Extremely burned out and I just cannot function, like I was done.

Last year was a really difficult year for me. At the beginning of the year, not really a New Year’s resolution but I said, “Okay, Christina. This year, you’re going to get a new job and you need to focus on you.” You need to shift your mindset from the ‘say yes’ mindset to when you say no, you’re actually saying yes to yourself because I thought a lot of guilt. I felt like I needed to help people and mentor people that reached out to me for mentorship, like that was my duty. I started to say no. I got the job — my current company — and I said I really need to focus. I really need to get this. It’s a great opportunity. It’s my dream job. My dream come true and it just worked out. It’s a remote position. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s everything I wanted so don’t mess it up.

I just had to say no and I didn’t want my fate to be full with external things and it’s worked out great. I’ve been able to focus on my job, focus on my family and that’s it. I just said, “This year is about you,” and also, considering all the things that are happening outside like our current political climate, the world is falling apart, I don’t want to add that heavy burden but it’s been great so far. It’s working and I think it’s super important. I know everyone is like say yes to opportunity but I’m like, “No, not if it’s going to cost me my sanity and my peace of mind.” I rather be the snail — slow and steady.

REIN: Man, there are so many good things in there.

JESSICA: Yeah. It sounds like you had a time when the thing to do is default to yes and let more things into your world and then you reach the time when the thing to do is start saying no so that you could grow the things that were already in your world and most important.

CHRISTINA: And most important. Right, exactly and just inching back slowly, like being very… I want to use the word strategic but I feel like that world sound a little bit cold —

JESSICA: But it did and somebody tweeted the other day that, “I’ll know that that’s your strategy when you tell me what you are not doing.”

CHRISTINA: You know, I think it’s really easy to get caught up, especially you’re on social media and you’re in tech and everything and you think so many people are doing so much and you feel like you have to be part of this community and all that. It’s really easy to get caught up into that whirlwind of stuff. It’s easy to forget what it is that you really want to do? What is it that you love doing? What do you feel like doing? Do you feel like working on a side project? Do you feel like contributing to open source? It’s okay to say no. It’s fine.

But if you’re on social media and you’re part of the tech ecosystem, it’s not fine. It’s just like society pushes you towards like this is what you need to do, to build your skills sets. This is what you need to do. Guess what? I don’t feel like it. I actually view that attitude, being from New York City, we don’t like to be pushed around or bossed around so we kind of push back a little bit. I think it’s serving me greatly right now because I needed that.

JANELLE: I feel like there are so many people that need that. I’m sitting here thinking of how many times the story has probably echoed through time of getting to the point where you’re just completely overwhelmed and completely breaking and then you see somebody that needs your help and you’re like, “I have to help them. I have to get involved. I have to contribute my opinion. I’m needed in so many ways and if I go away, then I’ll feel bad. If I say no, I feel bad,” so you push yourself all the way to the breaking point and then it’s like, “All right. I have to hit the reset button here,” and that it’s actually the [inaudible] thing to do to say no and getting to the point of pushing back and saying no. Anyway, I’m sitting here glowing as I’m listening to you, things you’re saying that just makes me so happy to hear.

CHRISTINA: I was listening to this audiobook, not tech-related. It’s from an actress. Her name is Gabrielle Union. Sometimes, I listen and do other things like take Japanese lessons and do other things to take me out of the box, to free my mind. Listening to her audiobook, she said something that really resonated and she said, “People don’t know what to do with you if you are not trying to assimilate.” I thought that was such a great quote because I have find myself this year, having the year pushing back and saying, I’m not going to somebody. I’m not going to do what people expect. I’m not going to be that hacker with a black hoodie just because you think that’s what a hacker with the black hoodie looks like. It’s okay if I get that pushed back. It’s okay if nobody wants to be my friend. It’s okay if I’m out here in the world because I feel like it’s so much about quality over quantity.

If I have this one friend that appreciates who I am and what I bring to the table, I’m good. That’s all I need. I’m okay. If I have none or if Twitter doesn’t love me or if I don’t have followers, I don’t care about that. That’s not important to me but the five followers that engage with me are super important to me. It’s kind of like in that context.

REIN: This is a journey that I’ve definitely been on as well and there’s so much of what you’re talking about resonates with me but there are a couple of things that I have found to be really helpful. One of them is making sure that all the work you do is visible, especially to yourself because you may not always get all the stuff done that you want to but you should be able to look back and see what you did accomplish and not have it hidden. That’s why on our teams, we have a rule that if you’re working on something, there has to be a story for it because we want to make sure that all of the work that people are doing is acknowledged.

CHRISTINA: You know, that’s an interesting point and it’s great that you brought that up because I find that for some of us, it’s really difficult to pat ourselves on the back. I know that is something that I struggle with. I think there’s a thin line between the patting yourself on the back and boasting and it’s really, really hard for me to acknowledge out loud what I’ve done or what I’ve contribute or how far I’ve come. Then there are moments where I remember like just something that jumps in my head that I thought and I’m like, “Wow, I’ve really done a lot. I should be proud of myself. I’m the woman, you know?” I think I should do that more often. I guess, how do you pat yourself on the back without feeling like you’re not humble. I don’t know if that makes sense but —

REIN: It does and that brings me to my next point, which is get someone else to do it for you. We try really, really hard to have a culture of acknowledgment, where we don’t just say, “You did a thing. Thank you.” We try to say, “You did the thing and it helped me.” For instance, I had too much work on my plate last week and I was able to delegate some of it to someone else on my team and they did it better than I would have in the first place and I think that when I said specifically, “You know, I want to thank you because you really made my week better and I was able to focus on other things that I had to do and I don’t think I would have been able to do it without you.” Intentionally, trying to create a culture where you would thank people for the work they do, eventually comes back to you, is what I —

CHRISTINA: I agree and I find it easier to acknowledge and thank other people. I definitely agree with that. I like that reminder.

JANELLE: It’s like the gratitude culture, basically.

REIN: Yeah.

JESSICA: And I love that, Rein because it explicitly acknowledges the generativity in what the other person did.

CHRISTINA: Right and you’re kind of [inaudible] both of your cups, right?

JESSICA: Yeah, it raises that level of output of the whole team. It’s not just about what you did. It’s about how what you did helped everybody else do stuff too.

REIN: Yeah and that’s why I try not to just say thank you. I try to be specific about what it meant to be.

CHRISTINA: Yeah. On the flipside, working as part of a team that I always try to think not what would help me out but what would help the team. Not like, “Oh, I need to do this because this will going to help me get promoted.” No. Put the team first like what would make our lives easier? What are the low-hanging fruits or what is our biggest pain point? It could be creating a document or maybe automating something or creating a landing page for us to whatever, creating a new SharePoint site. It’s something that would make our lives collectively easier. I try to think from that perspective mostly. I think we tend to do that. Especially women, I mean men too, but I feel like women always put others before us. That can be good and bad but I try to take the good from there.

JESSICA: Yeah, we have words for that. It’s congressive and ingressive. Ingressive as advancing yourself and congressive as doing things together to advance in the group.

CHRISTINA: I love that.

JANELLE: I’ve just been listening to this and so much beautiful stuff has come out of this conversation. One thing that you said that really struck me of just a story of my life is that people don’t know what to do with you if you’re not trying to assimilate. I don’t never fit in. My whole life, I’m struggled with loneliness and trying to do things for people so that they would like me, so they would love me and give me that feedback, give me that gratitude. I was trying to earn their affection so that I could be seen.

I feel like that’s where a lot of that pull comes from of not wanting to say no because we need that love, we need to be seen, we need to feel like we matter and being invisible, this stuff is hard. But at the same time, eventually I got to the point of just having this rebellious energy of, “I don’t care anymore. I’m going to say no. I’m going to do what I want. I’m going to be who I want to be and screw you all!”

There’s a balance between things because I basically shifted to that mode 15 years ago and I recently got to the point in that kind of mode where I ran all the way off the cliff with essentially being kind of an antibody respond to most of my former self because I turned into this table flipper, rebellious energy, ‘I’m going to go do things my own way.’ There’s a balance in that though and I feel like if you can create this gratitude culture as a precedent of filling the love tanks of the people, it takes love energy to do our jobs. Even though it’s not something that’s necessarily easy to measure or to put metrics around, how does it ever matter?

CHRISTINA: Yeah, it absolutely does and I think that that’s just a part of being human. I think we all crave, even if we say we don’t crave attention and validation and like you mentioned, feeling like we do matter but I think it’s important to understand that when you’re feeling that you don’t matter and you’re feeling a little bit sad about that, it’s important to catch yourself and feeling this way and acknowledging and saying, “Yes, I feel this way,” but then countering it and saying like, “You know, I do matter. I am important and my voice does matter.”

That’s what I noticed and I noticed that similar to you, I also catch myself like, “Why do I care if that person doesn’t see me.” I try to drill down like, “Why is this important to me? Why isn’t what I feel from myself enough? Why do I need external validation? How does that change who I am?” I started to ask myself these questions because all my youth, I was driven by the same thing. It was important to me. What other people saw in me was important and I think with age, as I got older, I started to say, “I don’t have time for this.”

When I started to value the relationships that I do have with people and know that, “These people love me. I have only two people love me? My husband and my kids?” I’m fine with that. But I think it starts with a lot of introspection and feeling you have to feel that. You know what? My voice does matter. I don’t care what you say. I matter. I’m important to myself and that’s really all there is to it. I think even though with social media and the internet, it now really exploits our psychological weaknesses and they knew that when they did it — all the validation that is part of just social media in general: likes, loves, favorites, retweets.

REIN: Yeah. They’re a giant awful Skinner box.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, exactly.

JESSICA: What? Wait, they’re what?

REIN: Skinner boxes. You teach a monkey to press a button and get food, that kind of thing.

JESSICA: I know you are going to bring psychology into this somewhere.

CHRISTINA: Oops.

JESSICA: That’s a Rein theme. An important one. I called these as puffs. They were like little puffs that push you up just a tiny bit but they come from strangers so they’re not really that deep but you can get dependent on them.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, it’s an addiction. You become addicted. Even though like swipe down to refresh or pull down to refresh. There was a really good Wired article that I read a couple weeks ago about the engineers who actually create all of these features wanting no parts of any of it. Pretty much going off the grid, hacking their phones so that they couldn’t download any social media application onto their phones, just like crazy stuff and these are the engineers that created these features. Again, these are the engineers that created these features and they see the damaging effects.

REIN: There’s one study about endorphin levels while people tweets are being liked.

CHRISTINA: You know, they should. That’s a good point. I’m sure they probably won’t talk about it and if there isn’t, there should be. It’s addictive. It’s like an addiction.

JESSICA: Hold on. I’m Googling that.

CHRISTINA: It’s actually pretty fascinating, though. What did you call it, the web box?

REIN: Skinner box.

CHRISTINA: It’s actually pretty fascinating, I guess from a psychological perspective. I don’t know anything about psychology. I would be interested in reading more about the techniques they use to convince us to do these stuff or convince us to stay on our phones for two hours straight just refreshing.

REIN: The technical term is operant conditioning chamber.

JESSICA: I learned that word the other day — operant conditioning. It’s when you get trained that you do one thing and another thing follows.

REIN: Yeah, it’s basically training or learning through word and punishment.

JESSICA: That’s very boring compared to learning through creativity.

REIN: Skinner is operant, push a button and get food. Classical is like the Pavlovian response, where you learn to associate the ringing of a bell with food, even though you’re not being rewarded for ringing a bell.

JESSICA: Oh, it’s just like correlation — this happens then this happens?

REIN: Yeah, so basically the bell is a neutral stimulus that is been associated with something positive through correlation.

JESSICA: That would be like, “Whoop!” Notification sounds?

REIN: Yes.

JESSICA: And then you start to consolidate because it is going to be so tasty?

REIN: Yeah, for sure.

JESSICA: Or wake up, I hear, “Twoot! Twoot!” in the middle of the night at 3 AM and I go, “A message is going to be great. No Jess, go back to sleep.”

CHRISTINA: That’s why you need to turn all of notification off all the time.

JESSICA: Yeah, I totally do. I just forgot last night but I succeeded that I did not look at it and it was a good thing because in the morning, when I did look at it, it said, “Oh, sorry. That wasn’t for you.”

REIN: It was dopamine. I was almost right.

CHRISTINA: Yes.

JESSICA: This might be a good segue to tell you that this episode is brought to you by Upside. One of DCs fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers who want to disrupt the norm and they’re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team to learn more.

REIN: That was amazing.

CHRISTINA: What was?

JESSICA: I love doing commercials.

REIN: This brings us to reflections, the part of the show where we reflect on things, which is why it’s called reflections. See? I think mine is really everything you’re saying about being self-aware of how much is on your plate, how you’re feeling about it and then being able to say no and how that’s really saying yes to what you want to do and what you want to spend time on and how you want to live your life. That’s huge and that’s something that I really need to spend more time working on my own life.

JANELLE: So many amazing, beautiful things in the show. I’ve just been sitting here blown away. I know I keep saying that but so many insights and things that just resonate with a lot of the struggles in my life and I’m really excited to share this with everyone because I’m just sitting here and going, “Man, everybody needs to hear this.” That’s pretty amazing.

One of the things that struck me that I haven’t gone and got all excited about already, was your comment about taking the time to remember and that remembering takes time. We talked about setting up buffers between meetings and how long of a buffer do I actually need. If I’ve got inputs that I may be prepared for, how long does it take me to prep those inputs and if I need to spend time thinking about that, don’t just rush ahead and start doing it, even if you’re running behind.

Take the time to stop and think because it’s only going to get worse and remembering that thinking takes time and the way that you manage your workflow with these human processes, it’s like there’s this implicit undercurrent realization of thought-work itself. What is the thinking that needs to happen in order to get through this process? Then once you have your process flow down your workflow of your thought-work, then you can figure out how to automate various pieces of it but first just see it. First, just understand the problem you’re trying to solve. That was just beautiful.

JESSICA: I love how this episode started talking about multitasking and Christina described how she’s good at doing a lot of things, then it got to talking about how she’s good at doing fewer things. There’s a time for inviting everything in and there’s a time for when you choose the group that you’re going to focus on. It feels selfish to say no but really, Christina isn’t saying, “I’m not going to help anyone. This is about me.” She’s saying, “I am going to help my group at work and my family and a few other specific people who are actually meaningful to me, instead of trying to help everybody a little bit in the way that they think I’m good for.” It’s about choosing the group that you’re being generative with.

JANELLE: And taking responsibility for your life and how you want to run it.

JESSICA: Yeah and it’s still congressive. It’s not about advancing her. It’s about advancing people but we can more effectively advance people when we’re not trying to advance everybody in the world who asks for mentorship or anything else.

CHRISTINA: Just a reminder that you can’t pour from an empty cup.

JESSICA: Yeah, so you matter. As a mother, that’s totally part of my philosophy of I have to be happy in order to keep you happy so yes, I’m going to travel one week a month. I know it’s not your preference but trust me, all of our worlds are better this way.

CHRISTINA: Exactly. One thing that stood out was that Rein mentioned UX and I feel that I often forget that UX is everything and everywhere. It becomes transparent to those of us that are not looking but when you really think about it, the user experience is everything, no matter what you have or no matter what fancy tech is working behind the scenes. If the user experience isn’t there, nothing is going to work pretty much. That was a good reminder to keep that top of mind all the time.

REIN: There’s a quote that I like to drop every time this comes up and I wish I could remember who it’s by but the quote is that a computer, to the people using it is not the hard drive or power system or anything like that. It’s the monitor and the keyboard and the mouse. That’s what it means to use a computer.

JESSICA: Those are representation that we interact with.

REIN: All that other stuff is not the interface. The interface, what it means to be a computer in terms of how you interact with one is it has a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse. Everything else is just an implementation detail.

JESSICA: Yep.

JANELLE: This was so much fun. Christina you are a beautiful human. I rather [inaudible]. It brought me so much happiness being you talk about these core of things that matter about life and love and taking responsibility for being a happy whole human. It’s what I get out of the show.

CHRISTINA: Thanks. I feel that I’m working progress. I’m not all energy-producing every day but again, that’s okay. It’s part of growing and learning, I guess, just kind of discovering. I think it’s important to stay open at all times. From a mental perspective, stay open to different ideas on what makes you happy, basically or what makes you feel good because sometimes you have to do things that don’t necessarily make you happy, like wake up very early in the morning. Just follow what makes you feel good and if something doesn’t make you feel good, then you have to remove it from the equation.

REIN: I want to do another reflection just so I can name drop Chomsky and make Jessica happy.

JESSICA: Yay! Philosophers. I totally make fun of you but I actually really like that you bring philosophy and all these non-tech references into the discussion.

REIN: We were talking about Skinner. Skinner’s idea on human agency was that much more is determined by the environment, than by human agency. In terms of our ability to create the environment around us. Skinner thought that was mostly just the environment acting on us, rather than the other way around. Noam Chomsky, who I may have mentioned a couple times, reviewed Skinner’s book about verbal behavior. His argument was that if you look at how children learn language, the pace at which children learn language far outstrips their actual experience of language. He called it the lexical explosion. I think that this is a phenomena that doesn’t happen just in language acquisition. If you look at human capacity, I think in general, it far outstrips the mere behavioral concerns of what in the environment has impinge on us and we as humans, our capacity far outstrips our learning histories and that’s really interesting to me.

JESSICA: Lexical explosion.

REIN: That’s [inaudible] for the podcast. I’m now realizing.

JESSICA: Can we use that as our fake name next episode?

REIN: Yes.

JESSICA: Yes. “Welcome to lexical explosion.” That’s going to be great. Christina, thank you so much for being our guest today.

CHRISTINA: Thank you. Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun.

JESSICA: If you just can’t get enough of Greater Than Code, then donate any amount to our Patreon because we’re mostly listeners-supported and then you can join us on Slack. It’s my favorite Slack. It’s the only one besides my work Slack that I totally check all day long because people there are so nice and the discussions are really great. It’s a wonderful place to ask hard questions that you’re not sure where to ask.”

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.

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056: Systematize Your Hustle with Kronda Adair

Mandy Moore — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 05:00:18 +0000

Panelists:

Jessica Kerr | Sam Livingston-Gray

Guest Starring:

Kronda Adair: @kronda | kronda.com | Karvel Digital

Show Notes:

01:26 – SYSTEMS! Implementing Repeatable Processes Via Automation

Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less by Sam Carpenter

09:28 – Strategies for Implementation

12:18 – Reclaiming Your Time and Cheap is Always Expensive

Work the System (Online)

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)

Solopreneurship: “It’s never just you. There’s present-you and future-you” @kronda on @greaterthancode

— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 8, 2017

23:20 – Choosing Successful Customers and Avoiding Perfection Paralysis

If you don’t have a system, your system is, think really hard about it every time.@geeksam on @greaterthancode with @kronda
me: or worse, don’t

— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 8, 2017

28:44 – Successful Use Cases

Active Campaign

systemHUB

Join Our Slack Channel!
Support us via Patreon!

35:33 – Iterating and Changing Processes

42:31 – Kronda’s Superpowers

Reflections:

Jessica: As developers, and as we’re writing automation for other people, we can also think at a meta level, and automate the parts of our jobs so then we can spend more thinking time thinking about the interesting part of code, like how to achieve the results that we want.

Kronda: Things that are easy vs things that are effective.

Sam: Executive Dysfunction and the idea of making decision rules.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

SAM: Hello and welcome to Episode 56 of Greater Than Code. I’m Sam Livingston-Gray. I’m pleased as Punch to welcome my friend and co-panelist, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Good morning. I am thrilled to be here today because our guest is Kronda Adair. Kronda is the CEO of Karvel Digital, a digital marketing agency that helps established businesses double their revenue in 12 months using online marketing. She loves empowering small business owners to not be intimidated by all this tech stuff and she’s often covered in cats. Kronda, how many cats?

KRONDA: Two. Not quite a cat pile but enough.

SAM: But they’re entitled enough so they can cover you, right?

KRONDA: Yeah, they can totally cover me. There’s a recent post of just shenanigans under a blanket happening while I’m trying to nap. It’s epic.

JESSICA: Cats make better blankets than pillows.

KRONDA: This is true. They get cranky when you try to lay on them. That’s the most enthusiastic introduction I’ve ever had. Thank you.

JESSICA: Oh, you’re welcome. I am really enthusiastic today because you said you want to talk about systems.

KRONDA: That’s pretty much all I want to talk about these days.

JESSICA: Sweet.

KRONDA: Why are you excited about systems? I’m always curious.

JESSICA: I could go on about this for a while but —

SAM: What do we mean by systems?

KRONDA: Good question. I recently read a book called Work the System by Sam Carpenter and he points out repeatedly that everything that ever happens on planet Earth is the result of a step-by-step process: one, two, three, four equals result. The whole premise of the book is that if you manage your systems so that you control the output, rather than fire-killing and dealing with the bad results of unmanaged systems, you will have a better business, a happier life, etcetera, etcetera.

JESSICA: That’s interesting because I think of systems quite the opposite as one, two, three, four of result. In my reading, the interesting bits about complex systems is that there is no clear causality in most cases. We only construct the causality retrospectively but there are many conditions that make it possible for something to happen and then one trigger, which is often small.

KRONDA: Wow, so this should be an interesting conversation.

SAM: All right, reconcile those in 30 seconds. Go!

JESSICA: Like your website went down because one database [inaudible] had a network partition but there were six other conditions that led that to cause your whole website to go down. In a lot of what we do in devops and in infrastructure these days is mitigate those possible failures and make the conditions not exist.

KRONDA: But the mitigation is the system management. If your website gets down and you say, “It went down because of this,” then you further say, “It went down because of this. How can we prevent that from happening again?” That part is system management, where you go back and say, “This partition went down so we need more redundancy,” or we need whatever it is to keep that from happening again. That’s system management and you can do it proactively but you’ll never going to get everything perfect. When there are either mistakes or accidents or whatever, those are gifts basically telling you, “Your system could be better,” and inviting you to go and fix it.

JESSICA: Yes, so it’s kind of one, two, three in parallel conditions and then four and then something happens.

KRONDA: Yeah, I don’t think we actually disagree.

JESSICA: Yes. It sounds like we don’t.

SAM: On the face of it, it seems like a lot of creative people wouldn’t object to that mechanistic sounding description of one, two, three, four because if I sit down to write a piece of code or I refactor somebody else’s bit of code, if I sit down and analyze it very deeply there are one or 17 steps in my head but they’re all the result of my own life experience that nobody else can duplicate. But it sounds like you’re talking about a little bit more repeatable process.

KRONDA: Well, yeah because the context of this book is business and I’m running a business. That’s the context in which I think about it. It works for pretty much every part of life but particularly in a business, especially a business that you want to grow beyond just being one person, if you don’t have repeatable processes and you start hiring people, then you can’t really be effective because they’re all just waiting on you to check their work or tell them what to do or etcetera, etcetera.

One way that I put this in place is I have been sending out a newsletter every Sunday and that means I think of the ideas, I write the newsletter, I spell-check the newsletter, I put it in an ActiveCampaign, I schedule and all the stuff. When I got a virtual assistant, I filmed myself doing all of the steps for spell-checking and putting into ActiveCampaign and scheduling and I sent that to the VA and I said, “Write a process for this based on this video.” Then I took what he wrote and said, “You left out this part,” and we worked on it until I felt like, “If you follow these steps, you’re going to get the same result every time, which is the newsletter that goes out at 6AM on Sunday.” Then my job became just write the newsletter and send it over and then he would schedule it and do all the other things, then I get that hour back every week.

SAM: Nice.

JESSICA: Like Mandy does for this podcast. We just show up and talk to people.

KRONDA: Exactly. They all seemed to have a pretty good system.

JESSICA: Mandy has a system. Yeah, it’s sweet.

KRONDA: I’m basically trying to do that for everything in my business, figuring out what are the things that happen over and over again and writing processes for them. This is the part of business that most people don’t want to do and find boring so they don’t do it so then they wonder why everything is chaos. It’s really interesting once your mindset changes to then, look at the world and look at how other people managed things and go, “Oh, yeah. That could be really a lot better and a lot less stressful,” if you would do these things but you won’t.

SAM: That sounds like just applying a developer mindset or a programmer mindset to business systems.

JESSICA: Yeah, exactly. That’s what we do when we code things, right?

SAM: Exactly.

JESSICA: That we have to set down all the steps in order and exactly what to do in each contingency. It’s automation.

KRONDA: Pretty much and people think that automation means that you can’t be creative but I don’t think that’s true either. I think once you understand what your role is and what the outcome is supposed to be and the steps to get there, then within that, you can be really creative.

SAM: Yeah, and especially, I was going to say that one of the steps in programming can be throw up your hands and wait for a human to solve it. That’s raising an exception, which you can totally do. If you can automate 90% or even 80% of the boring stuff, then that leaves you so much more time to deal with the special cases and the interesting parts.

KRONDA: Exactly. I’m basically trying to write myself into the position where my job with the company is mostly to work on strategy with clients and write content marketing. That’s what I would like to do all the time.

JESSICA: Yes, so you’re automating yourself but in the sense that you write a process for people, instead of the computer like we do.

KRONDA: Exactly. I’m programming people now.

SAM: That sounds messy.

KRONDA: Yeah, it’s super messy. Someone recently said to me about their mentor who doesn’t really code much anymore. He said, “Yeah, I’m programming grad student now.” For a long time, when I first started my business, I really didn’t have aspirations to hire people or grow or do any of that stuff. I was like, “People are messy and it’s hard and I’m just going to code my way until sunset,” and then I realized if I want to have a life, then I have to build something that runs without me and that means other people.

It’s hard finding people. I recently had to let go my first virtual assistant because there wasn’t enough attention to detail, like I was writing all these things down and they weren’t being followed and I’m like, “Come on.” If I’m going to spend all this work, then you got to follow it. It’s super messy and this is something actually now that I think about it, one of my early mentors at the one tech company that I worked at, it kind of went through the same process where he was really, really amazing developer and then moved into management and running the company. He was like, “The challenges are really kind of the same,” like you’re just programming and people and spreadsheets. It’s just different challenges but at the same kind of mindset, in terms of getting the output that you want.

SAM: And completely different strategies for doing it.

KRONDA: Right.

SAM: What I heard that you wanted to talk about systems. My first thought was about something like for example, getting things done or Personal Kanban or some of those other systems that people use to manage their own volume of work. I’m wondering if you use one of those, if you have managed to make one of those stick.

KRONDA: I haven’t really gone deeply into any of that. I know about getting things done and I know the premise of it and I think, maybe a few years ago, I sort of made a half-hearted effort but nothing has stuck. I think the strategy that I’m using right now is to try to focus on one thing and fix it basically, forever. Right now, my email is a disaster because I’m focused on fixing something else. I’m focused on the process and documentation for the business because that’s going to allow me to bring in people and say, “I need these things done,” and I can just say, “And here’s how to do it,” and it’s all documented. That will give me my time back, then go and fix my email.

By fix it, I don’t just mean like wade through the whatever 33,000 that there are now but like unsubscribe from a ton of things, figure out what is the system that I’m going to use to keep email under control, implement that system and then fix that forever, then I’ll move on to another thing. Maybe it’ll be scheduling or I don’t know but it’s a really hard way to work because when things are in chaos, which a lot of things around me are chaos right now, you just kind of want to dive into all of it and that’s a good way to not get much done at all. It’s been really hard but for the last, probably four months, I’ve just been focused on, “I’m going to implement enough systems in my business that I can pass things off to people and get the results that I want.”

JESSICA: Yeah, because when you’re trying to accomplish something, we gain our power from all the things that we don’t do.

KRONDA: Right, and just trying to get the time to do this one thing. I’ve been trying to launch a product for two years. It’s just been one struggle after another so I finally scale it down and said, “Let me release the first 20% of this.” I did that and now I’m trying to finish out. The actual essence of the product is the Working Websites course, which has become my side hustle that I would like to become my main hustle at some point. I was like, “I’m just going to launch this thing and that’s going to force me to create it,” so now, I’m creating it and then I will have something that exist, something that I can sell that doesn’t then take up more of my time, which is the thing that I’ve been trying to do for two years.

JESSICA: You do have a focus on reclaiming your time.

KRONDA: Yeah. I don’t see my family as much as I want. I don’t see my friends as much as I want. I don’t spend enough time on home stuff. There’s so many more things that need my time that I don’t have so the way to get that back is to fix the things in the business that can be automated and repeated and sort of buy back my time that way

JESSICA: Right, you can’t just do the things. You can’t just answer the emails. You have to go meta and build a better way to answer emails or pair them down.

KRONDA: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s in the Work the System book but Sam has a lot of blog posts and things, or maybe it was on a podcast and he talks about how he handles email. In his whole company, their goal is to never have more than 20 or 30 emails in their inbox and they largely succeed at that. I was reading a blog post on the website and I was, “Man, this text is way too small,” so I was like, “Well, I’m going to read about it,” because apparently they all read their email in a timely fashion.

Sure enough the next day, I got a reply from Sam and he was like, “You’re totally right.” Because basically the email is like, “Come on, dude. I know you’ve got to be in your 60s and your core audience is probably over 40s so what is with this tiny text?” He said, “Oh, you’re absolutely right. I am in my 60s and my tech team are all in the 30s and I’m sending them up an email right now to work on this.” Then he was like, “What’s your address? I want to send you my books,” and so I gave it to him and two days later, books showed up. Sure enough, he wrote some business documentation software and if you go in there, there’s a bunch of sample processes and one of them is how to send a gift to a client.

As soon as I send him my address, he fired that up to someone else and said, “Send her some books,” and then it happened and he works two hours a week. He went from working 100 hours a week to two hours a week so I’m like, “Clearly, this guy know something that other people don’t.”

SAM: That sounds like macroing the hell out of your business.

KRONDA: Pretty much. There’s another good book that I like called ‘Traction.’ The subtitle is ‘Get a Grip on Your Business’ and it’s through the Entrepreneurial Operating System — EOSWorldwide.com. There’s actually a guy outside fixing our fence gate right now and they came in and put up the first half of our fence, in the front of our house. They were amazing. They said, “We’re going to be out on this day to look at the property.” They showed up and they said, “We’re going to get you a quote,” and they got us a quote. The day before they came to build the first section of fence, I said, “What time are you going to be here?” They said, “Well, it depends. We have our Wednesday a meeting and it depends how many issues are on the issues list,” and that’s it.

It’s a really particular way to say something like that and I said, “Oh, has your boss read Traction?” He said, “Oh, yeah. We’re an EOS company,” and I said, “Everything makes sense now, like why all your stuff is dialed, why you’re so expensive, why your work is so good.” You know, it all made sense. It kind of made me want to, the next time we need something done, just go to EOS and be like, “Do you have anybody who does this?” because if someone’s running their business that way, it’s a pretty good bet that their stuff is dialed and they have systems in place and they’re doing quality stuff. In fact, there was an issue with the gate but because the way they run their company, they’re like, “We’ll send somebody out to fix it,” and it’s a very, very different experience from other contractors we worked with.

I actually read a blog post or I think it was an email that’s like, “Why are freelancers so flakey?” and it’s largely because they don’t have systems and they’re not charging enough so then they’re like chasing the next job to pay for the work that they’re doing, that they undercharged you for. When it’s like, if you just charge enough to really pay attention and do things the way they need to be done, then you can get a better result. That’s just like a theme that keeps showing up.

SAM: That sounds like a whole other topic right there.

KRONDA: Yeah, the Venn diagram of good, fast, cheap. We’ve run afoul of that in our search for a landscape contractor to do our yard so it’s become a project.

JESSICA: Yeah, and I guess it’s like software. The thing is cheap but turned out to be really expensive.

KRONDA: It does. I’ve been on both sides of that equation. I’ve been the one that screwed up and I’ve been the one to be like, “What is going on?” Now, when people come to me and they’re like, “Can you give me a quote? I want to compare with this other quote.” I’m like, “Yeah, mine will be more expensive.” Tell me what the result that you want is, like what’s in your budget is a real thing but if what’s in your budget can’t get you the result that you need, then you have to figure something else out because pretending that you can get what you need with a budget that’s too small is going to get you some half done thing or something that doesn’t work and then you’re going to be out of money and still not have the result.

The first time I really understood that was about a year ago when someone came to me and he wanted like e-commerce and bookings and all this stuff. He said, “My budget is $3500.” I’m like, “We can’t even keep talking for that,” and I said, “Look, this is what it’s going to take to get the result you said you wanted and if you want to keep talking, just know that,” so he did and went forward and that’s the most successful site that I’ve launched to date.

He immediately started making money hand over fist when the new site watched because now, instead of spending all his time on the phone with people who are trying to book this shuttle, they’re just going to the website. There’s a giant FAQ that answers all their questions, that tells them to go book their hiking permit and then they can book their shuttle and then they show up. That really kind of made that hit home for me.

JESSICA: I love that it’s called Entrepreneurial Operating System because that illustrates that in our working systems that have to do with people, I think we’ve been learning a lot from software.

KRONDA: Yeah, because in software you can’t not work within the system because then, it won’t work. You’re forced to figure out, how’s the computer understand this.

JESSICA: That’s true. You can’t just say, “This person is stupid.” It’s a computer. You know what it’s going to do. It doesn’t accept your blame.

KRONDA: Yeah. It’s like, “You’re not working within the system so I can’t give you what you want,” whereas with people, we can screw it up all day long and we might still get occasionally what we want so then we don’t know that the system needs to be fixed.

JESSICA: Right. I think as people, we like to blame the system and just wish it were different. You don’t do that with computers. We either make it different or we work in it.

KRONDA: Exactly. I was in a Mastermind group recently, where one of the questions was, “How are you all getting new clients? Because I’m torturing myself going to these networking meetings and I hate it.” I said, “Well, what are you doing with your website?” and she was like, “Oh, nothing,” and I was like, “Have you thought about that?” Yeah, but I don’t have the money to pay someone and I don’t want to do it myself. I’m like, “That’s it. Those are your only options.”

SAM: Right, a magical website elder will not going to come visit you on Christmas Eve.

KRONDA: Right. That would be amazing, wouldn’t it?

SAM: Right, that would be great.

KRONDA: I would be a magical website elder.

SAM: Hang on. Let me see if that domain is available.

KRONDA: I wanted to walk out of the room because option three obviously is do nothing and keep complaining but it doesn’t get you anywhere that you want to be. As someone who just officially took on the mantle of, “I’m going to make a product that helps teach business owners, especially non-technical business owners, how to do websites that actually help their business,” this is something that I encounter a lot: people who are like, “I just want to use Wix because it’s easier,” and nobody ever says to me, “Oh, I use Squarespace or Wix because it’s more effective and I get a ton of clients from it.” Nobody ever says that to me. It’s always, “It’s easier.”

JESSICA: It’s all about them, as opposed to the results.

KRONDA: Right, so I’m getting way better at just filtering those people out right away because you’re not the person I can help because you don’t have the money to pay me five or 10 grand to just build this for you and you don’t know how to do it yourself and I’m saying, “I will teach you how to do it yourself but you still have to do it yourself.” If they’re the type that are like, “Well, it’s hard so I don’t want to do it.” It’s like, “Your business doesn’t care. Your customers don’t really care if it’s hard.” Whether something is hard or not, it has nothing to do with whether you should do it. If it’s hard, that means you probably should do it. That’s probably the way to success.

SAM: And your customers are going through the exact same process, right? They’re looking for a bed and breakfast to stay in and your website doesn’t make it obvious how to contact you or how to use your services. I’m going to go find some other bed and breakfast who bothered to spend a little bit more time on their site, you know? It’s the exact same process of like, “This is hard so I’m not going to do it.”

KRONDA: Exactly. Oh, that’s good. I’m going to use that. That’s really good. You have to find the people who are really grateful and like, “Oh, this is hard and you’re going to help me?” Awesome. Let’s go. Those people are fewer and farther in between so it’s been interesting. I actually looking forward to next year because I have a contract with Prosper Portland, which is basically a business development commission and they created this inclusive business resource network to help underrepresented founders.

The woman who works for this organization came to me and said, “Everybody is asking for more help with digital marketing,” and I said, “Great. I’ve been trying to make this course for two years. Why don’t you give me some money and I’ll finish it.” We just did that deal and we’re going to have, at least 10, maybe more of their either providers like mentor businesses and/or the direct clients that they serve who are one of the first people to go through the course next year. That’s going to be really exciting to actually get feedback from the target audience to say like, “Did I really capture this? Is this still too complex? Am I leaving things out because I don’t know what I know?” I’m really looking forward to that.

SAM: That’s awesome. Congratulations.

KRONDA: Thanks.

JESSICA: It sounds like part of the process of making your customer successful is choosing customers who have a chance of being successful.

KRONDA: It’s a large part of the process and it took me a while to figure that out. Now, someone called it like the velvet rope, like you’re trying to get into the club. People are trying to get into the club that’s standing with the velvet rope going, “I don’t know. Do you have what it takes?” Because one of the classic red flags is, “We’re going to do our own content to save money.” In this, you are a copywriter. In fact, it’s your business. Chances are, you’re not going to come up with the content that’s actually going to speak to your audience and convert your website visitors into customers so then, you’re tanking your results in the interest of ‘saving money.’

JESSICA: So you’re going to save, at most a couple of thousand dollars, whereas with good copy and a really good site, the upward potential of the revenue you could bring in orders of magnitude higher.

KRONDA: Right. I do a lot of screening for that. I still get a lot of increase that are like, “Can you set up this theme for me?” where over this past year, I’ve been transitioning out of a development-focused company and into marketing and strategy-focused company. I am a developer and I do have developers on my team but you don’t get them until we know why we’re doing this and what result we’re trying to get. That makes the screening process much easier actually because it’s really apparent, really quickly when people just want you to be like their code monkey and say, “Put this widget over here,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but why? What’s the good we’re trying to do here?”

JESSICA: Your development skills are now a tool, not the product.

KRONDA: Exactly. The product is ‘let’s grow your bottom line.’ One of the favorite things I like to do is what I call the ‘under haul’ and that’s when you have a website that is really beautiful and has terrible code underneath or maybe it’s good code but it’s super custom so no one can touch it but the developer. Then what you have is a marketing site that costs $100 an hour to edit text because no one can touch it except the developer without breaking it and marketing websites need to be flexible.

I’ve gone in quite a few times and this has been like, “This looks fine. Let’s just make it usable so you can actually edit things without writing PHP or whatever.” I love doing those. There are so many gains. There’s not having to wait a week, while you send offer request to go change this testimonial to something else or there’s speed of implementation. There’s so many gains by just being able to move quickly and online marketing now is just like you don’t know what’s going to work so you have to be able to change things. That’s a another thing that I think is a very slowly, people are coming to the realization that having a pixel-perfect, custom-coded marketing website is actually not an asset, having something where it’s like —

JESSICA: Oh, right because what is perfect you don’t know.

KRONDA: Right, you baked in and like, you do this entire project, you baked in all of your assumptions or maybe you talked to a customer along the way. Probably not and then you baked in all those assumptions to your website and then you’re like, “Nobody’s buying,” or nobody’s converting. Being able to say, “We’re going to get our minimum viable product,” and they’re going to AB test the crap out of it and say, “Does this call-to-action work better? Does this header work better? Does this copy work better?” and being able to test that, that’s what’s actually valuable at marketing websites.

JESSICA: Yeah and in software in general, I think because when you get into a system that’s complex enough that you can’t have it all in your head, which is like all of them now, you also don’t know what’s going to work or what’s going to cause problems. Like you said, when there is a problem, then that’s a gift of, “Oh, ha!” This didn’t work as the way you thought it does, you have to be able to change it.

KRONDA: Yeah. I just keep talking about this and they figure at some point, I’m going to become a trendsetter. Not that I’m the first one talking about this. I actually found a woman who used to work for Microsoft and she has a whole imperfect website like growth engine system and she kind of crystallized all the things that I was thinking about. I was like, “Look, she went completely crystallized this and made a course to teach people about it,” so I was like, “Yeah, that’s totally on the right track.”

Perfection paralysis is a huge barrier. I actually relaunch my KarvelDigital.com site in July and I did it as a challenge to my email subscribers because of having all these conversations of people and it was all boiling down to, “I really want this result but I don’t want to do any work,” so I was like, “Okay, people. Tell me what are you going to do in the next two weeks. I’m going to relaunch my site,” which is something I’ve been talking about since the beginning of the year.” I just did it really quick and dirty and it totally wasn’t perfect but it was way better than what I had before, then I’ve just been improving on it slowly.

SAM: We were talking about systems a little bit earlier and I was curious if you’ve been able to help any of your clients implement systems to help their businesses run more smoothly and what kind of results that’s had for them.

KRONDA: The site I talked about earlier with the shuttles, just them having the website kind of forced them into a system —

SAM: Because they said they were going to do a thing?

KRONDA: Because they said they were doing to do a thing. Well, before people would call, everything was over the phone so people would have to call and they would ask questions — a lot of the same questions — and then they would say, “Reserve my spot,” but then they don’t actually pay until they show up and pay cash, then it’s like, maybe they show up, maybe they don’t. Just the fact of having a website now that has a booking system means this is how you have to book. All the questions, they’re all answered on a website and if new questions come in, then you can just add them to the website so you save a ton of time.

SAM: And it sounds like you get better customers or you only talk to the serious ones, right?

KRONDA: Yeah, with the shuttle thing, this is a trail in Northern California so they actually get a lot of Silicon Valley people who are tired of staring screens and like, “I want to get back to nature,” so the online booking thing isn’t a barrier. It’s a feature not a bug. The wood-sy who were like, “What are computers?” You’re getting like, “The computer people who are like, “Oh, my God. I need to get to the woods.”

SAM: “But I don’t want to talk to anybody on the phone.”

KRONDA: Right. I have a client that I do just for marketing. We have a marketing retainer so part of that is just trying to install more systems like they’re going to start using one password for sharing all their secure passwords and stuff. I went in just this weekend and we went over on how are they using ActiveCampaign, both for prospecting and for customer retention and newsletter stuff. We just went through and I’m like, “Why are you doing it this way.” I like to do this and save some time.

What I’m slowly moving toward is within the tech stack that I use, helping people use those things to be more efficient. Like ActiveCampaign, it allows you to do a lot of email automation, which means you can send people emails based on a page that they would visit on your website. If they visit a product page, then you can send them an email a day or two later saying like, “If you’re interested in blah-blah-blah, here’s a coupon.” Helping people implement marketing systems and also just use, I like to say the power of robots to save themselves time. Basically, any time I see a client doing something that computers could do it instead, I’m like, “Why don’t we let computers do that?”

JESSICA: Right, because we started out talking about systems that you’re building that are programming people and you did say it was like hard finding people but that was super messy. If you can build the system into the computer, that can be a lot less messy sometimes.

KRONDA: It is. It’s just getting the people to agree what the system should be and then the computers are like, “Cool. Tell me what to do.”

JESSICA: And it’s way easier to scale.

KRONDA: Yeah, it’s way easier to scale. It’s always a mess at some level because as soon as you bring a person into a situation, there’s potential for mess.

SAM: Right, but when they bring you in, you’re playing the role of the external consultant and you have a chance to help them decide to use a computer a lot more effectively than they might, if they were just on their own, right?

KRONDA: Exactly. I’m looking forward to doing more of that because I’ve been in this transition from being like, “I’ll keep your WordPress up to date,” to, “Let’s streamline your business.” It’s been a struggle, really to figure out how to market myself because there’s so many different layers — the marketing layer, of course — but I think the reason I talk about systems so much is that when you go in to help a client, if everything in their business is chaos, then you can’t suddenly be like, “Computers will help you.” You have to bring order and figure out what direction are you going first, then computers can help you.

A good example is I have a client who does delivery of their product. They’re actually to drive their products to their different customers. They came to me and they were like, “How can we let clients put a note in their order saying when they want it.” I said, “No, you don’t want to do that.” You don’t want to give your clients control over your delivery schedule because, then you’re efficiency is out the window. You want to say, “These are the days we deliver so if you order by this day, you’ll get your product by this day,” because that’s a system that you can follow that streamlines your business.

Sometimes, they might need something on a certain day but if you have the power to systemize and say, “This is how we do it,” and then find the customers who buy into that, that is a far more efficient and profitable way to run your business. It’s having those conversations where they’ll tell me, “We’re doing it this way and I’ll say, “Wait. Let’s just make a process for this and that will be how it happens,” but it’s really hard. The more people you have involved, the harder it is to establish those and stick to them.

JESSICA: We talked a lot about the importance of change. If you don’t have a system, then it’s really hard to change the system and make it better.

KRONDA: True because how do you remember how you did the last three or four times.

SAM: Right. If you don’t have a system, your system think really hard about everything all the time.

KRONDA: Right, exactly. A lot of people that I talked to who are solopreneurs, they’re freelancers or it’s just them and I start talking about this stuff and they say, “It’s just me,” and I’m like, “Great,” but you’re actually ‘present you’ and ‘future you’ and I guarantee the present you is going to do something and future you is going to be like, “What was I thinking? How did I do that?” Even when it was just me, like the act of writing things down, I have a ton of things documented now. I have use a tool called systemHUB to store all my processes for my business. I go and look at those all the time because I’m like, “I’m going to do this thing and let me make sure I don’t miss a step,” and then I’m not spending the energy thinking about it and just looking at the next step and doing it. In that, it saves me a ton of time, even if it’s just past-me talking to present-me.

JESSICA: What a mental energy.

KRONDA: Yeah.

JESSICA: I wanted to ask you, now that you’ve built some repeatable processes, how do you iterate and change those and make sure they don’t ossify?

KRONDA: Because I’m looking at them while I’m doing them, if I hit a point where I’m like, “Why is this like this? This could be better,” then I can change it instantly. If it’s someone else like virtual assistant or a developer, it’s the same thing. If they’re doing a task and they are like, “I think this could be better this way,” they can literally comment on that system and I can get and go, “Oh, yeah. That’s cool. Let’s change it.” The rigidity of the system is balanced by the willingness and the ability to change it instantly and make it better. Then that change for the better, you keep that forever because you wrote it into the system.

SAM: You know, this reminds me of something I saw on Twitter just this morning and I sent to myself to look at it later. It’s a Git repository called ‘Git Flight Rules,’ which is apparently borrowing from a thing in aviation where there’s extremely detailed standard operating procedures for how to deal with a particular thing. This is a bunch of flight rules around things that happened in Git that you want to do like, “I wrote the wrong thing at the commit messages,” as one of the entries in here or, “I accidentally did a hard reset and I want my changes back.”

KRONDA: Is it like a list of how to deal with those things?

SAM: Yeah, exactly.

KRONDA: That’s awesome.

JESSICA: Yeah, because Git has reversibility but it’s not obvious.

KRONDA: No, it’s not.

SAM: Nothing in Git is obvious.

KRONDA: Yeah, it’s been a while since I lived in Git, on the daily, too so if I had to go and do something, I’m like, “What?” A good example of this is I did a webinar recently. This was something like ‘past-me should have written down.’ I forgot that Keynote and WebinarJam don’t play well together. When I hit go on my slides, the entire screen for the webinar went black. When it happened, I was like, “Oh, yeah. I have a big memory of this happening before and that’s why I did Google Slides the time before this.”

SAM: Oops.

KRONDA: But past-me didn’t write that down so present-me got to have five minutes of blank screen before my friend came in and was like, “Your slides are blank.” That’s a perfect example of like, “We need to capture these things so that they don’t recur.”

SAM: Yeah. I, for a long time, had a checklist of things to do. When I sat down to get ready to record the podcast, it’s like, “Plug in your microphone,” and I didn’t follow the checklist this morning and sure enough, I forgot to change my muting application so that when I thought I was doing push-to-talk, I was actually doing push-to-mute and no one could hear me.

KRONDA: Perfect example. The humans are always the weakest link in the system like, “Oh, yeah. I have a checklist for that. If only I read it.”

JESSICA: Yeah but yet, we also tend to fall back on, “The human did it wrong. It’s a training issue,” where really, if we get our system set up right especially in software, then the human is prompted to do the right thing.

KRONDA: If you read the Work the System book, Sam’s business is a call center. It’s basically a private 911. Imagine trying to systemize that like the way that people answer the phone and take messages. Mandy know something about this but they have all these systems in place and they’ve managed to quantify what makes a good phone call, like what makes a good phone interaction such so they can measure it —

JESSICA: Is it like something other than how quickly did you get them off the phone?

KRONDA: Yeah. I don’t know the details of it. He doesn’t go into it but they’ve basically managed to quantify it to the degree that they can measure the speed, the effectiveness, the lack of mistakes. I think in one of the podcast or one of the blog post he said there was a call rep who had basically gone something like 17,000 calls without a mistake. That’s amazing. If you can do that for a call center, you can basically do it for everything and they have a whole consulting business where they help people implement this. I’ve heard them talk about doing it for hair salons. They had a woman with a hair salon and she trained all her people in her method so that she could open multiple locations. When people who are like, “Oh, I can’t do that because my thing is special,” I’m like, “Okay, if you say so.”

JESSICA: “Keep doing your thing forever and ever and ever.”

KRONDA: Yeah but it’s tough. It’s slow-going. It takes a little bit before you start to see the value of it. If you don’t intrinsically see the value of it, then the only way to do it is to start doing it and prove to yourself that it works and that can take a while and I think that’s why people, maybe they start and they don’t keep going. I don’t know. I feel like I don’t have a choice because I do want to get my life back at some point. This has to happen. In my ideal world, I would love for my client service business to just run completely without me except for marketing and sales.

JESSICA: The parts where you personally do add the most value?

KRONDA: Exactly. Then in my other business, I would love to just spend time helping business owners figure out the online marketing thing. I would love to get to the people who are like, “I’m just going to use Wix because it’s easy,” and be like, “Actually, let me show you how you can do this other thing. It’s not as hard as you thought and will actually get you better results.”

JESSICA: Commercial time.

SAM: Yay! We’re going to take a quick moment to talk to you about giving us money because that’s what you need to do. Seriously though, if you would like to support us, if you like the work that we do and think that we’re talking about interesting and important things and you happen to have some extra money that you can throw at us, please do. You can support us at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode.

One of the premier benefits, I think of doing that is that if you donate any amount and seriously, this can be like a buck, if you donate any amount, you get access to our Slack community, which is full of over 200 awesome people who have really interesting conversations about all kinds of stuff and it’s definitely one of the friendliest online communities I’ve ever been a part of. It’s one of my favorite places to hang out. I’m always excited to see the little new messages icon on that particular Slack. Feel free to support us: Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Thanks. Now, back to the show.

JESSICA: Kronda, what’s your superpower and how did you acquire it?

KRONDA: Oh, I think stubbornness is definitely one of my superpowers, which I think is necessary as a business owner because there’s so much that you have to endure in order to get to the point of having a successful business. I think that’s one of them. I think systemization and documentation, which we’ve talked a lot about because I actually enjoy that stuff because I understand the value of it. I understand how much better the future is going to be for me or whoever I’m doing it for and that’s what makes me enjoy it. I think those stuff are one of my superpowers.

Also, staying focused on what is the core purpose of things. Whenever one of my clients comes to me and says, “I need you to do this,” then I’m always going to say, “Why. What’s the outcome that you’re striving towards,” because it kind of like going to the doctor and saying like, “I need stomach surgery,” and the doctor will be like, “Slow your roll there. Let’s run some tests and tell me your symptoms and let’s figure out what’s really going on.” That’s what I like to do for clients and the tech things that they ask me for is to figure out what’s really going on and what’s the actual goal because maybe you don’t need what you think you need. Maybe you need more than you think you need. Maybe we could do something that’s way cheaper than what you thought you were going to have to pay. I think those are some of my superpowers.

JESSICA: How did you get so stubborn?

KRONDA: Genetics, probably. Long line of stubborn women. I think that’s probably most of it and let’s hope that I keep my memory when I get old because my grandmother is 93 and can’t remember anything but still stubborn.

SAM: It’s not a good combination, is it?

KRONDA: Yeah, it’s fun times.

SAM: All right. We’ve reached a point in the show where we get to do reflections, which is where we look back at something that really stood out for us during the call or something that we would like to remind our listeners of, something that we could look into or something that you learn that was really interesting. Who would like to start?

JESSICA: Me! Kronda, while you were talking, especially early in the show about how you look at one thing that you’re doing and you figure out how to fix it forever, I totally do that but as a developer, I’m doing that in code about code. Like the other day, I was like I need to be a change. I don’t know how many build files and I don’t know how many of our 220 repositories and I am not going to go look at every one. Some other times, what I’m going to want to do, change it to a bunch of build files again. I work at Atomist and this is what we build as tools to make this kind of automation easier so I wrote a program to look through all the build files and tell me which ones were still get tag, which is now going to fall on Travis.

I wrote a program to change those to send us an event and our other automation makes the tags in one place, instead of a thousand build files… Not a thousand but a hundred. Anyway, even as developers like us, we’re writing automation for other people, we can also think at a meta level and automate the parts of our jobs so that then we can spend more thinking about the interesting part of code like how to achieve the results that we want and it works everywhere. It does take an extra level of caring and thought. You have to be willing to think harder than you have to think to do your work, to think about how you do your work and how you cannot have to do that work ever again.

KRONDA: That’s a really good point.

SAM: Yeah so you have to have the extra capacity but once you spend it, you get a lot more of that extra mental capacity back later.

JESSICA: Yes. You can use your little pieces of slack that you used to think extra hard to increase the amount of free time you have later and then you can hang out with your friends.

KRONDA: I think you just encapsulated my entire life mission there with other [inaudible] basically. A business owner comes in and they’re like, “I need a website,” and that’s all they’re thinking about and then I start talking about like, “Why? Who are your customers?” They don’t want to do that. That’s the hard work. That’s the thinking, that if you did it, it would give you, in this case not necessarily extra slack but extra customers or extra time like the thinking and people are too busy killing fires or they’re in a hurry to do so that was amazing.

JESSICA: Yeah and killing fires feels productive. That’s why I was surprised when you said, the people find this boring. It’s not boring. It’s just hard.

KRONDA: Right. I guess to some people that’s the same thing.

JESSICA: Yes because some people have a higher need for cognition than others.

SAM: How so?

JESSICA: Need for cognition. It’s a personality characteristic and it’s how much you want to think about things, think about why, think about puzzles.

SAM: Oh, interesting. I’ve never heard that one before.

JESSICA: Isn’t that a cool phrase? That’s my phrase of the week. It’s on Wikipedia.

SAM: Oh, I better go and look it up then.

KRONDA: Nice. I’ll go next. I think one of the things that is a recurring theme for me that we talked about is things that are easy versus things that are effective and that’s a recurring theme in a lot of the stuff that we talked about, a lot of the struggles that I have with business owners. Usually not with my client because if they’ve reached the stage of being my client, they’re probably not a person who wants to take the easy way all the time. But in potential clients and people who come to me and ask me for help, a lot of them are just interested in what’s the easiest thing and that’s often not going to be the thing that gets you the result that you want.

Simon Sinek who wrote the book ‘Start With Why’ says that people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it. You want to sell the people who believe what you believe and you want to hire people who believe what you believe so the mindset I have when I’m talking to potential clients or potential employees or potential partners is do we have a compatible view about the worth of doing hard things. What you talked about Jessica was really slowing down the speed up, instead of just going through and going like, “Let me go look at these 200 files.” You’re like, “Wait. Let me back up and think about how I could fix this forever,” and that’s a rare skill. It’s probably less rare among developers but it is a rare skill and personality type to find the people who understand the value of doing that.

JESSICA: I’m getting a lot of quotes. There’s going to be a bunch of tweets from this episode.

SAM: Earlier on in the call, I was thinking about a talk that I saw actually last night at the Portland Ruby user group. It was actually not a technical talk. It was about executive dysfunction. Dana Scheider gave a really interesting presentation about what executive dysfunction is and talked about some strategies that you can use to mitigate it. One of the things that she talked about was this idea of making decision rules.

One example from my own life is I was a vegetarian for quite a few years and I found it much easier to go through a menu at a restaurant because having a decision rule of ‘don’t eat anything with meat in it’ narrowed the menu down to three things that I could then choose between and I was actually always ready to order as soon as I sat down and saw the menu.

JESSICA: By executive dysfunction, you mean like your brain, because at first I thought this was going to be like how to fix your boss.

SAM: No, I mean, there’s a part of your brain in the frontal lobe that there’s a whole set of things that the frontal lobe of your brain does that are collectively referred to as executive function. There are things about like planning and sequencing and making sure you’re paying attention to the right thing and thinking about time and so on. When those things don’t work, you really have a really hard time functioning in this world. Having a decision rule, makes it so that it’s like having a mini-system that’s like one thing — I will eat A, B or C for breakfast, which means that you don’t have to burn the cognitive fuel to figure out what from the infinite possibility of food items I’m going to eat this morning. That’s just seems like something useful that we can learn from neurodivergent folks. I feel like there’s other ways that we can look out for that sort of thing.

KRONDA: That’s great, though. I actually had a client and she teaches people with executive function deficits and how to manage their time. I worked for her for two years and that was interesting because I’ll be like, “This is what we’re doing this month,” then three days later, they’ll be like, “Oh, my God. We need this right now.” Yeah, that was interesting.

SAM: Well, that’s our show and we’ll be back at you as soon as we possibly can. Thanks everybody.

[Outro Music]

SAM: Mandy cut that last part. It was too desperate.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

055: Change Ourselves a Little, Many Times with Keith Bennett

Mandy Moore — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 05:00:33 +0000

Panelists:

Jessica Kerr | Sam Livingston-Gray | Astrid Countee | Jasmine Greenaway

Guest Starring:

Keith Bennett: @keithrbennett | about.me/keithrbennett | Bennett Business Solutions

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “Metamours United For Frequent Dialogue” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:47 – Keith’s Background and Superpower

10:03 – Conflict Resolution

Open Spaces session on Conflict Resolution this summer at DevOpsDays D.C. (and the precursor to this conversation)

Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most

12:01 – Opinions on Mediators/Mediation

14:21 – Approaching Conflict

News Story Re: Portland Murders

17:31 – Radical Helpfulness/Kindness

Keith Bennett: Kaizen and Radical Helpfulness

The Smoke Filled Room

20:49 – Being Okay with Being Different and Speaking Up

Triumph Over Fear: A Book of Help and Hope for People with Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Phobias

Congressive/Ingressive Chat with Dr. Eugenia Cheng

Join Our Slack Channel!
Support us via Patreon!

31:17 – Fire Alarms and Radical Helpfulness (Cont’d)

35:50 – Knowing When to Step Back or to Step Forward

Reflections:

Astrid: The way to change ourselves a lot is to change ourselves a little, many times.

Sam: Decide that you’re okay with being different and training yourself to be bold.

Jasmine: Be mindful of yourself and your actions.

Jessica: There’s a lot of conscious thought and choice in both being helpful and resolving conflict.

Keith: Working together to create a safer and happier world.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

JESSICA: Good morning and welcome to Episode 55 of ‘Metamours United For Frequent Dialogue — MUFFD.’ I am happy to be here today with Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Thank you, Jessica and I’m pretty sure this is still Greater Than Code but I love that also. I’m also really thrilled to introduce my friend and co-panelist, Astrid Countee.

ASTRID: Thanks, Sam. I think we need our own really cool acronyms so that it’ll be easier for us to [inaudible] introductions but I would like to welcome our new panelist, Jasmine Greenaway. Take it away, Jasmine.

JASMINE: Hello. I am Jasmine. I’m super happy to be here. I am based in New York City in nice, beautiful Brooklyn where the lattes and kale is abundant — and the kombucha, can’t forget that kombucha — and I’m a Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft.

SAM: And our guest today is Keith Bennett. Keith is a long time software developer who started his software development career writing an in-house accounting package for a construction company on an Apple II in Applesoft BASIC. That takes me back. He’s worked with several languages since and has been working mostly with Ruby for the last few years. He’s lived on four continents and now spends most of his time split between Chiang Mai, Thailand and Reston, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC. His other interests include karaoke, current events, foreign languages, massage, technical community and becoming a better human being. You can find him on Twitter, GitHub and LinkedIn as KeithRBennett — two N’s, two T’s. Welcome to the show, Keith.

KEITH: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

JESSICA: Keith, we often like to start the show by asking you for your origin story. What is your superpower and how did you get it?

KEITH: If I could think of one superpower that I have and I don’t know that I have any but one thing that I did think when I thought about this question was I’m pretty good at explaining things to people and understanding what they mean. Sometimes, I’ll be in a conversation and I’ll notice that the two people talking are just not understanding each other at all and I’ll step in and say, “Did you mean blah-blah-blah?” and just expressing that in a different way, seemed to enlighten the group and help people understand each other better.

ASTRID: Keith, this is a trait that you’ve always had or is this something that you actually worked on over time and got good at?

KEITH: I’m not sure. I think it improved over the years. I’m a pretty introspective person and trying to understand my thoughts, my actions and their effect on other people and that includes the other direction — thinking about the thoughts and actions of others and how they affect me. I guess just focusing on that helps.

SAM: You seemed to be in some doubt and in my book, that definitely qualifies as a superpower.

KEITH: Thank you, Sam.

SAM: I find, sometimes just being able to notice when two people are using the same word to mean two different things, just noticing and identifying that one thing can make a huge difference in their conversation.

KEITH: Absolutely. A shared vocabulary is so important.

JESSICA: Yeah and when you think you share a vocabulary and you don’t is the worst. It’s like the word ‘persistence’ in functional versus OO development or property. We use this totally differently and it confuses the snot out of people.

KEITH: Yeah.

ASTRID: There’s a lot of stuff in your bio. I would love to hear more about your origin story and how all those little pieces came in.

KEITH: I grew up in New York City, graduated high school when I was 16, went to college for a year, got bored, went to Europe, drove around in a motorcycle for six months, lived in Sweden above the Arctic Circle for free, couldn’t find a job so I studied the Swedish language so I speak a little bit, joined a very unconventional religious group for nine years of my early adulthood, left it, live in the Central African Republic for three months of that time, got married, had a child, studied accounting in school. As I was working as a bookkeeper and accountant, I started getting interested in computers because we got a computer at our office that was a turnkey hardware and software combined system for client accounting.

I found that there were a couple of basic manuals in the drawer that I could actually get to do things that it wasn’t already programmed to do and it was really exciting because as a bookkeeper/accountant, you have a calculator and the only thing that you really have to work with is a single register. There’s no instructions they can give. You can just store one value. To have this incredible machine that had so many possible storage areas and an infinitely flexible behavior was super exciting to me.

Although I continued to study accounting part time at night so that I could just have a degree, I realized that I was way more interested and enthusiastic about software development than I was about in accounting so I never became an accountant. I had the help of a mentor/friend who helped me learn C language in the beginning but after that, it was totally self-taught. I didn’t have any formal education in computer science or programming, which in a way is unfortunate but in other way is not because I have a feeling I would have lost interest if I had. I got a D in my first computer course. It was about mainframes and it really wasn’t a very interesting course and it wasn’t like it is now, anyway.

SAM: Yeah, the nice thing about when you started is that you came in at a time when it was possible to understand everything about the machine you were working on.

KEITH: Yeah, almost. I downloaded the assembly language but didn’t get too far but it was certainly a much more limited scope than it is now. Much, much more, I agree. I lived in the Washington DC area shortly after I started my career so some of my jobs were in governments, some were in commercials. Most of them were in places that were kind of rigid. It’s totally different from the startup culture today and the more flexible culture of today. To be honest, there are a lot of jobs that I had where I felt like I was just one cog in a huge machine and had a very narrow responsibility.

I didn’t really learn that much. I wasn’t really happy and in addition, I had some really good managers and I had some really bad managers and over the years, I just realized how incredibly connected my human experience was to my happiness in the workplace. How important it was to have people that were understanding and flexible and inquisitive and energetic? I started to see more and more how things were so much an issue of human interaction and not so much about technical things so I decided to think about that more and talk about that more and that’s when I started writing about it. I am very interested in how we can improve the human condition and I want to try to do my part to help.

JASMINE: That’s wonderful. Keith, I noticed something you said in the beginning about your origin story. You said you live in the Arctic Circle for a bit. Can you talk a little bit about that? That’s really fascinating.

KEITH: I was 18. I went to Europe. I bought a motorcycle. I started riding and I got tired of industrial cities and I asked people, “Where should I go?” It’s different from where I’ve been. One person said, “Go up to Lapland,” and I say, “Where’s Lapland?” Oh, it’s the northern part of Sweden and Finland and Norway. I looked into it and I took a ferry from Denmark to Finland and rode up the way to Finland, cross the border and arrived in the town called [inaudible], which is above the Arctic Circle. I was greeted at a gas station by another motorcyclist who started talking to me and he said, “Do you want to meet my club?” I said, “Sure.”

I followed him out of town and it was about six kilometers and I was wondering where am I going? Is it going to be a motorcycle gang? Is my life in danger and everything? We ride up into this club and there’s like seven to eight bikes out there and they were the nicest people. I decided to stay in that town where I stayed for about three months. They let me sleep in their motorcycle club house. I didn’t have a place to stay. One of them, his father was a parliament member and he took me under his wing and introduced me to people there.

It was really a very interesting experience, [inaudible] without any skills at all. Although I wanted to find work, I couldn’t so I spent all day just studying Swedish. This friend, Johnny has a sister helped to teach me Swedish and I continue to study a bit after I returned home. It was August when I arrived and by November, it was already about 30 degrees below zero. The Northern Lights were gorgeous but it was too cold for me and it was too cold to ride a motorbike.

JASMINE: Was that in Fahrenheit or in Celsius?

KEITH: I think they kind of converged at about that value.

SAM: If Celsius, it’s -44, I believe. Any time you’re in the negatives on either scale, I’m like, “We’re done.”

JASMINE: Yes.

KEITH: And that’s why I live in Thailand during the winter whenever I can.

JESSICA: I was wondering what the balance was for Thailand.

KEITH: Yeah, it’s partly a climate thing but it’s also I’m tired of the stressful life in America. There’s so much conflict here and so much stress. I just want to go somewhere else and relax. I stay in Chiang Mai a lot of the time. It’s a wonderful place.

JESSICA: Why come back?

KEITH: Because I have a daughter and I want to stay connected with her. She’s grown up. There’s that and also, I found that I really enjoy coming home and reconnecting with friends. I just went to bootcamp last weekend and that was an amazing experience and one that I hope to repeat every year. There are things to appreciate about being an American too. I love this country and I love other countries as well.

JESSICA: Keith, I think you said the word conflict. You said the one reason you go to Thailand is because there’s less conflict there. I believe you do some work to reduce the conflict that we have here.

KEITH: I try to butt in whenever I can and whenever I think I can be helpful. It was in conference so I just proposed the subject conflict resolution. I got up in front of everybody and I said, “I want to talk about conflict resolution. I don’t really have any solutions but I want to hear yours.” We got a group of really good people who shared some interesting experiences and got some good ideas from that.

JESSICA: What are some of the suggestions you’ve got? What did you learn?

KEITH: One of them, which I echoed was to read the book ‘Difficult Conversations.’ I found that kind of slow and difficult to read at times but it has some incredible ideas about understanding the other person’s point of view and resolving the situation. One of them was by, rather than assuming that a problem is due to one person or the other being totally at a fault, understand that usually, it’s more nuanced than that and each party has some responsibility in the problem. I gave an example of a time when that happened to friend of mine.

Another thing was to listen first. We always want to be right and provide a solution and be the hero and everything but a lot of times, we just need to listen and understand what the other person is saying. Sometimes, they just need to feel listened to so we have to suppress ourselves and our, “It’s not about me. It’s about you. It’s about everyone.”

JESSICA: I like that phrase — it’s not about me. I use that a lot when there is any conflict and I start to feel defensive at almost everything, another person says or how they react to me is about their situation, much more than it is about me.

JASMINE: Keith, I have a question. How do you feel about mediators? I asked that because mediator’s purpose is to be the neutral party between two numbers of people who are trying to work something out. I’m curious, do you think mediation is ever harmful or like the ways it can be harmful and helpful?

KEITH: First of all, let me say that I do not at all consider myself a scholar or an expert on conflict resolution but I’ll be happy to share my personal opinion. I think mediation is extremely helpful as long as both or all parties are open to it. If they’re not, then it’s kind of a waste of time, I think. But if so, mediators are skilled at understanding one person’s point of view and sometimes expressing it in a way that is understandable to the other and also in initiating or suggesting a compromise, which may not have thought about otherwise.

JASMINE: How do you feel when mediators are trying to stay in that narrow road in that middle lane and one party is mentioning they feel offended by that, that this mediator is saying, “I’m trying to stay neutral into this,” and the other person or party might say, “That’s wrong. Why are you not taking a side?” Maybe it’s a moral thing or maybe it’s a big priority to one person but might not be to the other. How do you feel about that? What are your credence on that?

KEITH: I’ve had personal experiences in mediation where this happened to me and it’s extremely frustrating. I don’t know the answer. I guess we just have to think of the two sub-optimal paths, which one is the better one and hope that when it all resolves out in the net, that it’s better.

JASMINE: Yeah, I know. I’m sorry for asking you such a hard question. That’s a question I’ve been actually thinking about for a while now.

KEITH: It would be really interesting to get mediators on the show and talk about their experiences in mediating people. That would be wonderful.

JASMINE: Oh, yeah.

SAM: Keith, do you have a framework for conflict resolution that you use or you just go in there and wing it according to what seems right at the moment? How do you approach this?

KEITH: You know, I’m not really a scholar or anything about this. I haven’t read a ton of books or anything. I do just kind of wing it. Sometimes, you have to make a decision not to enter the situation at all, if there’s a threat of physical danger for example. I think about the two men who lost their lives helping the two Muslim girls in Portland and they’re my heroes. There are not too many of us that are willing to risk our lives to do the right thing. It’s a personal decision.

Sometimes the question is ‘if’ and not ‘how.’ As far as how, I just try to do the right thing. Sometimes [inaudible] and sometimes I don’t. The other day, I wanted to go to a co-working place. I went to a great place I’d like to go to in Chantilly, Virginia but it was all full so I had to go somewhere else. I drove to about 10 minutes to another coffee shop, got in there and all of the tables were filled except one. That table was between myself and a man two tables down from me. He had his backpack on the bench just almost where that middle person would have been sitting. I got really angry. I thought this guy should know better and I thought about, “Well, what am I going to do here? I’m going to say something or not?” If I say something, is my anger going to show and will it be counterproductive or will it have a happy ending when the person says, “Oh, yeah. I’m sorry. You’re right.”

Eventually, I decided to say something about it and I said, “Excuse me. Is that your bag?” and he said, “Yeah.” I said, “Would you mind moving it to the chair across from you so that if somebody is coming here, they don’t think that the table is taken.” He got very angry —

SAM: Really?

KEITH: — And he started being sarcastic and nasty. I tried to dive under my emotions and say the ‘calm’ thing in response to him. There were some interchanges and eventually, I just decided that I’ve done all that I can do here without escalating it to an unacceptable level so I’m going to stop now and he left the bag there.

There are a lot of obstacles to initiating an action like that. One of them is the possibility that you’ll fail anyway and another is that you’ll be verbally abused or at least disrespected. Another is that you’d be physically abused and there are others as well. Sometimes, we’re just shy to do something which other people don’t already do. We don’t want to be different. I’ve decided that I don’t mind being different and if there’s something I can do to help people around me and it’s not going to hurt me to do it, I’m going to try to do it even if it’s weird or embarrassing or whatever because we only have one life on this Earth, why not spend it trying to help each other. When we help each other, we’re helping ourselves. It’s kind of a cliché but it’s really true that when I help somebody, I feel really good and I enjoy it.

When I wrote this blog article about radical helpfulness and another term for that could be radical kindness, there is so much conflict now these days in our country and all over, really. I feel like a lot of it is because we’ve become so distant from each other. We hang around in our own virtual and ideological worlds. The one thing that we can do is perform acts of kindness totally agnostics to our beliefs. I saw a great news article many months ago. There was a pro- and anti-Trump demonstration and one of the anti-Trump demonstrator is an adult. I forget exactly what he did but I think he said something really nasty to a young boy, maybe eight years old and the boy started crying.

One of the anti-Trump demonstrators, a woman went up to the boy and comforted him. I thought, what a beautiful story. This is what we should be doing more. This is what we should be talking about. If we can make those connections, then maybe we have a shot at reducing the amount of violence, negativity, hate, conflict, selfishness that plagues our society, that plagues humanity. Now more than ever, we don’t have time to be bickering. Human race has existential problems that we need to be addressing. We need a thousand Manhattan Projects on how to deal with climate change. There are so many things, so many problems that we have. We don’t have time to be messing around this little stuff. We have to start thinking about our future — future of our children. It’s really important.

SAM: Something you said early on in there really strikes a chord with me about just being willing to take that first step and that puts me in mind of a psychology study, which you can find by Googling ‘psychology’ and ‘the smoke-filled room.’ This is an experiment where they had people come in and the experimental subject was asked to fill out a questionnaire. There were some number of confederates in the room as well, who were also pretending to fill out a questionnaire.

The real experiment was they started piping smoke into the room through other room’s vents. The experiment was to see what the person would do. What they found was that a lot of the people in this experiment would sit there and they would see the smoke and then they would look around to see what everybody else was doing and the confederates were instructed to stay calm and just keep filling out their surveys. People would take a remarkably long time to actually respond to the smoke, to the extent that if there had been an actual fire, they probably would have been dead. That really speaks to me about what you were saying about the willingness to just take that first step. That can be, as you say radical.

KEITH: Absolutely and I find that a very good antidote for that is karaoke. It sounds ridiculous but actually it’s really true because when I first started doing karaoke about 20 years ago, I felt very shy, I didn’t feel comfortable doing something that’s going outside of myself. We really have to overcome our shyness in that respect because it’s really a fear. It’s really an insecurity like how could I do something that other people are doing and it’s inappropriate and it’s not constructive.

ASTRID: Keith, to go back to what you said about how you had to decide that you’re okay with being different, I think that that decision is something that’s hard for a lot of people. Many people even consider that that might be something that they need to think about because what you’re talking about with making certain decisions and choosing to say something or not say something, also means that you have to have some sort of self-awareness. It seems like to one of the earlier points that we spend so much time in our virtual worlds that we don’t really spend that much time thinking about who we are or what we want, what kind of impression we want to make on others. Do you have any advice for how somebody who maybe notices that they would like to feel a little more intentional before it could get started?

KEITH: You mean besides the karaoke?

ASTRID: Besides karaoke.

KEITH: I think it’s just practice. A few years ago, I had a fear of flying. Whenever I would be in a plane and I heard some noises or I feel some vibration, I would be frightened and I would think, “What does this mean? What going on?” I read a book called ‘Triumph Over Fear.’ It was a great book and eventually, I resolved my fear of flying by taking a couple of flying lessons and feeling what it was like to dive and to feel 2 gees and that kind of thing and understanding that the sensation I was feeling on the plane were nothing compared with what would happen if there were a serious problem.

But the reason I’m mentioning this is that the approach that she use in the book, Triumph Over Fear was that she would take people of very gradually through their phobias. I don’t think it’ll be too inappropriate to call it a phobia when somebody is afraid to reach out. I believe, it was long time ago that I read the book but I believe the example was of a lady who was afraid of high floors and tall buildings. She brought the woman to a building and she said, “How far can you go before you start feeling uncomfortable?” She said, “Oh, maybe 10 feet in front of the elevator.” She said, “Okay, let’s walk 10 feet from the elevator,” and then she said, “You think you could take one more step?” She took one more step, then maybe that was it for the day and they went home. They kept on doing this. After a few sessions, she was already on the 10th floor.

My point in saying this is that we can hack ourselves, we can change ourselves and the way to change ourselves a lot, I believe is to change ourselves a little many times. We can ask ourselves in a situation, “How far am I willing to go before I start feeling uncomfortable?” and then ask yourself, “What can I do in addition to that? How much further can I go in addition to that without feeling super-uncomfortable?” and doing that. Once we start exercising that muscle more and more, we can make more progress than we would otherwise. A lot of times we cripple ourselves by just thinking about where it is you want to go and we look at how far that is and we think, “Oh, man. I’m never going to get there so I’m going to try,” and that’s unfortunate.

JASMINE: I can so identify with you on the fear flying. My strategy was very similar as yours. I did not learn how to fly but I read a bunch of books on flying. I read a blog post about this pilot who basically has his blog about folks who are afraid of flying and he goes through the whole entire process. He’s like, “When you take off, you’re going to hear the landing gear drop. It might sound a little funny. It sounds funny from plane to plane. Every plane sounds different but these are the normal things or the things that you’re probably going to hear,” because that was a big thing for me. It’s just the sounds. For me, working through that and trying to face those things, I kind of read about it and be like, “Okay, I can do this. I can do this,” and I also started very, very small, very few short trips and then worked my way up. That definitely resonates with me. It’s little by little.

KEITH: That’s great.

JESSICA: Keith, the discussion about fear of being different reminds me of a conversation we had in this podcast with Eugenia Cheng, where she defined the words congressive and ingressive, where congressive is behavior and needs that are about helping everyone — we want to be part of the group and advance the group. Ingressive is it’s about me — I want to advance myself. As humans, we naturally have a lot of congressive urges and we get rewards from things that help everyone. I think this whole part of not wanting to be different from the group is part of our congressiveness.

Personally, I use that word congressive inhibition, which I made up, which is that impulse that holds us back from standing out or doing something that might annoy other people. That fear of being different in some ways is part of us wanting to do things to help everyone but it can hold us back too much.

KEITH: Yeah, a lot of it is just trying to make and form judgment about where that line is.

JESSICA: Yeah, you’re right. It’s about learning that because that part where you don’t want to stand out, that is part of you wanting to help the world. That’s not something bad about you but there’s a balance where you can help a little more by being different in some situations.

KEITH: I agree. That question about, “Is this going to be annoying or helpful?” is an important one but I think only for a subset of behaviors because there are some behaviors that are indisputably beneficial and there is no really gray area. I have mentioned in an article about one time when I was at a hotel in Toronto and there was a fire alarm and we were all told to leave the building. We were out there for 20 minutes and I saw this family who had apparently been swimming and they were freezing. I just walked up to one of the hotel staff and I said, “That family over there, they look really cold. Could somebody get them some towels or something?” so he did and in that case, there really wasn’t any kind of downside to acting but I’ve had to condition myself to do that, to be the one to go up and say something.

Just a couple of days ago, I was at my gym and they were playing on the TV a political commentary show, which was not really news, it was commentary. It was about Donald Trump and I won’t even mention which side it was on. It was actually on the side that I support and I said to the man there, “I think a lot of people would feel bad seeing this on TV. Can we put it on something more neutral?” He said, “Nobody’s ever complained about it before and I get that a lot because I am more vocal than anybody I know.” What I should have said was, “Someone just did.”

JESSICA: Yeah, there’s often that unspoken thought that everyone has and no one wants to be the one to say because you do you risk that rejection, right?

KEITH: Yes.

JESSICA: I asked myself, “What’s the worst that can happen?” and really, usually the worst that can happen is somebody says, “No, don’t do that,” and then I say, “Okay.”

KEITH: I was at a seminar on Kanban and had lunch. It took about 15 or 20 minutes for everybody to get fed. Later, the leader of the session said, “I noticed that at lunch time, it took a very long time for people to be fed. The table was up against the wall so there was only one line of people that could have gotten through. If you have moved the table a few feet over, you would have had two lines and it would have taken half the time.” I thought to myself, that’s really true. If I had thought of that, would I have said anything or if I would’ve said anything, why would I have not said anything? There are so many reasons —

JESSICA: Yeah, there are a lot of reasons and those reasons are usually like, “Maybe, there’s a reason that the tables up against the wall.” There’s a lot of reasons for things that we can’t just see but what’s the cost of asking, of suggesting? There really is that personal risk of projection. I think some of us are more sensitive to that than others. Personally, I’m really not so my theory is, “I’ll ask because it’ll cost me less if I’m wrong than it might someone else.”

ASTRID: I understand the feeling of not wanting to say something but I also grew up in a family with a grandmother who was that person who said something. There were very many times, where we would go to the store and then they would bring up her stuff and it was not the price that it said. A lot of people would be like, “It’s a few cents. It’s not a big deal.” My grandmother is like, “No, that’s not what it is.” She would stop the whole line. She didn’t care because to her, it was, “Why should I have to pay for your mistake?” She thought that was important enough because she felt like, “If I don’t say anything, then other people are going to have to pay for this too and that’s crazy.” That’s her attitude about a lot of that. More so, the idea of how can you help the group, for her it means, I speak up, as opposed to I don’t because I don’t want to ruffle feathers.

JESSICA: Nice. That behavior of speaking up is actually congressive.

ASTRID: Yes. There was a trip we took where we were all on this bus together going somewhere. We were going between states and this woman had these little confetti things she was popping because they believe it was 4th of July, which was annoying and she was close to us. My grandmother stood up and said, “Excuse me,” and I don’t remember all the words because I was cowering in my chair but she said basically like, “What you’re doing is very loud and rude and you’re getting confetti in other people and I would very much appreciate it if you stop because it’s not necessary,” and the woman was like, “Well, nobody said anything,” but then after my grandmother sat down, the entire bus started clapping.

They all felt this way but they were so afraid to say anything and my grandmother was saying, “The bus driver must have said something because that’s the person with some authority but if they’re not going to speak up, then I’m going to speak up because this is crazy and we shouldn’t have to go through this because this woman doesn’t have manners.”

SAM: Right. All of this is reminding me of a conversation we had yesterday in our Slack channel. By the way, if you’re listening to this and you’re not in our Slack channel, you can get into there by going to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and donating any amount. We have some really interesting conversations in there but yesterday we were talking about fire alarms because Jessica posted something in there about fire alarms and their function as a tool to make some of these decisions a little bit easier. Jess, you want to talk about that a little?

JESSICA: There was that thing where we talked about it earlier, we did experiment where people didn’t get up —

SAM: Uhm-mm, the smoke-filled room.

JESSICA: Right and it turns out that if you turn on a fire alarm, then they get up and they go out.

ASTRID: It’s like the permission thing.

JESSICA: Yeah.

SAM: Yeah, I think you dropped a tweet in the guest questions channel about how fire alarms aren’t useful because they tell you there’s fire. They’re useful because they tell you it’s socially acceptable to react.

JESSICA: Right and then Jacob pointed out that also when the smoke detector goes off, no one panics because a smoke detector is a socially acceptable and calm way to announce a fire, as opposed to running around screaming. Yet, a great comparison to linting, like pointing out that you’ve forgotten a semicolon at the end of this line might be constructive but it’s annoying as hell so we have the linter do it. The fire alarms are kind of like that too so that we can build automated machines to do that interruption, that pointing out activity for us when it’s socially painful to have a person point out that you put a space after your stupid curly brace.

SAM: I wonder if there are ways that we can use our processes, build these points into our workflows, where we can have checkpoints and make sure that everything is going smoothly and make it socially acceptable to say, “I noticed this thing.”

JESSICA: My friend Emma, to her job currently, to notice failed builds and pester the developers who’s built failed after she determines that it wasn’t just a transit in failure and this is hard for her. We’re currently working on an automation for this using Atomist — plugged for my work — but there’s reasons I work there and one of them is because she’s building an automation to look at the build log, determine why it failed and then ping the developer. When a bot does it, there’s not that social cost. Keith, you called this radical helpfulness?

KEITH: Yes and it’s important that it be radical because you want to go well beyond our normal level of healthfulness and even our comfort level.

JESSICA: So it’s radical because it’s uncomfortable. I like that because the name gives us permission to be uncomfortable in order to be helpful.

SAM: Yeah.

JESSICA: There’s something that you talked about way back at the beginning and it’s when you said and this is why I laughed at that at the time, “I try to butt in whenever I can, whenever I think I can be helpful.” But then you immediately followed that up with one of the things you can do to be helpful is listen and that it’s not about you. In this radical helpfulness, in fact if you feel really good about it like, “I’m so badass. I am going to move this table,” then it becomes about you and there’s a decent chance you’re not being helpful at all. Unlike if you walk into someone’s conversation and maybe they don’t want you there. That’s a question. You mentioned, you heard two people who are not communicating, how do you ask them whether they want your help at all?

KEITH: I guess it depends on the context. I mentioned in a blog article and also in the conflict resolution meeting that we had, I had a situation where a couple of my coworkers were arguing. It was a very heated argument and I just walked up to them and I said, “Would a third party be helpful here?” because I realized that [inaudible] turning on me. I didn’t want to be the problem. I want to be the solution so it’s a delicate balance. I’ve learned from hard experience that sometimes I’m wrong so I try to always keep in mind that I might be wrong here so I must not be arrogant about what I think is the right thing to do or what I think the solution is.

JESSICA: And if someone doesn’t like your help, you got to step back.

KEITH: Oh, yeah. That wouldn’t be helpful if not to step back.

JASMINE: Keith, I’m curious about the things like the markers that you see when it’s time for you to take a step back. One of the things I think about is body language and I guess, it’s probably the main thing that I can think of right now but what are your markers?

KEITH: Body language is a huge thing. Of course, asking up front is probably the safest thing to do. Sometimes, that’s not an option and just got to make adjustment. It’s a calculation, the perceived probability of success and failure and the perceived risk of danger and all these things has got to make a calculation at the strobe of the moment and I hope that you’ve made the right decision.

I have had the experience of proposing what I thought was the no-brainer solution and it turned out there was something deeper that I hadn’t thought about. That happened in code all the time too. I look at some code and I think, “That’s silly. Why did they do it that way?” and then it turns out that they had a really good reason so I really need to be very respectful of others and not jump to conclusions and not think that I’m infallible because I’m not.

JESSICA: Yeah. There’s a lot of ugly code out there that is beautiful you just don’t know why.

KEITH: Yeah.

JASMINE: One situation that I find it very hard to do that sometimes is when you are in remote environment. Lately, in the past few years, a lot of companies are embracing this remote, I don’t want to say culture but remote setting where folks didn’t have a chance to sit down and be in their comfort zone at home to do their job. I think about when you’re in a video chat or sometimes, when the audio is off, I think about how well do I know my team, to know when I need to either step back or input something. It can be very challenging especially when you can’t see everybody and sometimes, a lot of the communication is just through chatting in the chat room.

KEITH: Yeah, that’s a big issue. That’s why it’s so great when remote teams can get together in person sometime periodically.

JASMINE: Yeah, I agree.

KEITH: I think in the end, we just have to give ourselves permission to make mistakes and just make sure they were doing things out of the right intention and make sure that they were being respectful of other people. But there are times that I’d rather take a risk than not, even if I’m not sure. It’s really a judgment call and we have to give ourselves permission to make mistakes.

JESSICA: Yeah and when someone tells me, “No, because…” or even just, “No,” I say thank you because that’s a piece of information I did not have.

KEITH: If I were on the receiving end of the, “No,” I would be really curious to know why. Why ‘no’? Is it disrespectful to ask somebody why?

JESSICA: I guess it depends on the context. Like with my kids, there’s a few times when I just say no. That’s because it’s like dangerous or we don’t have time to explain it or something like that. Other times, I do think it’s rude to say no and I owed them an explanation. Sometimes the answer is, “No and you don’t want to know why.” They don’t want to know about grown up things.

SAM: I get that with my daughter a lot too.

JESSICA: That was some really good advice. I like how you said that we need the right intention and respect for other people because the right intention is not enough. We also need information and other people have that.

KEITH: Yeah. Our context as individuals are so limited.

JESSICA: I think it’s time for reflections. This is where each of the panelists gets to bring up a piece of the podcast that they found particularly insightful or bring something else in to think about.

ASTRID: Keith, as part of my reflection is that your life sounds like a movie so I need to do more.

KEITH: I have more time than you have.

ASTRID: Well, still. I mean what you have done by 20, I’m still on my bucket list. You said that the way to change ourselves a lot is to change ourselves a little many times, which is I think a great amazing quote because I feel like oftentimes, I have goals and I can see the path but getting there feels very overwhelming. I think it’s the same when you’re really talking about working on yourself, which can be sometimes harder because nobody can see what you can see. I love what you’re really saying here is just do something really, really small but just do it so many times that eventually, you’ll get there without even really thinking about it.

SAM: I also wrote down that quote about the way to change ourselves a lot is to change ourselves a little many times. I really liked that. One of the other things that struck out for me was this idea that you should decide that you’re okay with being different and I like that you call that out as an actual step that we need to take because I’ve known a few people who just were different and that’s just how they were but I feel like there are a lot more of us who need to actually be explicit about that.

I also really liked your suggestions about doing karaoke or taking flying lessons. Those were more interesting things that I hadn’t really thought about in terms of ways of training yourself too, in one case, get over your fear of flying and in the other case, I think of it as just to train yourself to be bold. This is really useful. Thank you.

JASMINE: For me, I think that same quote also resonated with me and also, made me look within myself to really think about how my character and how I just connect with other people. It was a really great reminder just to be mindful of myself and my actions.

JESSICA: One thing that I noticed in this episode, like you said Jasmine, it’s about being mindful. There’s a lot of conscious thought in all of these ways of being helpful in resolving conflict. There’s a lot of conscious listening and thinking and then making deliberate choices of what to do. The karaoke is a very deliberate choice to how to deal with the fear of flying. Change ourselves a little many times, each of those is conscious thought and choice in order to form the habits that we’re trying to become. You know what? If you’re doing that, good job because that’s a lot of effort. It’s not easy and it’s not comfortable and that’s okay.

KEITH: I find it very heartening that all of you are so introspective and caring about wanting to live a good life, the right life, helping other people. My hope is that there are many, many other people like you out there and we can all work together to create a safer and happier world.

JESSICA: Group hug!

KEITH: You cannot see my arms but they’re out in front of me.

JESSICA: All right. Thank you for joining us, for uniting for frequent dialogue. See you on Slack and on the next episode of Greater Than Code!

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.

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054: Code Hospitality with Nadia Odunayo

Mandy Moore — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 05:00:30 +0000

Panelists:

Jamey Hampton | Jacob Stoebel | Rein Henrichs

Guest Starring:

Nadia Odunayo: @nodunayo | nadiaodunayo.com | Ignition Works |
Ruby Book Club

Show Notes:

01:19 – Nadia’s Superpower

02:01 – Code Hospitality and Being a Good Host

Nadia Odunayo: The Guest: A Guide To Code Hospitality @ GORUCO 2016

Daniel Dennett’s “Intuition Pump”

10:22 – People and Habits and Having Expertise in a Particular Realm

17:00 – Asking Questions/Waiting for Explanation Rather Than Passing Judgement

22:16 – Codebases Are Constantly Changing: Use the README to Give Context

Code Hospitality Guide App

27:27 – Making Diagrams Whilst Coding/Pairing

Rapoport’s Rule

32:27 – Thinking About the “Why”

36:44 – Giving and Receiving Feedback in a Nonviolent Way

Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

39:09 – Host Responsibilities for Hospitality

Reflections:

Jamey: Breaking down the power dynamic of learning.

Jacob: Unspoken rules and normalized behavior based on location and telling stories to make people feel more at home.

Rein: Recognizing emotional labor.

Nadia: The mindset and safe spaces.

Nadia Odunayo: This Code Sucks — A Story About Nonviolent Programming

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

JAMEY: Hi everyone and welcome to Episode 54 of Greater Than Code. I’m Jamey Hampton and I’m very excited to introduce a guest panelist, Jacob Stoebel, from our Slack community. This is one of the benefits of being part of our Slack community, you might get asked to be a guest panelist. Thank you for being on, Jacob.

JACOB: Thank you very much. I am joined by Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Hi, thank you Jacob. I am super excited because I get to introduce, Nadia Odunayo.

NADIA: Yeah, not bad.

REIN: Not bad working on that name. It’s a really interesting name. Nadia runs Ignition Works, a double act, who are currently focused on helping enterprise teams run and maintain cloud platforms. Previously, she was a software engineer at Pivotal and she originally learned the code at Makers Academy. She loves to speak at conferences and help organize them. In her spare time, she runs the Ruby Book Club Podcast and does as many commercial dance classes as she can. That’s a pretty full ticket. You’re doing a lot of stuff.

NADIA: Yeah, all fun stuff.

REIN: Thank you so much for being on the podcast with us, Nadia.

NADIA: Thank you for having me.

JAMEY: A lot of times, we like to start out by asking our guests, “What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?”

NADIA: I guess my superpower is my smile because I’m always smiling. People always comment on it and it means that on the rare occasions I’m not smiling, people always quick to asks, “What’s wrong?” I think my smile is special because it always calms situations and makes people feel warm. I guess I just acquired it. Naturally, I’ve always been smiling. I think I’ve been smiling since I was born.

JAMEY: That’s so wonderful. I love that you didn’t even have to practice it. It just happened.

NADIA: You see, I can’t stop now.

JAMEY: I wish we’re a video podcast so everyone could see. Nadia, I’m really excited to have you on the show today because I know we’re going to be talking about the idea of code hospitality, which I’m really interested in. It was a concept that I wasn’t familiar with before. Can you give us to start the cliff notes on it, then we can get into it more after?

NADIA: Sure. The reason why you’re probably not familiar with it is because I created it last year myself. You wouldn’t have heard about it anywhere, unless you were watching the talk for it. Code hospitality was born when I was working with my business partner on a Rails project and I was really struggling with whatever we happen to be working on at that time. I just felt like I was hitting a brick wall and I was beating myself up a lot about it.

To put it in perspective, Theo, the guy that I work with, he has got 10 years of experience in Rails. At the time, I had two to three years of experience so there was a big experience gap. He could see that I was beating myself up and he said, “It’s like Rails is my city and I’ve lived here all of my life,” and what he was trying to say — and it did work, it did calm me down — was that, “It makes sense that I’m getting this and you’re not because I live here. I’m so used to the streets and the way this works. I know this like the back of my hand, whereas it’s an unfamiliar place to you so it’s fine that you’re struggling.”

When he said that, that got me thinking about this idea of seeing our codebases and the tools that we use as places where we live. If I thought about it like, Theo is this person who’s lived in the City of Rails for a long time and I’ve just arrived, I haven’t just arrived but just to put it in perspective, I’ve just arrived and I want to get to know this place too so it was, when you’re a new person visiting the city and perhaps you’ve got someone who has lived there for a long time, what’s the best way for you to quickly start to find your way around, for you to learn about the quirks of the place but also for you to feel at home.

There were two roles that came to mind: the role of the host, the person who has lived there for a long time, what can they do to help make you feel welcome and to put you on your own two feet and then the role of the guest as in what can you be proactive in doing and what should you expect or not expect to happen if you are in an unfamiliar place. That’s just the quick high-level overview of what the code hospitality concept is.

JACOB: If a codebase as a city, does that mean there can be codebases that are unfriendly or might seem unfriendly or that might seem in your face or they could have cultures that are off-putting to a newcomer?

NADIA: It’s funny because when I first heard the proposal for the talk, it focused a lot more on the code itself and the codebase itself and how that code was written and whether it was welcoming or not. But when I started writing the talk, I found the ideas that I wanted to talk about were more around the people working on the codebase and how they interacted. Partly also, I found that was quite hard to stipulate what is welcoming and what is not welcoming because everyone has different views and ideas on what welcoming or good code is and I didn’t want to go there. Also because I think it is more important to focus on how the people are interacting around the codebase.

But sure, I think there are some practices that are unwelcoming and in fact, one of the things that I talked about in the talk are READMEs as an orientation tool and how I think a lot of READMEs today are, I wouldn’t say misguided. Maybe they could be doing a better job of guiding a contributor to a codebase beyond just the initial set up, for example. There are practices and things that I talked about that touch on the codebase so I do think that there are some things in the codebase that could be done to make it more welcoming or less welcoming but I do think that the important thing to focus on is the interactions between the people working on the codebase.

REIN: I love just the metaphor of the codebase as a place because it lets you bring to bear all of your experience with traveling or with having guests in your home and your understanding of what makes that a pleasant experience or not and it just lets you transport all of that knowledge and reuse it when you look at what makes this codebase a pleasant experience to learn or what makes a person a good host to a new developer on the codebase. When I think about what do I do when I want to be a good host, I feel like I can apply a lot of the principles behind that directly, not even having fully experienced your talk but just thinking it through in my brain. I think that’s what makes it such a powerful analogy.

NADIA: That’s great that you should say that because that’s pretty much how I start my talk. I start my talk with this story about how I leased my spare room on Airbnb or something like that and this woman gets in touch and says that she’s thinking of coming to live in London and do I have any time to help her to show her around. I tell this little story at the beginning of how I tidy up my flat, I go and pick her up at the airport, I plan things for her to do initially but I also make sure there’s space for her to do her own thing. Then at the end, we have a meal and it’s almost like, “How was that for you? What did you like? What didn’t you like?”

Then I also tell a couple of anecdotes at the talk when she’s trying to find a particular place that she went to before and I took her there but I didn’t give her any tools to help her remember how to get back there. Little anecdotes like that at the talk, which I then tied back to, “What does this mean when we’re coding with somebody or trying to introduce somebody to a codebase?” Things like if you’re pairing with someone and you’re just going ahead and doing things how you normally do it, then they’re not really going to learn and know how to do it themselves the next times. Not much of the story of when the character of my story, Alex is trying to find somewhere that I’ve really taken her.

Then I also asked, at the beginning of my talk, the people to put up their hands if they’ve been a guest, if they’ve been a host, think of what makes a good guest, what makes a bad guest. Sometimes I asked people in the audience, “What did you do last time before you received a guest?” I start to prime people to think in terms of the things that you spoke about just now and then that gets them in the right mindset, when we start talking about the codebase, they start making those connections themselves.

REIN: I love when you can find analogies that are so fittingly like this one that they explain so much just on themselves. Daniel Dennett uses the term ‘Intuition Pump’ to talk about things that when you think about them, they help you build your intuition just by thinking through and understanding that thing. In this case, just thinking more about how I would apply being a good host to onboarding new engineers onto my team and things like that, something I’m working on right now, is really interesting for me.

NADIA: What’s interesting is when I was giving the talk at different conferences, different people would come up to me afterwards and apply the analogy to a particular problem they had or a particular thing that happened. For example, I had someone come up to me and say, “I’m trying to explain this concept to somebody,” and before I was just trying to say it how I would do it but I realized that’s not very helpful now so I’m going to extend it this way so I’m equipping them to be able to do it themselves.

I did have one more moving encounter after one of my talks, where I had this man came up to me, he looked quite sad and he said, “You know, we just recently hired a junior developer and they recently left because it wasn’t a good fit but listening to your talk, I realized that I did a lot wrong at the manager and I wasn’t a proper host and really the problem was more on my side than on their side.”

On one hand I was really glad that that person has come to a realization but also quite sad to think that what if he hadn’t come to my talk and going forward, if there were more junior developers in that situations. I guess the positive is that that person realized but it was also quite moving that they looked genuinely sad and as if it they had a realization of, “I’ve been thinking about it incorrectly.”

JACOB: That’s really interesting. I live in a town that’s very different from where I grew up right now. It’s a small rural town in the south in the United States. I feel like I’ve more or less become a person who lives here, not the person who visits. When I first moved here, I was very much a visitor and I was sort of thinking very consciously about why people do things this or at that way or why they drive certain ways, why, why, why, why, why and I think for the most part of it is I sort of stop thinking about why that is and it’s making me think like when a family visits or when friends from out of town come and visit, me and my wife are talking to them about these are some of the quirks of our town, we find ourselves sort of re-investigating why those particular eccentricities that we normally don’t think about on a daily basis. I feel like having guests to your codebase can have the same positive effects.

NADIA: Yes, so you touched on an idea that I originally had when I was mapping out this talk but that didn’t make it into the talk and that’s the whole piece around you said, why people drive in a certain way or take a certain route or things like that. When I was first thinking about the idea of code hospitality, one of the key things was people getting to habits. They get into their habits and they do things in a certain way. Sometimes it’s because they don’t even think about it. They just go and used to doing it. They just get up at this time. They take the train just because or sometimes, people do certain things because they’re optimizing for something that’s important to them so it could be cost, it could be fresh air, it could be whatever.

There were two sides for that. One as a host, when you’re getting ready to welcome another person, you can take time yourself to think about, “Now, what do I do things like this?” because for example, one of the ideas I had was the person coming to stay with you, messages you and says, “How do I get from the airport to your place?” Now, your instinct might be to just say the way that you always get from the airport to your place. You might just get a taxi, for example. But the real question is what is the guest’s parameters? What they need? Is it that they want to get there as quickly as possible? Do they have a budget?

Thinking about codebases, when it comes to writing a test in a certain way or delivering a feature, you take certain steps and particularly when you’re an experienced developer, you start questioning it. But when you’re working with a less experienced developer and you have to start explaining things, now it can come down to, “I don’t really know why I do it like that,” or, “I don’t like this because I don’t have this pain before and this is a way to avoid it.”

But if you do uncover the reason why you do something, one, the other person you’re working with, particularly if you have a particular reason, they might be able to show you a way that’s better so you might say, “Oh, I do this because it’s cheaper,” or because it’s a safe way to maintain quality. The other person might say, “Oh, have you thought about this?” The stuff is within your parameters but it’s a new way. Alternatively, if there is no real reason and it’s just habit, then once you recognize that, you’re probably more open minded to try things differently anyway because you realize, “It has been done in that way for 10 years and no one’s really told me otherwise. Of course, I’ll try something else.

I think it’s very valuable starting to question, “Do I do this out of habit? Or do I do this because there’s a real pain or there’s a real need and I want to protect for that?” and being of either way, can help you explain it to others, explain it to yourself, particularly be open to finding new opportunities when you work with different people. One thing I want to mention, though is I just use the comparison between a more experienced developer and a less experienced developer. Something I said at the beginning of my talk is, although the examples I’m using, because I’m talking about myself and Theo or they’d map to a senior developer versus a more junior one, but I’ll say that the difference between a guest and a host is not equal to junior versus senior because it’s more about expertise in a particular realm and that realm could be anything as broad as a whole codebase or to the team you’re working on, down to something particular line of code.

In some versions of the talk, I give a particular example where I was working with an iOS developer who’d been doing iOS work for five years but they’d never done test driven development. He had five years more experience than me in the iOS side or the Objective-C side but he’d never done TDD and I’d had two years of experience in that, for example. When we were paring, he was the host, when it came to writing the code and I was the guest but in the same session, I was the host when it was like, “Here’s how we think about test driven development,” and he was the guest so I try and pitch it that. It’s a malleable thing and it says more of a frame of mind that you’ll always be a guest and a host at the same time, most of the time.

JAMEY: I really, really like that because I think it can be really easy to get very caught up in the junior versus senior. This is actually helpful for me right now because I work at a very small startup and we recently hired a new CTO. I was the only developer at our company that had expertise in the codebase but then we hired someone that’s much more senior to me, to come in and be my superior. I felt very uncomfortable teaching him about code because he has more experience in this and he’s a senior level person and he knows all these things but he was coming to me with all these questions because it was about things that I was familiar with.

I also really like what you said about reconsidering why we’re doing things in a certain way because when he would ask me, “Why is it like this here?” I felt very uncomfortable being like, “I don’t know. It just is.” Because I felt like he was going to be like, “But why? Explain your decisions to me,” and some of this was from before I even started at the company and I’m like, “I don’t know, because someone did it that way,” and I felt like he was going to come in and be like, “Well, you don’t know anything about what you’re doing at all.” It wasn’t like that. It was more of like, “Let’s discuss this,” and I think putting that frame around like ‘this is a good time to discuss these things’ is very helpful.

NADIA: That’s another thing I mentioned in my talk. When you said this idea of you were concerned that this new person would come in and start saying, “Why have you done this? Why have you done that?” At this talk, I talked to either the host or the guest and for the guests, I make this point of when you go into someone’s house you don’t go around saying, “This is messy. Why did you put this there? Why did you put that there?” You’re often quite polite and I say it’s almost the same thing in a codebase, which is be patient and wait to hear why things are in a certain way.

If you see a lack of tests or maybe a messy bit of code, ask questions about it but don’t cast a judgement immediately like, “Why you didn’t go test it?” or, “This is awful. You don’t know what you’re doing,” because in the same way that you would go into someone else’s house and say that, it’s a [inaudible] thing, this context in history that you don’t know. It could be that indeed was an oversight or was negligence and it’s a bad way and you’re going to help them see a better way but just like how you wouldn’t just start commenting on someone’s things… Well, I think you shouldn’t do the same thing in a codebase but I think people do feel that it’s easier to [inaudible] a new codebase and start grumbling about the code and say, “This is not to my standards.”

This is why it’s particularly important that the whole guest/host thing is not mapped to junior/senior because you can be a much more senior developer going into a codebase that you’ve never seen before so you’re the guest. But you think, “This is not the standard,” or, “This is all wrong,” but really, you need to take time with the team and hear the story. When you go to someone’s house and you see stuff all of the floor, wait to hear the story about why the stuff all of the floor. Was there some works done and there wasn’t time to finish it and the person had to go and do something else but they’re aware of it. Hear the story as well, so be patient as well.

JACOB: It would probably be harder to learn about the place when your mindset is looking for things to go… I mean, using the analogy of host and guest and not host and cop or host and invader. It’s like, you’re trying to learn more and then eventually, you can live there and eventually, you can say, “Now, that I’m your roommate and not a guest, the clothes on the floor are messing up my ability to live here.”

NADIA: Exactly. I like the thing what you said: a host and a cop, like an inspector for example. You’re not an inspector going to say, “Yep, check, check, check. This is all good.” You’re trying to move in as well so it’s a compromise and it does relationship building and it takes time.

JACOB: Right.

JAMEY: I think there might also be a call for empathy here because if I went into someone’s house and it was a mess and they said, “There was some sort of natural disaster that costs our house to be a mess,” I would be like, “I’m so sorry. That’s so horrible. How can I help you fix it?” Whereas if I went into a codebase and I thought it was crap or whatever, you might be more likely to be like, “Why is this like this?” Even the reason is there were problems and there were issues and we’ve had a natural disaster, in a way or things out of her control, maybe it’s a call for empathy to be like, “Oh, I’m sorry that your codebase has gotten messy because of these things out of your control. How can we fix it?”

NADIA: This interview is a good sign. I think I had a little bit of bright ideas tied up because my main conclusion is that when we do code hospitality, it enables us to empathize and I talked about how it’s really difficult to work out what empathy means and what it is and how you practice it. If we have a framework that we can use that’s very common to all of us, it’s very rare that we are never in a situation, even if it’s very temporarily, like if we enter a new building or a meeting that we haven’t been a guest or host, then even when you’re the guest, you understand what it means to be a host and you can put yourself in the other person’s shoes and understand where they might be coming from.

Like you said this idea of natural disaster, there are so many things happening around a codebase that could lead to a poor codebase. It could be people leaving all of a sudden, difficulties in team communication, all that sort of stuff so that’s why you need to understand and empathize with those sorts of issues. If you’re a host and you think about, “Oh, yeah. What would it be like to be a CTO or a developer on this team when three people have left in the last two weeks?” or when they’re suddenly bought by another company and there’s a lot of flux or they have so many remote developers and they’re all in different time zones. If you start to think about those things, then you can say, “Oh, I understand how we got here.”

JACOB: Cities have histories that are living in there, on their streets and buildings. I guess codebases can too. When people are visiting wherever I happen to be living, I love sharing those stories that are embedded inside the physical place, like there was a fire here 10 years ago in this neighborhood and it’s never been the same since. You can say the same thing as just like you say, what’s the story behind the lack of tests. Is there a trauma behind that? Is there a story of people that are overworked or burned out? There can be some real human stories attached to certain parts of the codebase.

NADIA: Definitely and one of the bits of the talk where I talked about orientation and I talked about the README, I talked about that is a good place to explain the history or context or the narrative, if you can or if there is something around the current state of the codebase, how it got to be where it is or anything that would help someone who’s coming in just to set the scene in their head. I use it, particularly I say, even for open source projects where everyone is remote essentially, really it’s like you’re going into an office but they could have be a lot of history on an open source project that understand, this is how this project came to be, this is why the states come like this, this is the history of the maintainers. The story behind it, then that can help someone come in and understand, even if it’s a specific feature they’re going to deliver, they can have the scene set in their head of this is all the history, whether it’s a political one or a social one or maybe there’s nothing but that can help them start to feel at home in that repository, for example.

REIN: The more you think about it, the more it just strikes me as such a fitting analogy. Code is written by people. Code is a manifestation of the culture of the people that wrote it, the problems that they have, the constraints that they have. Cities are the same thing. Cities are manifestation of the cultures that built the buildings and the geography and the access to resource and all of these constraints, all these parameters that cost the city to be the way it is but the city is also evolving and changing all the time: old buildings get removed, new buildings get built and a codebase is the same too. One of things I love about the city analogy is it captures this idea of change as being normal and necessary.

NADIA: Yeah, definitely. The fact is just like a home, every day that you live in it and you walk around, things are changing. It’s the same as codebase. It’s constantly changing. That’s why I think it’s quite important that one provide the tools to help people get set up but also know where to go next so that’s why I talked about READMEs often get you to, “Now, you have it running locally,” but they don’t mean to guide you in terms of this is what this home is about, this is the history here. But also, that’s why it’s important when as a host, to not only help you guest out initially but also give them the tools or the set up that they can help themselves because you can’t be holding their hand forever.

While I’m a big proponent of pairing all the time or pairing whenever you can, even within a pairing situation, the other person needs to feel confident and know that they could do this by themselves, if needs be. I talked about the fish versus fishing. An old colleague of mine, he said to me, “You know, that phrase, ‘Give a person a fish, feed them for a day, teach them to fish, feed them for a year or a lifetime.’ Well, I think that phrase is bullshit because if the person is starving while you’re teaching them to fish, they’re going to die.”

I love this and I thought, “I could put this in my talk,” because it is important to find that balance between giving someone some fish or maybe some vegetables if they don’t eat fish, and teaching them how to fend for themselves. If someone new comes into your company or joins your team, you should assume, not that they’re starving but assume that they need a bit of sustenance and support just to get them going, then they can focus on starting to ramp up and be independent by themselves, I think it is important you find that balance because, like you said Rein, things are always evolving so if you suddenly throw someone in the deep end, it’s likely that they might not be able to keep up.

Also if you do that, they might not also know that it’s okay to ask questions and say that, “No, I’m not fine,” because they think, “I just got to keep up.” Before you know it, it might be too late like that story I told you earlier about the person who said the junior developer that didn’t work out and they were gone very quickly. That could be the case of someone thrown into the deep end and they weren’t given enough support. But then, because things are always changing, you can’t rely on always having someone with you so you also need to be at the same time equipping this person to be able to deal with that change and handle it by themselves. That concept of being primed for continual change is very important.

JACOB: Maybe instead of teaching someone to fish, just fishing with them?

NADIA: Yeah, probably — pair fishing. Then if one day you don’t turn up, the person realizes, “Oh, I know what to do because I’ve been doing this by myself with my pair for a while.”

JAMEY: I love that too because with fishing, I think a big benefit of pair fishing or just be that it’s more enjoyable to fish for someone else, than to do it by yourself. Maybe, that could be the same with code as well.

REIN: Yeah, another one I think is that it’s actually really hard to tell someone how to fish versus showing someone how to fish.

NADIA: Yeah, I think it is more effective to show somebody, not to tell them because even through the act of telling them, that adds another layer of communication like a potential miscommunication. I think it’s a combination of showing and then also communicating what you’re doing. One of the things in the talk that I mentioned is to say [inaudible] diagrams whilst you’re coding because it’s one thing to show somebody something but when you’re approaching a problem together, you probably have different mental models of the starting point.

To get this point across, imagine that the next story in your backlog is as a user, I want to get into the Tower of London. The Tower of London has start [inaudible] in London, over on the Thames and I say, “You’re looking at it and you see this,” and I showed this aerial view of the Tower of London. Then I say, “But the person you’re working with is seeing this,” and I show this view straight on to the door so on the ground looking at the doors. I say, “Obviously, both of your respective heads, you’re going to have a completely different solution to how you get into the Tower of London.

I say that it’s the same when coding. You might pick up user story and again, particularly someone who lived there for a long time and you just joined, you probably have a different starting point in your head just from understanding, “I know that the codebase behaves like this, it has this quirk or we typically tend to approach this kind of feature like this,” and the other person probably bringing a perspective from different codebases or how they used to do things. I say something that’s useful that it’s just always before diving into the code, talk about it, get out, even if it’s just boxes and lines or whatever sort of thing works for you. I talked about how when I was working with Theo on a particular problem, we weren’t going anywhere but there was this perception of, “This is easy,” and I was thinking, “No, this is hard.”

Theo said, “Draw how you think these objects are interacting,” and I drew this jumbled up diagram, which showed that I had this jumbled up concept of how the object were behaving or interacting and that’s why I found it difficult but we drew a more streamlined diagram together, I can’t remember what they called. It’s the kind of diagram that Sandi Metz has a lot of them and her POODR book with the boxes and then shows how the messages being sent. Is there a particular name for this? Is it role activity? No, I can’t remember.

Anyway, I drew a different style of diagram with Theo that was a much more straightforward diagram. As soon as we do that diagram, it was immediately like, “Ah, I know what test we need to write now. Okay, I know about implementation,” and it was just so powerful, just drawing that diagram and to think if we draw in a half an hour early, that would have been half an hour of, “Don’t know where I’m going,” that we just wouldn’t have had.

One of the things I talked about in the talk is pair but whilst pairing, have scraps of paper around just you can jot things down, check you on the same page and one of the other things I say is that it’s important that, even if you’re the host — you’re the person who is more experiences — you don’t assume that it’s the other person that’s lost and that they need to get to where you are. Instead you’re both at different places, how do you get to the same place that then stop going because if you always assume that it’s the other person that’s lost and you’re in the right place, then we get back to all of those things that we spoke earlier around your habits and you just do things the way you do and open to different ideas. There might be a better way to do things. It’s also not a helpful learning setup if it’s like teacher/student. It’s very important that it’s guest/host as opposed to teacher/student and, “I’m right and I’m going to tell you how you’re going to pass the test or find the right answer,” because that can also just not be a helpful or empowering learning set up.

REIN: I am reminded a little bit of and this was also mentioned in Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pump, Rapoport’s Rules for holding an argument in a kind way. The first is that you should attempt to re-express your targets position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says, “Thanks. I wish I thought of putting it that way.” What I’ve actually found a lot in working through problems or conflicts is that a lot of the times, if you can see the issue from the same perspective or if you can share the same perspective, the issue actually just goes away and the issue actually was a mismatched set of understandings or perspectives.

JACOB: Or sometimes, it’s like we agree and we just choose to tell the story of how we see it differently but when we get right down to it. We prefer to argue about how to get to a place in the city, rather than just about where to go. It’s like someone will find, “Oh, it doesn’t actually matter which way we take.”

JAMEY: I feel like when an argument ends with, “No, actually, we agree,” we agree the whole time. It’s good. It can be frustrating because you’ll like, “We just wasted time arguing for no reason,” but I usually feel like, “No, it’s good. We are on the same page.”

REIN: I would say that the activity of getting on the same page is probably the most valuable thing you could have done in that time so it was time well spent.

NADIA: Yeah and it always feels really relieving afterwards. You’re like, “Oh, okay. I feel good now.” Even if you’re like, “What did it take so long if we were on the same page?” But this things always happen.

REIN: This gets back a little bit when you have a guest come into a codebase to be polite and to be understanding of the situation and how it arose and not just assume that don’t mistake your lack of context for all of your ideas have to be right because you can’t see why they could be wrong. One tactical thing that I try to do is I try to always say, “What if?” instead of, “You should do this.” I always just say, “What if we change this to be like that?” because that gives them an opportunity to say, “It’s like this because of this that you didn’t know about.”

NADIA: Right. When you say ‘what if,’ is that a place where you know the answer but you are trying to use it as a learning tool or you go –?

REIN: It’s usually when I want to suggest a thing that I think would be an improvement but I don’t know if I’m right or not because I don’t have all the context to know why that could actually not work.

NADIA: Yeah, I think that’s a great tool that anyone could use actually. Another thing I found, actually when working with most experienced developers is that if you say, “Let’s do,” I’m not for one trying to shut you down or whatever. The other developer might say, “No, because…” and they’re not trying to just prevent you from doing things but if they foresee, “Ah, that’s not going work because I’ve had experience of this before. I didn’t know you’re going to come into that pain.” I think that’s a disadvantage because often, less experienced developers need the chance to fail to understand why things have failed, in order to help them to learn and make better decisions in the future.

However, when you phrase it like, “What if we did,” perhaps in some cases, we’ll force the other person to think about why. If they haven’t got a good reason, then they’re more likely, I think to say, “Actually, let’s try to see why.” Even if they say, “I have a hunch that it won’t work,” but they’ll say, “Let’s try because I’m not sure.” I like that tool of ‘what if’ other than, “Let’s do this,” but I think that makes it easy to say, “Oh, no. I don’t think that will work.” But if you go, ‘what if’ and then why, I think other developers, especially those open-mind to learning will want to see for themselves, “Why not?” if indeed they can come up with a good answer. But if they can, then that’s also a better learning tool as well.

REIN: Yeah generally, I get one of two things out of it. I either get more understanding of the thing and why my idea what more or we try it and it either works or it doesn’t work. But I will say that on the flip side, I think that the host has a responsibility to value and encourage the new perspectives that a guest has, because a lot of times when you’re living in a situation, you can’t see it with fresh eyes, you can’t adopt a beginner’s mind, you can gain a lot by being open to suggestions from a guest, even if they’re not phrased in the most polite way and to try to work through what can be superficial communication issues, to get at the actual insight that they might have.

NADIA: Yeah and that’s why, I think the analogy is really important on both sides because it’s not just, “I’m a guest so it’s fine. I’m unfamiliar. It makes sense that I don’t stand this.” It’s also, “I’m a host so I have to be a bit careful, a bit more reserved just because this person is vulnerable and uncertain so they may say things or do things, which don’t typically fit what I’m used to but that’s not because they’re wrong. That’s just because they know differently.” If thinking about it, they come from a different culture or a different way of living or a different environment so it’s not wrong. It’s just different. I think that’s very important, this idea of right versus wrong/different and maybe, I could learn from different as well as teaching my way.

REIN: Actually, at least for me, it’s really difficult in the host role and the guest says, “That looks bad. You should do with this other way instead.” Even if they’re right, I find myself less likely to agree with them and it takes a lot of self-assessment on my part and self-regulation to be able to say, “You know what? Despite how that came off, I should actually think about whether there’s something there or not,” and maybe talk with them about how we could exchange this information in a nicer way in the future.

NADIA: Yes, definitely and that gets into another part of my talk, which is a little about feedback. The talk is split into three parts. The first part is about setting tone. It’s all around the, “This is not teacher/student, senior/junior. You might want to do some cleaning, think about how you’re going to show someone around, find that balance,” and then there’s the whole bit about pairing and delivering values. That’s the whole sketch the diagrams and workout where you’re both at and then get on the same page.

Then the third part is about feedback because I say that things are inevitably going to go wrong we’re not 100% so you need to be able to talk about that on the both sides. But I also say that even if things have gone amazingly well, you should talk about it and say, “Why things have gone well?” because that can just help more of the same in future. That’s when I touched on the whole nonviolent communication style of talking: How would you talk about feelings? How do you talk about what you need? How do you make requests to other people?

When you said, that’s a perfect example of you’re the host and the burden is on you in the moment to not flip out or to not just discount because you didn’t like how it was said but you also need to have the space to give that feedback because there’s a lot of burden on you to just keep excusing things because you’re like, “I’m the host. They’re the guest. I should excuse them,” that’s not going to end well because they’ll be a lot of tension and one day, you might let go or one day, you might just ignore because you’re fed up or you might shut the person down and that could get even worse so I talked about on how it’s very important.

Even on a daily basis, just to have a quick check in on how is today for you, what should we change next time. That ‘what should we change next time,’ I felt frustrated when you said specific word here so it’s not just casting a judgement or generalization because I need support or confidence or trust or whatever it is that you need. Next time, perhaps you could face it this way so that hasn’t go, “I see why that came across this way.” I talked about a better framework for giving and receiving feedback in a nonviolent way that will help these one-on-one interactions, pairing sessions, guest/host relationships get stronger each day.

REIN: You said there were some things that you couldn’t make fit in your talk. Was there anything else that you really wanted to talk about in the talk that didn’t make it in?

NADIA: When I was thinking about more on the code way, there was a time when — this is a very specific. Do you all use Rails?

JACOB: Yeah.

NADIA: Typically, there’s a standard way of writing an endpoint and we had to deliver a certain video format. We need to do a video format in m3u8 and I didn’t realize you could just do ‘.m3u8’ to change the endpoint. I’d written this note about how that was like if you go to a city and everyone’s dressing the same, it’s the one-time you went to the town center and you see everyone wearing like purple dresses so you assume, “I had wear purple dress.” You don’t know because you haven’t been there for a long time. Actually, you don’t have to wear a purple dress. You could wear red trousers. I talk about how’s the hosts responsibility to always think about what you’ll seeing and to highlight those cases like what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. Do you see what I mean? Because other people have all gotten into habit.

JACOB: That’s really cool. I really appreciate it when visiting somewhere and a host tells me, “This is where the tourists go,” or, “When people are here for just a day, this is what they do. But what we like to do for fun on a day-to-day…” you know, for people who like live here, “we can do all these other things.” It’s like, “We don’t all just go to the Statue of Liberty every single day.” This is everything that’s available to you in the city.

NADIA: Yeah, similar to that kind of thing and I guess taking someone somewhere, I talked about three different ways that you could do if someone says, “I want to get somewhere,” you can either just take them there and go back. You could give them a map and say, “Here you go. Go,” or you could do something in between where you go with them but you point out things in a way and when you’re coding, if you’re pairing someone, you can just do so then they would really learn or you could just let them do it by themselves and the other things was like, “Do they need the balance?” Or you can pair with them but suggest different things along the way and explain why. I don’t talk about it because it’s not made into my talk but still, how that’s probably a better… Oh, I do actually talked about that in my talk.

REIN: One thing I wanted to ask you about are what are some specific things that hosts can do to make their codebases more welcoming? We talked a little bit about READMEs. What are the things that you can add to a README or how can you structure a README? When I think about making a guest in a city more hospitable, I think about maps and travel guides and things like that. What are the things in the codebase that are equivalent or offer the same value?

NADIA: I actually made a little example code hospitable README. I think it’s a gist. I don’t know if I can find the link. Can you add that to the show notes? But in my talk, I have a little video clicking through [inaudible] this code hospitable README. I do start with installation, users contributing, the kind of normal things that you see in a codebase because it’s useful. It’s like opening, “Here are the keys to get into the front door.” Then I have four more sections. One is history. It’s the story, where did this idea come from, how did we get there, where we are now. Then I talked about approaches: What are the philosophies or the patents within this codebases? Is there a certain pattern you used to write your tests or is there a certain overall approach?

I give a specific example of the philosophy because in the Active Record README, there is a philosophy section and it talks about how it is actually an implementation of object-relational mapping and here’s a link to a blog post by Martin Fowler and here are some of the general principles. It’s like, “We have this thing called ‘conventional reconfiguration,’ or something else called the metadatabase.” That’s just the high level, “This is how we generally approach things in this codebase,” and I thought that was really useful.

Then I have a reading material section, which might be external things like the Active Record README that lead to the Martin Fowler blog post or it might be internal things that you or someone else in a team has written about anything that’s relevant to the codebase. Then I have the section called walkthrough. This is meant to be the equivalent of a guided walking tour and I thought it was the case of walking through a particular feature so I thought you could start with, “Here was the feature,” and maybe it’s a commit by commits sort of, “Here’s the first test that we wrote. Here’s how we then implemented it.” It’s just a short thing so that someone could say, “Now when I go to the [inaudible], I see this feature,” or, “When I look in the issue tracker, I see this issue.”

I can see how someone who has lived here for a while and did it and that can get me started by how I should approach it. I think that’s particularly important even with open source, maybe you’re contributing a feature to an open source codebase for the first time and you want your work to be accepted and merged in. It’s a good way to understand, “Here’s how people typically do it.” We got to be careful that we don’t end up saying, “This is how we do it here and you do it like this or good bye.”

But it should be in the frame of mind of, “If you’re stuck or if you’re not sure, here’s how we’ve done it.” But I would hope that open source maintainers and even within your day-to-day job, people are always open to new approaches. It’s very important that you keep that side of things as well. It’s not just, didn’t even need the guide. We don’t do things like that here. At least not without a good explanation of why not. I’ve made all of this up, by the way. At the end of the talk, I do say that this is something that I’ve made up. The main thing is the frame of mind of the guest/host but you should take that and apply that to however you do things, if you need to make things better as opposed to, “This is how you do code hospitality.”

REIN: I feel like the reason that you’ve been so successful with this and been able to build up so much material around how to think about code hospitality is because it’s such a good metaphor. I really think it is.

NADIA: You love it.

REIN: I do. I like it.

JAMEY: I really love it too.

REIN: I love everything that gets me to think about my relationships with other people in a different way and to sort of reexamine how I interact with people based on power dynamics or things like that. Host/guest is a form of power dynamic, in a way. I’m always on the market for cool metaphors analogies in that space and I think this is one of them so I’m really happy.

NADIA: Yay! Thank you. I’m glad you all like it. Actually, that’s one of the scary things. I got really excited by the idea initially when I first thought about it with Theo and then I sketched out so many ideas and then I wrote a proposal. Then when it got accepted and I was [inaudible] of the talk, it felt really silly to me. I thought everyone’s going to bit say, “What is this silly analogy? It doesn’t really mapped well.” Or, “This is just really obvious. Why you even mentioning this?” I was really worried about it. It was actually after the first talk I did that the reception was great and then I did a few more and each time, people really could relate to it and that was really good.

But every time if someone else says, “Oh, I love this analogy. It makes sense,” it makes me really happy because I remember when I went through that whole fear period of, “Ah, this is really silly. No one is going to get it. Everyone is going to think this is really obvious or just not worth exploring.”

JACOB: It’s a super rich analogy. It really just invites you to think about so many things inside of a contained story.

NADIA: Yeah.

JAMEY: I think this is about the time in our show where we all take a couple of minutes to reflect on something that we talked about that really resonated with us. I think I’ll go first. For me, I really liked the way that we talked about learning over the course of the show. I started thinking about it right at the beginning, actually when Nadia, you told a story about someone who had learned a little bit of a harsh lesson a little too late with this junior developer that left and how he reassessed how he had handled that situation because I had someone come to me after I talk I had once and said, “I found your talk really challenging to listen to,” and I was like, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good thing to hear from someone,” and they’re like, “No,” I think that’s a really good sign that learning was occurring during it because it was challenging.

I already was in this mindset thinking about that person that you mentioned and having a challenging learning experience. But it also was on my mind a lot as we talked about the guest/host relationship. I really like this idea that when one person is training another person at work in tech or whatever they’re doing, both of those people should be learning and both of those people are getting something out of it. To me, that really breaks down the power dynamic in ways that are really helpful. I have trouble, sometimes going into power dynamic relationships because I’m nervous. On either side, like here’s someone who has a power dynamic over me and I’m nervous about how I’m going to make an impression, what they’re going to think of me.

Also, if I’m going into a situation where I have a power dynamic over this person, do I deserve to be here? Maybe impostor syndrome stuff, am I going to actually be able to teach them anything? This idea that it doesn’t matter which way that dynamic is going, either way both people should be learning, I think is a really healthy way to look at it. I think that’s going to change the way I try to go into those situations in those dynamics.

JACOB: I guess I have two threads that I wrote down. I was thinking about how there is a sort of reputation that New Yorkers are really rude. I’m not from New York but that was always something that troubled me a little bit when I would visit. Then someone who had been living there for a little bit told me, “You know, what it really is, is that most New Yorkers, unless they’re incredibly privileged, they’re surrounded by people all the time. There’s just so many people. They probably have roommates, the streets are really crowded, every time they get into an elevator, there’s a bunch of people they don’t know. What it is this person said was, there’s this kind of unspoken rule that has developed, which we’re really going to just sort of keep to ourselves because the setting is important. That’s how we’re all going to get through our day. We’re going to survive by just not being in everyone’s business all the time as [inaudible].

When someone told me that, everything just clicked for me. It’s like, “This isn’t some kind of act of aggression. This is just how we survived.” The fact that when that was made explicit, it really helps me feel a little bit more welcome in New York City whenever I visit now. The other thought I had, which Nadia just said was, I can just hand someone a subway map and say, “Here you go. This is how you get to everywhere you need to go,” and objectively speaking, I could get to where I need to go.

But really the objective isn’t to just get from Point A to Point B. As a visitor of a city, I would really love to know the story, I would really love to feel like this is my home, even if I’m only visiting for a weekend. When someone is able to walk me through a codebase and sort of tell me the story of what this codebase is, tell me its history, I’m going to feel a lot more at home when I’m going to start working on it. Hopefully, I can feel like a resident of that codebase eventually.

NADIA: Great. Your point about New York got me thinking about London. I think it’s exactly the same. There’s this unspoken rule of we’re busy, there’s so much stuff going on, you just don’t talk to people, especially on the Tube. It’s like this unspoken rule of, “We just don’t talk to one another and it’s not that Londoners are unfriendly. We just don’t do it.” Your story about New York reminded me of that.

JACOB: Yeah, head on.

REIN: I was thinking about, Jacob what you just talked about New York and then I was thinking about sometimes when you invite people over for board games or something and then it starts getting a little late so you say you’re tired to get them to leave but you’re not really tired. What it is, is you are tired, you’re just not physically tired. It’s an emotional labor to be a host or a guest. I think it’s important to acknowledge that and to be realistic about the amount of emotional labor you’re willing to put into it. If it’s something you can do great and if it’s not something you can do, it may be worse for you to try it and be grumpy or feel bad afterwards.

NADIA: Yeah, definitely. I definitely relate to the, “I’m tired now. I’m going to go to bed,” and maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m going to read a book for another few hours or watch something but you are tired, just not in the way that you’re communicating to other people.

I guess the main thing to takeaway and I hope people takeaway from this is this idea of the mindset and those safe spaces. When I say the mindset, I think coming off of Jamey’s reflections and thinking about how do we advance learning, it’s so key that those more experienced in the industry or those who are experts or managing don’t see themselves as a teacher but rather, “I just happen to be more experienced. I’ve just been here longer but it doesn’t mean I’m a teacher and I’m going to quiz the other person or give them challenges to help him get better.” It’s more of, “We’re going to do this together and I’m not right.” One of my favorite points in the talk is the whole assume you’re both lost and you’re trying to find each other than, “I’m in the right place. They need to get to me.” I think that’s a really valuable takeaway.

The other thing is that, I think all of the code hospitality stuff and I’ve even gone on and done another talk now about nonviolent communication, the thing at the nub of it is vulnerability and making safe spaces for people to be vulnerable because if you don’t feel safe to be vulnerable, you therefore don’t feel free to speak your mind and talk about your feelings. You therefore hold onto things, therefore their attentions, therefore your team can’t be as productive, therefore likely to lead to messy, difficult to work on codebases. The foundation is it’s safe for me to be vulnerable. It’s safe for me to say I don’t know. It’s safe for me to ask questions.

I think with the host, it’s meaningful that the host takes on a bit more responsibility to set the scene and to make it a safe space. One, by stating that this is a safe space, ask me any questions, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, don’t be afraid to fail but two, by leading by example, uncover your own flaws, talk about your own uncertainties, things that you don’t know.

I always found it really valuable when I went to coding bootcamp and then started working at Pivotal and everyone was way better than me, of course. It was always great when the person I was working with said, “You know, I don’t really know what’s going on here.” Just exposing their own vulnerabilities and I thought, “Okay, me too but you’ve been doing this five more years than me and you still don’t know. Okay, I feel great.” The key takeaways for me are a call to all of the senior developers out there working with junior developers, the junior developer is not wrong. They’re just in a different place and to make it safe to be vulnerable and be vulnerable yourself.

REIN: I love that. We do company demos weekly and last week, one of my demos was a commit that fixed a bug that I had just written, where I wrote the wrong variable name and the variable name that I wrote was actually the name of a method that caused an infinite recursive loop but the two variable names were off by three characters so my commit message was, “I literally can’t believe I did this,” and I just demoed that commit for the company. What I was trying to get out was like, “Look, it’s okay if you make mistakes. You don’t have to feel awful about it. Everyone’s going to make mistakes.”

NADIA: That’s great. It’s reminding me of every time there’s a failure, they stand up and clap or cheer about it. I don’t know where that came from but that sort of thing, it makes failing fun and funny but also a learning experience.

REIN: That reminds me of Karl Popper’s approach to change, which is basically that you don’t have to make the right decision all the time. You just have to be able to recover from bad decisions.

NADIA: Yeah, I love that.

REIN: That’s how evolution works. Most of the decisions that evolution makes are terrible but a few of them are good. Well, Nadia this has been awesome. I’m so glad you came on the show and thank you for talking to us. Also Jacob, thank you for joining us as our special guest panelist. This has been great. Thanks everyone.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.

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053: BOOK CLUB! The Responsible Communication Style Guide

Mandy Moore — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 05:00:36 +0000

This episode is sponsored by Upside!

Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.

___

Panelists:

Astrid Countee | Jamey Hampton | Sam Livingston-Gray

Guest Starring:

Audrey Eschright: The Recompiler | Greater Than Code Episode #013: Religion in Tech with Audrey Eschright | Open Source Bridge

Thursday Bram: thursdaybram.com

Show Notes:

01:33 – Superpowers and Acquisition

02:50 – Reflective Listening

05:27 – The Responsible Communication Style Guide

11:54 – Asking Content-Related Questions

15:10 – Who is the target audience for this book?

17:45 – The Evolution of Writing the Book

19:39 – People-first Language

Kronda Adair: Five Stages of Unlearning Racism

23:40 – What if you get it wrong?

1. Try to do good.
2. Fuck it up.
3. Apologize
4. Try not to make the same mistake again.

That’s the job.

— Kronda (@kronda) December 21, 2014

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and bring us to conferences near you?

Support us via Patreon!

Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

29:40 – Fearing Shame

34:22 – Political Correctness and Language Evolution

44:11 – “Use with Caution” Words

Reflections:

Astrid: The less that something is happening the way I want it to, probably the less that I know.

Sam: Learning something from a joke!

Jamey: People who don’t want to learn new things are boring. Also, not being self-reflective.

Audrey: It’s amazing to pay people for their work.

Thursday: Pride for the contributors of this project.

The Recompiler: Year 3 Kickstarter

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

[This episode is brought to you by Upside, one of DC’s fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers who want to disrupt the norm and they’re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team to learn more.]

ASTRID: Hello everyone and welcome to Greater Than Code. I am Astrid Countee and I’m here with my great friend, Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Thanks, Astrid. I’m also here with my friend and co-panelist, Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Hello and thank you. We also have two guests today. Jamey, why don’t you go ahead and introduce the first one?

JAMEY: I’d be happy to. Today, we have on the show, Thursday Bram. Thursday writes, speaks and organizes communities around technology, business and culture. She was the editor of ‘The Responsible Communication Style Guide’ and you can find Thursday online at ThursdayBram.com.

SAM: And our other guest today is actually returning to the show from Episode 13. Audrey Eschright is a writer, community organizer and software developer based in Portland, Oregon where it’s lovely and rainy now. Yay!

AUDREY: Yay!

SAM: She’s the editor and publisher of ‘The Recompiler’ and previously, she founded Calagator, an open source community calendaring service and co-founded Open Source Bridge, which is a great annual conference for open source citizens. Welcome to the show Thursday and Audrey.

THURSDAY: Hi, thank you.

AUDREY: Thank for having us.

JAMEY: A question that we really like to start off a lot of our shows with is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

THURSDAY: I can tackle that first. My superpower is that I will go and talk to just about anyone and I don’t feel shy most of the time, which I think is a pretty great superpower. I just was always like this. I was a very nosy child so I didn’t really acquire it. I wasn’t bitten by a radioactive shy person or anything.

SAM: You’re parents are just like, “Oh, that’s Thursday.”

THURSDAY: Pretty much.

JAMEY: That’s a very powerful superpower, I think.

AUDREY: Yeah. I was expecting Thursday to say that her superpower was plenty for every single contingency because that’s something I really value about her and I think that’s something that we have in common. But also, I would say that one of mine is getting through very difficult conversations and that’s something that I’ve just learned from a lot of personal experience and reflection and having to get through some difficult situations. I just find the kindest way to do that.

SAM: Oh now, I want to ask you for tips on that.

AUDREY: I know. I’m just thinking on that too.

SAM: How do you do it?

AUDREY: There’s a [inaudible] called reflective listening. Even if you go into a really difficult and stressful situation where you really want something and you really need something, you have to do it from that other person’s perspective. You have to really understand what they’re coming to that conversation with. If you don’t know that, you need to ask for that. I try to go into a conversation that I think is going to be very hard by thinking about what I need, what I want from it and what I think I know about that other person and their expectations and then I ask.

If I say, “I really need –” like a common household thing, “– you to do the laundry today,” and the [inaudible] reason has been a very contentious thing. We go into the problem of laundry isn’t getting done and I think I don’t have time to do the laundry, that’s why I’m not getting it done. I don’t actually know why you’re not doing the laundry but I can ask you like, “Do you think it’s my time to do the laundry? Do we agree on this? I don’t even remember.”

You know, I can go in with a lot of questions and intend to just really listen to what the other person tells me. Maybe it turns out that they’re allergic to laundry soap. I have had a household problems that were just really unexpected for me like that. I might find out that actually, you just forgot about it and you need to write it on the calendar or on the wall. There’s just lots of ways that I might misread or misunderstand the situation but it turns out that we have a lot of common ground. Even if we don’t have common ground, I need to say, “The laundry has to get done. One of us has to do it. Somebody has to deal with this so we have to find some way that we can work together on that or we’re not roommates anymore.”

SAM: So you don’t just go on and guns blazing like, “You didn’t do the laundry and you’re a terrible person.”

AUDREY: No. Especially with chores, people do feel like they’re a terrible person. If you reinforce that, nobody gets what they want. Everyone feels bad.

ASTRID: It feels like you are defusing potential bombs by just asking a question, as opposed to assuming why they’re not doing it or if they have a problem or something like that.

AUDREY: Yeah and the less something is happening the way I wanted to, probably the less that I know about what’s going on there. For me, that’s just really a sign that I need to ask questions and be very gentle about it and listen to what I hear and not force my expectations onto the situation.

SAM: That sounds like a very responsible way of communicating.

AUDREY: There might be a theme in our efforts.

JAMEY: Today, we’re doing a very special book club episode of Greater Than Code and we’ve been excited about it for a while. We’re going to talk about ‘The Responsible Communication Style Guide,’ which Sam is just holding up a beautiful paper copy of. I only have the digital copy, unfortunately. That was put out by The Recompiler recently. Thursday was the editor so we have both of you on to talk about it and I’m really excited.

ASTRID: Where did the idea come from to make a book about this?

THURSDAY: I wanted this book for about the last decade. I’ve been a writer of various kinds for years and I have made a lot of mistakes over the many years I’ve been writing. It’s never necessarily an intentional mistake but it’s really hard to necessarily know what you’re doing without a reference guide. It’s hard to keep this much information in your head. Having the actual style guide that I wanted, that’s where this really started for me. I told Audrey about the idea and Audrey has been fantastic to work with.

AUDREY: Thank you. I was really excited when you proposed this to me because I know that working with on The Recompiler, we have a lot of these questions all of the time, even though people do write from their own backgrounds and they really share their perspectives. We still need to be able to talk about each other’s identities and as the book says, be very responsible about that and there was just questions I didn’t know how to answer [inaudible].

I also knew that I hadn’t seen a reference like this anywhere and we did a little bit of research on that. We just realized that there were so many separate reference guides and there isn’t a lot out there that puts it all together. The intersectional perspective is really important to us.

SAM: For our listeners who may not be familiar with the book so far, what’s the short description? Why would they want to read this book?

THURSDAY: The short description is that it’s a style guide. It’s a reference book for anybody who’s communicating about identity. There’s two kind of chunks to it. One chunk is basically just a list of terms of how to define them, how to use them, how to make sure that you are not using them incorrectly. Then there are a set of articles that talk about the process of writing inclusively. Some of them are a little more specific. One is about writing inclusive documentation, one is about the concept of people first writing, which comes up in a lot of communities but not all communities used it so it’s got some clarification on which communities use it and how to ask if you’re talking to somebody from one of those communities.

Then you’ve added in a couple of appendices that are just things that we have to look up on a regular basis, anyhow so they might as well be sitting on our desk or in that eBook that’s always open as well. One of the appendices is a list of major holidays and observances. If you’re trying to figure out when to plan a particular thing, you can look it up in the book and check that you aren’t claiming a conference during Yom Kippur, which is a thing that continues to happen that I personally find really frustrating.

ASTRID: Holy Week, too. It’s really weird to have parties on Good Friday.

THURSDAY: It’s not just focused on Jewish and Christian identities but we try to take a really intersectional approach with it. We’ve brought in holidays from a variety of different cultures as well as observances. Right now is National Hispanic Heritage Month, even though it’s not like any of the other months like Black History Month is the month of February. Hispanic Heritage Month is October 15th to November 15th. Keeping that in my head was nontrivial.

AUDREY: One of the things that I really enjoyed about this aspect of inclusiveness on the book is for example, just to stick with some of their religion section stuff, as we finished it up we realized that we didn’t know enough about Islam, that we need it to get somebody who could read it and give us more information. We did more research to realize that we have to make sure we had all the details right. We discussed [inaudible] and how to fit that in there in a way that it really made sense and just how to describe all of these things that, whether or not we had personal experience with, we knew that they were real parts of people’s lives.

THURSDAY: I think that’s a really good opportunity to talk about some of the ways that we put this together. Going into it, we didn’t want to try to be experts in something that we’re clearly not experts in. While we provided the framework, we brought in a ton of experts. We have our different section editors but we also have our sensitivity readers. We have this amazing group of people who helped us make sure that we were offering something that was actually intersectional, that was actually useful from a variety of different perspectives and that really reflected the communities that we were trying to describe in their own words and in ways that they wanted to be described.

JAMEY: I could tell how much labor of love went into that when I was reading it. Obviously, I’m also not an expert on every single thing that was in the book, either so I was kind of trusting all of you. But I feel like I’m kind of an expert in the transgender community and how we like to say things and what kind of phrasing we like to use and what kind of language we like to use so reading those actions and seeing how right everything was, it made me feel like I had a lot of faith in the other sections to the ones that I didn’t know about. It gave me a lot of confidence that even the pieces that I didn’t know and that I was learning, that I was learning the right things.

ASTRID: How did you go about asking people these questions to make sure that your content was correct, like the people who would be more aware of things that you were less aware? What was the way that you went about asking those questions?

THURSDAY: I think one of the reasons we decided to do a Kickstarter is because I didn’t want to ask those questions without being able to pay people for their time. That’s really important to me that a lot of the people that we asked to work on this project are subject matter experts and that means that they’re activists, they’re freelancers, they’re writers and creators or people who might not have the time who work on a project like this for free. Being able to say, “Not only do I love your work but I have cash money that I could pay you for additional work,” wasn’t really important. I don’t think that this is the work the people should be asked to do for free, especially since there are some resources out there, though not quite the resource that we wanted to build. Being able to attach money was definitely the first step.

The second step was we both had a list of people that we thought would be good for this project but we did open call for articles. We want to reach out beyond our networks a little bit. I think that actually doing the Kickstarter helps with that a little bit too because it put the project in front of people and then people were like, “This is the thing that is looking for help, that we can contribute to.” I think that’s how it kind of started off. I had a list going in of some of the editors that I really wanted to recruit, people who had already written about this in a really great way and then being able to ask our community through things like sensitivity reading was also really crucial. Being able to ask people who had a really wide variety of backgrounds was really important.

AUDREY: The thing that I would add to that too is that there were times when we just needed to check a couple of details. I tried to be really specific about what I was asking people to do that it’s not like, “Read this whole chapter and tell me what you think.” I tried to ask really specific questions like, “We’ve got this definition in here. Does that match how you think of this thing? Does that match what you know about it? Are we missing something that we need to make sure to include?”

SAM: I’m so glad that you were able to pay people for their work on this. I know it’s so common that people get asked to perform unpaid emotional labor and it’s really encouraging to hear that you are not contributing to that.

THURSDAY: We live under capitalism but we do not have to make it worst.

SAM: Right.

AUDREY: I would say that it makes a project like this book easier and harder. It’s easier that we paid people. We could really show that we respected them in their time. It’s harder because we had to raise $20,000. It’s not like I resent that in the slightest but it still work to get out there and raise money for a project like this, knowing that we’re not going to be automatically on the top of anybody’s list. We’re going to have to really make a good argument for why this book matters.

ASTRID: Who is the audience that you hope will read this book and use it the most?

AUDREY: For me, it’s people who write those sign up pages for different services. I think that there’s so many ways that we ask for user information on just basic web apps that really don’t work for a lot of identities and really aren’t very respectful. Having been a developer in some conversations, where I was really trying to advocate for what seemed to be like a good practice and maybe, I didn’t have all the perspectives to reference. I just really like that there’s a reference that maybe people can be using in their work to say, “Actually, we should do gender this way.” Or, “We should ask for names this way,” instead of just going with what works for the five people who are directly on the project.

JAMEY: That was my favorite article in the book also and I was going to mention that. I think that we don’t even think about what information we’re asking from users a lot of the time. We just go like, “What do you need?” because what normally gets asked: your name, your email, your gender, the location. I feel like there’s no thought put into like, “Do we need to know these things? Are we going to use these things for something useful? Are we going to use these things for something that people actively don’t want us to use these things for?”

It makes people very skeptical, I think about signing up for some services. I know that at this point of the service, ask for my gender and there’s two options like, I’m just not for user service. I just don’t need, almost always unless it’s something like medical that I actually do need. I lived my whole life without your service and I will continue living in without it.

THURSDAY: That article actually came about because of a specific request from one of our writers. Dash Buck wrote the article on interviewing people about their identity if they’ve transitioned their names, their pronouns and all of that. But as Dash and I were going through that article, we noticed that there were some specific things that we needed to address in terms of form so we added onto the book to make sure that we cover that. But that’s honestly, we won’t have done that if we hadn’t gone to this subject matter experts, if we hadn’t been able to bring in these people with different perspectives. I’m just so amazed by the people that we’ve gotten to work with. That might be why I keep referring to them.

JAMEY: That brings me to another question, actually to what you just said. How much of this final product of this book was about what you expected to write at the beginning and how much of that evolved over the course of working on it?

THURSDAY: I’d say that the framework is pretty much what we imagined, with our sections about identity, our articles, our appendices. We definitely started out with just the five sections and added another sectional section partway through as we realized it was going to be a better organization schema. But the specific items, the specific articles, the specific language that are in the book, I tried to go into it without a lot of expectations because I really wanted to make sure that it was our subject matter experts who were setting the guidelines for their section, because they know the sections better than the I do.

AUDREY: I agree. I thought our framework work really well but there were a lot of details that I just wouldn’t thought about until people started to write some piece of it. Then sometimes, that also made it easier to say, “If we have this, then we have to have that,” realizing that different topics went together and that if we could explain one piece of the issue, then we need to make sure that the rest of it was in there too.

THURSDAY: Similarly, there are a couple of things that I expected to have in the book that because of the scope, we decided to pull. For instance, we have a religion section but we didn’t get into an in-depth discussion of how’s [inaudible] which is definitely important information but because of the scope of this book, it didn’t fit. We think of this as a living project. We are planning to do a supplement that will cover those topics but we did have to adjust as we were doing this.

SAM: Sort of interesting things that happened to me as I read this book was, you have the section about people first language, which is the idea that instead of saying a handicapped person, you would say a person with a disability and handicapped is problematic for other reasons that you can get into if you read the book. But what I found really interesting was that I’d run across the idea of people first language and I thought, “That seems like a good general rule,” and I hadn’t really thought about it much beyond that.

Then you have this article that talks about all of the reasons that people first language might not work and all the communities that don’t necessarily use it or appreciate it. I had this really fun experience of watching myself encounter this cognitive dissonance of like, “I thought this was a useful and good thing,” so that was really fun. Then that reminded me of this article by Kronda Adair. She calls it the ‘Five Stages of Unlearning Racism,’ where at stage two she says, the opposite of racism is color blindness. The parallel to me there is that I wanted to use people first language for everything because it was a simple rule that I could understand.

Pretending to be colorblind means you end up treating everybody the same and just as I had been trying to unlearn that and to be able to treat people differently based on how they wanted to be approached, I realized that I also needed to adjust the way I thought about my language. That was really interesting. Thank you for that.

AUDREY: It gets into some very interesting topics of identity. Are we just a person with gender or are we a gendered person? Maybe it relate to a different parts of your life. I inherit this first through autism advocacy. It’s a very different thing to say that you’re a person with autism versus an autistic person. It really speaks to your experience, whether it’s just an innate part of your experience or it’s the changeable part of your experience. There are just a lot of different ways that somebody may choose to bring that.

SAM: Yeah, I like the discussion in the book around deaf culture as well because my mom was an interpreter when I was a kid so I know just a tiny bit about deaf culture so I was able to use that knowledge that I had as a hook into being able to extrapolate into different populations. It was really neat, too.

JAMEY: I think what you’re saying is very personal decision, like the idea of how someone wants to be referred to. It’s hard to make a generalization about it because it’s so personal to everyone but if you come into the situation informed about the different ways that different people might prefer, then I feel like you have a better groundwork to ask someone and understand where they’re coming from and then be able to follow up and refer to them in a way that they’ve just told you they feel more comfortable with, if that makes sense.

AUDREY: And it goes back to what I was saying at the beginning about asking questions and listening. This is so much better communication. It’s just learning what questions you can or should ask and learning to really listen to the answer, not to bias it or influence it.

JAMEY: I love that ‘learning which questions you should ask.’ That’s exactly it.

THURSDAY: Yeah, I think the only hard and fast rule we learned through this process is that you have to ask people questions and you have to listen to their answers and take them as valid, which I would love if they will just do X, Y and Z and you will always write correctly about people but people are these interesting people that keep evolving and even asking somebody today is not enough and asking people consistently and over the course of your interactions with them and double-checking. The only hard and fast rule we’ve got is talk to people and listen to what they say.

JAMEY: What if you get it wrong?

THURSDAY: Oh, I’ve gotten it so wrong.

AUDREY: We didn’t put a check about apologies. Maybe apologies will be on these supplements.

THURSDAY: Yeah. First off, I apologize and acknowledge that you’ve done something wrong because that’s something that people do need to see to understand what’s going on. Not just the person who you’ve inaccurately described. Everybody else needs to get the updated information as well, which it doesn’t feel great but it’s a necessary step sometimes to make a public apology. But an apology is never enough. You have to actually learn from that situation and improve.

Going back to Kronda Adair for a moment, she gave me basically the best instructions I have ever had on how to live my life —

SAM: It’s like, “Try to do good, fuck it up, apologize, do better,” something like that?

THURSDAY: Yeah, that’s it. The doing better part is very, very important to make sure the people get it right. Kronda has it, as her pinch tweet: Step one is trying to do good, step two is fuck it up, step three is apologize, set four is try to not make the same mistake again, and yeah, that’s how I try to approach every time I screw up because once again, people are people so I expect to screw up again in my life. I just try not to make the same mistakes again.

AUDREY: And if you do mess up, you apologize and you keep squashing people in that way, nobody will trust you anymore. I’ve seen people do that and I don’t think they understand just how little trust people have in them afterwards and not just about that topic but about anything they say. If you can’t trust that somebody actually is listening to you and doing what they say they’re going to, how do you trust anything else they tell about what’s going on, what they’re doing, what they think of you.

JAMEY: Thursday, I like what you said about acknowledging that you messed up because I feel like when you’re apologizing, people assume that there is this implication that you’re admitting that you mess up but there’s this like, “Sorry, I did something bad. Sorry that I messed up,” versus, “I’m sorry that you were offended by what I said,” which isn’t a real apology.

THURSDAY: I hate getting those apologies and I worked very hard never to give them. Being told that somebody is, “Sorry, that I’m offended,” just makes me more offended.

SAM: Right. It’s like, “I’m sorry there’s something wrong with you,” is how that comes across.

THURSDAY: Exactly and if somebody is apologizing, if somebody it’s making the effort to apologize, they know that they did something wrong, whether or not they’re admitting it. Let’s just admit it. Let’s treat people like humans and move on to the next thing that we’re going to screw up and apologize for.

AUDREY: This is something that I end up covering in code conduct training a lot that you need to understand that you cause harm. Even if it’s fairly a minor thing, well, it might be a minor harm but you still cause harm. If you can’t acknowledge that, then you’re not really apologizing. I think sometimes it’s okay to not understand that harm, to not really be able to just personally mirror what’s going on there. You can still say, “I can see that I’ve harmed you. I can see that I’ve hurt you and I don’t want to do that so I’m very sorry. I’m going to try to be aware then and not do that again.”

SAM: Yeah and on the topic of apologies, I feel like this is turning into the ‘Kronda Adair’s so awesome show,’ but a while back, she shared this thing called ‘The Four Part Apology,’ which is this template for apologizing and I think a really impactful and a helpful way. The template goes, Part 1 is, “I’m sorry for –” where you’ve deemed the behavior. Part 2 is, “This is wrong because –” where you acknowledge the nature of the harm that was caused. Part 3 is, “In the future, I will –” where you talk about what you’re going to do to change and Part 4 is, “Will you forgive me?” I’m not sure quite how I feel about Part 4. You can always hope for forgiveness but Parts 1 through 3 are spot on. I found this really useful in my own life.

ASTRID: I like the, “Will you forgive me?” because I think it’s good to hear that someone to actually asking, as opposed to trying to tell you how you should be responding to them in that’s circumstance.

SAM: Yeah. I guess maybe part of my discomfort with that is not growing up in a framework of forgiveness, which I think people who grew up in a culture of faith may have more tools to deal with.

JAMEY: I think that’s a good question as long as you realize the answer might be, “No, I don’t forgive you.”

ASTRID: Yeah, and maybe no.

AUDREY: And, “Maybe, not right now and I don’t know when. Don’t ask me.” It’s interesting because it does open up a way for richer communication. You’re suggesting that it might be possible but I agree that it can feel really force and be like, “Will you, so that we can just move on from this?” Maybe I’m not ready to move on.

THURSDAY: I’m also super cool with this being the crud of fan episode, just FYI. If that can be the name of it even, I would up for it.

SAM: Subtitle: ‘Also, Kronda Adair is great.’

AUDREY: You’ll put it on t-shirt. I was going to say, I feel like we should talk about shame too, as a part of this. I think shame, for not being able to do right things, sometimes it keeps us from trying to do better, especially with really complicated aspects of identity because we can tell that it’s a very personal thing. I think sometimes, in theory in shame, shame is this external thing that’s put on us, can keep people from actually just stepping up and doing the work.

Just is it, is kind of vulnerable. It is hard to know that you might make mistakes, that you might hurt people by trying to communicate with them. I don’t think that it’s got an easy answer and easy way to deal with that. They get something to be really aware of that that’s part of our culture and our way of thinking about this and what we might feel coming into it.

JAMEY: I think your whole book is an answer to that in a way because, I think it’s related to shame this fear of trying is like a fear of failing. If you have more resources to be like, “I read this,” and I feel like, “I have a background and I know where I’m coming from,” that can empower people to be able to try. I think that the fear is related to not even knowing where to start. I think this book is a really, really good place to start. Thank you for making it.

AUDREY: Thank you.

THURSDAY: I would also continue with that thought. I come from a journalism background and harm is not something we necessarily talk about in journalism classes when we’re in the newsroom, when we’re working on a project. In my background, there were certain things that were considered unacceptable because they would open the paper you work at to libel laws. We got lots of training about libel laws but we didn’t get a lot of training about interviewing beyond how to get the right information that the paper needed.

We did get a lot of training on how to talk to people, how to understand the context of their experiences. We got some basic guidance on, “Don’t say this because this is a problem,” but we didn’t get any explanation of what to use instead. For instance, there were a lot of things that we get from AP style that say, “You’re going to talk about race in this way,” to which I am from Oklahoma. I interned at the Tulsa World, which is a very interesting paper but there are some people who have been on staff there since 19-I don’t know-08 or something and telling them, “No, the AP style says we’re talking about race in this way,” immediately leaves into discussion of, “Oh, you just want me to be politically correct. I’m going to write the way I write and editor can deal with it later if it’s really a problem,” which was unkind to the editor in question because the editor in question was a young woman who didn’t want to deal with that crap anyhow.

There are improvements since when I went through journalism school but it’s not necessarily something that a lot of newsrooms are focusing on even today. Everybody grabs their copy of the AP style guide and says, “That’s good enough,” and the AP style guide comes from a very set perspective and we come from a different set perspective.

AUDREY: I think we were really looking at that leading edge of it. We put in under index, which was something that I just can’t seem to find a lot of places when I was starting to see people use it. I think that AP comes from, not in a political way but a conservative approach. They’re not going to push something in there until they think that’s it’s fairly widely accepted. I also think that there’s just such a big difference between doing something because you know it’s the kindest way to interact with them and doing something because otherwise, they get sued. It puts the blame and the responsibility in completely different directions.

SAM: Yeah, that’s two completely different level.

JAMEY: That’s a good point but I would still, rather someone treat me good because they’re afraid that they’ll get sued than just treat me bad.

AUDREY: For sure. In some tech companies, that maybe all you really can hold on to. That’s just like a low bar. It’s a really low bar to pass.

ASTRID: With the political correctness, I often feel like a lot of the conversation is about what people assume is wildly accepted versus the truth about things. Sometimes, when you’re trying to represent something truthfully, then you’re being labeled as being politically correct because it’s not the same language that’s being used to talk about whatever it is more ubiquitously but it doesn’t necessarily make it more widely accepted. I think that’s something we’ve kind of just assumed because this is how it’s always been so obviously, it’s accepted. But I think that the accepting part is very assuming and I don’t think it always applies.

To try to use an example I would say, if you think that most people in America live in a large city, then when you talk about things related to city life like traffic or housing issues or streets, then you would make differences if you were talking about somebody who lived in a rural area. You would actually say, “They live in a rural area and this is what this area looks like,” because you would assume that most people don’t know what that is so you’re trying to talk about it in a way that you think is describing. Then maybe others might say, “Why are you even talking about like that? Just say the name of the place and whatever.”

But if you don’t actually know the truth about where people live or what their experiences are, then you’re still making assumptions. I think half the political correctness conversation is an assumption about, why do we have to use all these labels. Everybody knows what we’re talking about. It’s just this small group of people that are having a problem so why should we change our behavior for the small group of people. I think it’s probably more true that we don’t know enough about people in general, to even know if it’s a small group of people that if we’re using different terminology, how do you know that’s not widely accepted.

If just because you haven’t been using it, it doesn’t mean that it’s not actually being used. It could be you or your paper or whatever your outlet, whatever your communication place is, that is not using this terminology but that doesn’t make it untrue or not even widely accepted. I feel like in some ways, we can’t even have the ‘is this politically correct?’ conversation until we even know the truth about what is going on.

THURSDAY: That really resonates with me. I would also add that without that truth, without that understanding, without that contexts, nobody is able to communicate effectively anyhow. Without that understanding, without building more of that relationship between who’s doing the talking and who’s doing the listening, whether that’s journalist talking to their audience or even just one-on-one, I think that it’s really easy to forget honestly that other people are not exactly the same and that’s a thing that I hope that we’re working on. I hope that this is a useful tool for.

I would also maybe add that this is kind of a discussion in linguistics in some way as well. This assumption that English as a language doesn’t change and we don’t need new labels to describe new things is completely unaware of the history of language, especially English. English has this reputation as that language that will rifle through all other languages pockets and steal whatever isn’t nailed down, which is why English is often adopted for technical discussion. It’s often adopted for scientific discussions because we have historically had no shame about using new words and new labels and new terminology.

While I think the discussion of political correctness might be motivated by more than just a lack of understanding on how language works because once again, [inaudible]. I think that the way that English is evolving right now, the way that we’re adding new terms, we’re thinking about new concepts is honestly kind of cool and a really interesting evolution of language that’s worth looking at.

AUDREY: It’s also an emotional labor issue, who has to do the work of being aware of other people. Certainly, if you’re on the other side of the political correctness that somebody is expressing it, what it means is that you have to learn how to be overly considerate of white people’s feelings. Overly cautious instead of accepting that you do equal work, that you should be doing equal work here to understand and help people.

JAMEY: I really like what you’re saying about the way language evolves because I think a lot of times when I get into a conversation about language on these topics, it’s because someone’s telling me, “That’s not a real word. That is not grammatically correct. You just made that up,” and I’m like, “I didn’t just make it up. Somebody else made it up but that’s how our words became words.” Somebody made them up at some point. That’s true.

I think it comes down to this dichotomy where it’s either I’m going to be really rigid and strict about the English language or I’m going to respect how other people feel. At the end of the day, if I have to pick one of those, it’s very obvious which one I’m going to choose. I’m not sure why so many people get hung up on that step.

ASTRID: I think maybe one of the reasons is because they’re looking for a rule and they feel like, “If I know this rule and then now, I use it and you’re telling me it’s wrong, now I have to learn a new rule. Then what if somebody else tells me that’s wrong and they have to know a new rule.” I think it’s actually way easier if you allow people to tell you how they want to be treated and you just treat them that way. That can be a universal rule, as opposed to trying to say, “This is what they said. I don’t want to change anymore. I’m tired of having to change a lot,” because that’s the opposition argument, which is, “It’s too much to change. I can’t do this. I can’t keep up with this.”

You just need to pick a box and stay there, which is already insulting to people who don’t feel like they fit in the box. But if they comes from this place of, “I don’t know anything about this and you’re telling me there’s this rule, then when I try to use it and somebody tell me the rules are wrong. I’m tired of rules. You need to do what I know so I don’t have to keep doing this.”

AUDREY: That’s why it’s so refreshing to listen to Thursday and be like, “Isn’t it exciting that we’re changing all these things and it’s evolving and it’s so cool to see,” and I’m like, “Yes, it’s amazing. Thank you.” It is super amazing. I love hearing about different people’s perspectives and experiences. I also have absolutely heard people explicitly say, what Astrid is [inaudible] that, “I already had to learn how to talk about women in the 70s. You already held me so why do I have to learn something else about it now.” It’s very boring to me to just refuse change so drastically.

You change. Somebody is seeing that changes. They are not the same person they were in 1970 but we don’t reflect on our personal change, unless you have a lot of friction with the culture around you. We don’t reflect on that personal change the way that we notice it on others like, “I just had to learn your pronouns five years ago and now they’re different.” I’ve seen people do that very directly. I think part of it is they’re not very self-reflective, either. They’re not really understanding themselves to be into that. They just think everyone else keeps shifting around them, keeps shaking them.

THURSDAY: There’s a small overlap with the same communities that say, “I learned COBOL and I don’t need to learn another language. I’m just going to program in COBOL for the rest of my life.”

AUDREY: I do have a family member who has done that.

THURSDAY: I’m not saying that COBOL doesn’t have its time and place. I’m just saying that maybe there are some alternatives that have happened since COBOL that are at least just good.

JAMEY: Maybe that time and place is in the past. That was me and I take that back.

THURSDAY: Unfortunately, in our banking system —

SAM: The past didn’t go anywhere.

THURSDAY: Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of companies that rely on COBOL-based inventory management still. I know several COBOL programmers who just go from company to company, updating their inventory system just enough but it keeps running and keep shipping things and then they’re on to the next questionable inventory system. It might be relevant to say that one of the supplements that we’re talking about doing fairly soon is age because age does have a role, not an all-inclusive role of course but it does have a role in how we talk about some of these things as well.

A lot of people that we talk about, in terms of political correctness, I’ve heard referred to as dinosaurs, which no matter how cool dinosaurs are, it might not always be the right word either so age is definitely a thing worth discussing as well around identity.

AUDREY: I think it’s just a thing that we erased from our technology, there’s this very historical perspective that we often bring to programming about not learning what’s changed and what’s different. That also rolls into how we think about people. We try to get them very static rules and it doesn’t always work.

JAMEY: Speaking of static rules, another thing I really like about the book was the end. There’s a section, a list of words that you shouldn’t use, which was helpful but then after that, there was a section of words that was… I can’t remember how it was worded —

SAM: Use with caution?

JAMEY: Yeah, use with caution. It’s like, “These words could be used correctly if you know what you’re doing with them.” I really like that because in particular, one of the words in that list is queer and that’s totally how I feel about the word queer and I’m all for it. I use it all the time. I think it’s a great word and I don’t like when people tell me not to use it but there are things you have to think about before you make the decision to use that word. I like that the book recognized that in different contexts and different things are acceptable and there’s not necessarily static rules about all these words. I appreciated that.

THURSDAY: Thank you. Our editors definitely were a guiding piece of that because there were several words where we’re like, “We can’t put these on the ‘don’t use list.'” But there are certain people who without proper training, perhaps shouldn’t access these terms. It’s like the adult section of the library, like it’s fine if you’re ready for it.

SAM: Right, like spirit animal was the most recognizable one on the list for me. It was like, I see people misusing that so often, just as an example.

AUDREY: A lot of it is about how your personal identity is reflected. It’s very different to say, “I’m queer,” and to have somebody say, “You damn, queers.” A lot of these words is just because it’s so different if I identify that way, versus somebody tries to shame me for being that way. That often is why those words become so charged.

JAMEY: It’s about reclamation for me. I think reclamation of words is very important. It’s hard because I don’t want to force that on other people, if they don’t want it but I also definitely resent people telling me that I can’t reclaim words. I’m like, “You can watch me.”

AUDREY: Watch you with your ever-changing English language.

THURSDAY: It’s our language. We’ll use it how we need to.

ASTRID: This is the part of our show that we have reflections and we reflects on the conversation that we had on any insights that came up or calls-to-action for the future. I can go first. My reflection is something that you said, Audrey which I wrote down so that I will not mess it up, “The less that something is happening the way I want it to, probably the less that I know,” which I think is a really important thing to move forward thinking about because so often, when something doesn’t go the way you want, especially in interaction, your first reaction is, “What is wrong with them,” which I think is human. I’m not trying to say that that’s you’re automatically a bad person because I know I’ve done that plenty of times.

But I think to think about it in terms of, there’s probably something I don’t know as opposed to there’s something wrong with whoever they are and why they’re behaving this way is really helpful in understanding how you can grow and learn from whatever happened and be able to not have the same mistakes happen again because you just don’t know what’s going on.

SAM: For me, one of the more interesting parts of this conversation was when I tried to make a joke and the factual basis of that joke was completely incorrect, I got to learn something. Yay!

ASTRID: Where’s that apology, Sam.

JAMEY: I also want to reflect on something that Audrey said about people not wanting to learn new things. Basically, the quote was, “People who don’t want to learn new things are boring,” and I totally agree with that but I feel like it’s really important to say that because so often, I internalize that people don’t want to learn new things around me and it’s like, “Maybe I’m this burden for expecting everyone to learn all these new things. Maybe I’m expecting too much of people,” so it’s really great to hear like, “No, it’s not you. It’s just boring, if you don’t want to learn,” which I totally agree. Once you say it, it’s just so obvious to me.

She also talked about not being self-reflective which resonates with me a lot too. I made a post on Twitter one time and it was like, “Me to cisgender people: Nice gender. Did your mom pick it out for you?” And people got really mad about it and they were like, “What’s wrong with being cisgender?” I was like, “Nothing but your mom did pick it out for you, though. Have you ever reflected on why you feel that way?” If you sit down and you reflect really hard on your gender and help makes you feel and you’re like, “I was born male and I love being male.” I’d be like, “Great. I’m so happy for you. That sounds really convenient actually but I’m glad that you thought about it before you made a decision that this is who I am just because somebody told it to me once.” I think about that a lot.

AUDREY: I just want to repeat something Thursday has said early in our conversation, which is that it’s really amazing to pay people for their work. I had to literally write the checks and it felt so good to send all of our editors and our writers a check to say, “This work was meaningful to us. We’re really glad that you did it.”

THURSDAY: Yeah. That was definitely one of the most enjoyable parts of this project. It’s probably the first really enjoyable bit of capitalism I’ve had in a while too. I’m just really proud of the work that you were able to do and I’m really proud of the people, the community who were able to contribute to this. It is something that I’m really glad that we couldn’t do well, that we didn’t have to do well. I just want to say that that’s one of the best things about this project for me.

SAM: Before we say goodbye, is there somewhere that people can go to learn more about the book, about The Recompiler, about the two of you that you would like people to know?

THURSDAY: The style guide does have its own website, which is RCStyleGuide.com. We are currently selling the eBook, which is available through RCStyleGuide.com or through RecompilerMag.com. In early 2018, we will be doing another prepping for physical copies of the eBook so keep an eye out for that.

AUDREY: Speaking of paying people, October 24th, we’re doing another Kickstarter for The Recompiler. We’re going into Year 3 of publication and we have a lot of plans for more issues and another book that we’re actually getting ready to announce so I would love it if people just keep an eye out for that.

SAM: Thank you so much for coming on the show. We’ve had a really great conversation and I look forward to more in the future.

AUDREY: Thank you for having us.

ASTRID: Thank you.

SAM: Thanks listeners. We will be back at you next week.

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052: Master’s Degrees, Double Binds, and Data Science with Emily Dresner

Mandy Moore — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 05:00:36 +0000

Panelists:

Sam Livingston-Gray | Jamey Hampton | Coraline Ada Ehmke

Guest Starring:

Emily Dresner: @multiplexer | about.me | Upside Travel

Show Notes:

01:06 – Emily’s Background and Superpower

02:49 – Having a Master’s Degree: Was it worth it?

08:08 – Struggles After Retaining a Master’s

10:31 – Role Model: Emily’s Mom and Her Story

12:11 – “The Double Bind”

14:47 – Experiences Working at a Gaming Company

Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace

18:33 – Transitioning to Upside and Building a Healthy Culture

21:50 – Engineering Vs Management

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29:09 – Data Science

32:50 – Self-Selecting for Privilege

36:38 – Data Science and Security/Privacy

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil

46:55 – Having a Background in Actual Science; Conquering Biases

51:35 – The Importance of Mentorship and Internships from the Beginning

Reflections:

Coraline: Having a biases towards hiring people like yourself and other hiring biases.

Sam: Research cognitive biases.

Jamey: Computers aren’t people.

Emily: I really do enjoy teaching.

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Transcript:

SAM: Hello and welcome to Episode 52 of Greater Than Code. I’m Sam Livingston-Gray and I’m here to introduce my co-panelists, Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Thanks, Sam and I’d like to introduce our other co-panelists, Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hey, everybody and welcome to Episode 52, as Sam said. We’ve been on the air for just over a year now, which I’m super excited about. We have a special guest with us today, Emily Dresner. Emily is the CTO of Upside Travel. Prior to joining Upside, Emily was a product engineering lead for Luminal and web team lead and principal architect on the Elder Scrolls Online at ZeniMax Online Studios. Emily has a Master’s in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. She’s also a certified scrum master and a fanatical Michigan football fan. Welcome, Emily.

EMILY: Hi. Thank you so much for having me today.

CORALINE: Emily, we always start the podcast with the same question and that is, “What is your superpower and when and how did you discover it?”

EMILY: My superpower is my ability to know a guy. I have an uncanny ability to network. I always seem to have somebody in my pocket from college or from previous work or from online or through some networking facility that happens to know some weird and obscure fact. I’ve noticed this actually more and more as tech has gotten more specialized and I need to reach out to friends and get an answer on something very obscure and strange very quickly. That’s my superpower.

SAM: That is nothing to sneeze at. Networking is super useful.

CORALINE: Were you always that way? Did you develop that skill at some point in your professional career?

EMILY: More or less, I don’t let people just go when I move on. I usually maintain a relationship, especially with my old college friends who have all moved all over the place. A lot of them have PhDs in very specialized fields these days. I keep up with a lot of people on Twitter especially. Not so much with Facebook. Mostly Twitter is my jam but just over time, I know people who happen to know a thing and I usually can reach out to know a guy to get an answer for something.

CORALINE: I’m pretty good at keeping up with people on Twitter but I talk to two of my college friends maybe once every six months and I barely talk to old coworkers and I don’t want to have that power.

JAMEY: If you’re not on Twitter, you don’t exist to me.

CORALINE: Yeah, exactly.

SAM: Wait. What do these college friends of which you speak?

CORALINE: I have vague memories of people from college but I don’t think any of them went on to get PhDs.

SAM: Speaking of advanced degrees, I noticed that you have a Master’s in Computer Science and Engineering. I find it’s rare enough in this field to find people with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree and it seems even more rare in the working field. What’s that like? Is that a path that you would recommend to others?

EMILY: A master’s degree, especially from someplace like Michigan is mostly a signal that you have the commitment that you can follow through with a major project from beginning to end and that you have the capacity to read technical research papers. Those are really the two things that getting a masters sort of gives you. It’s a funny little story. When I was getting my bachelor’s in computer engineering from Michigan, I went out to Intel and this is a very long time ago and I had a two-day long interview process with them and the only job that they would offer me was a helpdesk tech. It felt like four years of a hard core engineering education didn’t seem to really measure up to being a helpdesk tech in Portland, Oregon so it’s a little bit of an insult.

They sent me an offer letter and I put it through a shredder in the EECS Building at University of Michigan. It was still in its brown envelope. They did call me back exactly 16 times — I took real notes — before they stopped calling me for a call back and I actually —

CORALINE: Maybe you have some more to add to their professional network on LinkedIn.

EMILY: Perhaps. I turned Intel down hard core and I applied to the Michigan Computer Science and Engineering program at Rackham Graduate School up pretty much that day. I got in and I did two additional years and I specialized in distributed operating systems, which funny, back then it was called distributed operating systems and today it’s called the cloud. Apparently, it’s just about 15 years ahead of my time. I thought that giant computers were really cool and I wanted to build things that were so big they span to the planet.

Getting a master’s degree gave me some of the deeper algorithmic knowledge to be able to do it but I didn’t use some of that knowledge so I got until almost 10 years after I got my degree. It was just years ahead of its time. I end up spending a lot of time in security, instead because I was doing operating systems and a lot of security is actually the operating system level. I like fiddly algorithms and crypto was just a lot of fiddly algorithms. That’s a badge of a thing that I did and I had to pay for, which I did, in cash.

SAM: And time and opportunity cost.

EMILY: And opportunity cost, yes.

CORALINE: I don’t know how people can do that, honestly. In my teen, in 20s, I was a big fucking mess and I ended up running out of money and dropping out of college so I have respect for people who can finish that at such a young age and know themselves enough to do the work because I definitely was not capable of that.

SAM: Same here. I went to college twice and dropped out twice before the third time stuck in it. The third time was when I went back at 27 and I was highly motivated after having a bunch of crap jobs to actually do the work.

CORALINE: The second part of Sam’s question, Emily was, is that something that you recommend for other people?

EMILY: It depends. I think if you are a woman in engineering, I do highly recommend getting the master’s degree. It helps when you’re just starting out to pull your resume out from the rest of the pack. It’s just a little bit of a nudge that says, “I have this much more training. I think about problems in slightly different and deeper way.” If you’re a women or you’re a person of color, then I actually do recommend that you get the master’s degree.

I don’t recommend you get the PhD. Unless you want to go to data science, then I strongly recommend you get a PhD actually. But if you just want to go industry engineering or engineering management, I do recommend a master’s degree for people who just feels like you need to get your resume onto the top of that stack, to get a second look. It served me really well for… I don’t know, almost a decade of just being able to get my name in front of a hiring manager just that little bit much easier, than if I’m just what I have my bachelor’s. I was not offered any more helpdesk jobs from Intel after that, let’s put it that way.

SAM: it’s almost like you’re saying that women and other underrepresented minorities have to work harder to be seen as just as good.

CORALINE: What?

JAMEY: In tech?

CORALINE: But it’s the meritocracy, Sam. Come on.

SAM: Right.

EMILY: Yes, if you’re a woman in engineering, it is not a meritocracy out there, unfortunately and these little things help.

JAMEY: I heard some people tell stories about being told that they were overqualified because they are too advance of an engineer. Is that not something that you’ve personally experienced?

EMILY: I’ve never been told that I am too qualified because I had a master’s degree but I’ve always hitched to the top. I’m never interested in those intro positions. I’m always interested in those senior positions so it was never a topic that came up. There was other topics that came up but ‘you were overqualified’ has never been one of them.

SAM: Was everything easy for you after you got that master’s degree? Where are some of the struggles? I’m sure the answer is no so what are some of the struggles you faced, even being on the top of that power resumes?

EMILY: I never really had a problem with the interviewing part of the ‘getting through the door.’ It was always after getting through the door that the cultural problems really started to sink in. To get stand up at a board and write code off the top your head in a number of different languages, my jam was always straight up C and I can still write code on the board straight up C, even today. You remember I said all the algorithm questions and all the algorithm patterns and all that is getting through the interview is not really that hard. It’s after being in the job that the challenges start to emerge.

For much of my career, I was the only woman, not just on the team but in the department. In fact, that was the way until I was able to actually start hiring women actually, believe it or not, until I was in the driver’s seat to make hiring decisions. One job I had that there was a woman on the team but I’m just ticking off all of my positions in my head, going all the way back to the beginning of time. My first job I ever had, I had a woman manager but it was hospital IT. That’s a different world because it just is when you’re living in a world of nursing and doctors and they have a different take on position on things, which is something I didn’t realize. But if I look at my second job, my third, my fourth job didn’t have women on teams. My fifth job and then by sixth job, where I was finally a hiring manager. Out of all of those, there was only one that there was another woman on the team and there was two.

Throughout my entire career, it wasn’t so much the interview process or the call back process or ‘getting in front of hiring managers’ process or even ‘getting in the door’ process. On the team, there were never any peers. It was interesting. It was never even peers on the team or in team leadership or in product. Usually, I have to go out to marketing before you actually find any other women that happen to be on the team. Then once I was in the driver’s seat where I can start making some hiring decisions and resumes got to me, I started hiring women, which is something I carry along with me through my career now.

CORALINE: Did you have any role models when you’re coming up, if there weren’t very many women in the field? Who did you look up to?

EMILY: My mom. My mom has a PhD in molecular pathology. She is a director in pathology and associate professor at University of Maryland in Baltimore. She actually didn’t get her PhD until she was in her late 30s while I wasn’t around. But the story is she went to Michigan Tech and she actually want to be a plant biologist. She got into the PhD program at Michigan Tech for plant biology and just before she started her program, they yanked her position and all of her funding out from underneath her because she was informed that a friend of the dean for the program had a son and they needed to find him a place and because she was a woman, they were going to prefer him over her. If she want to do plant biology, she had to leave.

She was a medical tech and then she went back and got her PhD at Wayne State and then she was a head of one of the major labs at the American Red Cross and then she moved to the University of Maryland in Baltimore. My mom’s always been a symbol of perseverance against pretty much everything. She’s still there today so that’s why I look up to.

JAMEY: That story is unbelievable. It’s really not unbelievable. It’s just really sad.

EMILY: It was 1971. I got a reflection of it in 1991 and I have a 12-year old daughter who wants to go into Applied Mathematics and we will see it again in six years.

SAM: It sounds like you’ve experienced a lot of isolation as mostly being the only woman on your team. I’ve seen a lot of chatter on Twitter this week. Marco Rogers posted some stuff about the double bind that he experiences as a person of color in tech and then, I think Sarah Mei was tweeting about some of this as well. I’ve seen a bunch of other people talking about the double bind where as a woman in tech, you are either told that you are too aggressive or that you’re too nurturing or that you’re both at the same time, which is a special trick to pull off. Have you experienced any of that?

EMILY: I had a manager for five years who every single one of his yearly reviews informed me that I was too aggressive and I would never move forward in my career, unless I was more female. I ignored his advice because it was bad.

SAM: Literally, he said more female?

EMILY: Yeah. I need to be more of a woman and more caring and think more about the men’s feelings around me. I would make him more comfortable if I changed in that way. That hasn’t happened.

SAM: Glad to hear that.

EMILY: I’ll let you know if I ever does that.

CORALINE: I’ve definitely been on the receiving end of being called aggressive or abrasive and there’s some truth to it because when I know I’m right, I do not yield. I don’t want to have that sort of confidence that I’m that right all the time. But when it does come up, I am relentless in my pursuit of doing the right thing and that has definitely caused me a lot of trouble in the past. How do you think your career would have been different if you taking that advice?

EMILY: I don’t think that I can physically take that advice. When I went to go and build the game, I don’t think I would have survived that environment. That’s an interesting world of video games and it’s funny because I have done video games twice. Media Station is actually a game studio. I don’t learn from my failures apparently. But I think if I would have taken that advice and wouldn’t have learned how to stand my ground, I don’t think that I would have been a successful at ZineMax Online Studios as I was.

I think that this double standard between you have to be more warm and more nurturing while you’re too aggressive but I need to be more aggressive and I need you to defend your decisions, I think that it’s just bad advice and you really have to find your own way in the situation that you’re at the time, if that makes sense.

CORALINE: Definitely. I’m interested in hearing about how working in a gaming company was different from working in a more traditional, what we think of tech environment. I have a friend who specializes in programming AI for bosses in video games and she’s told me some real horror stories about what games studios are like and the grind and the long hours. I’m curious how your experience was in that industry and maybe, why you left it.

EMILY: There’s an old David Foster Wallace essay called ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.’ In that case, it’s about him being on a cruise ship, which also a supposedly fun thing that I don’t really want to do again. The video game industry is both amazing and terrifying and a call out to all my friends who are still in it, “Hi. Are you still there? I will parachute you guys in like hot dogs and other edible food that we can shove under the doors so you can get food.” Shout out to my friends at Blizzard and Ubisoft and still at ZineMax. It is the group with the most passionate people that I have ever worked with in my life.

These are people who love what they’re doing, they’ve live for it, they breathe it, they play their own games, they eat their own dog food. They play other games for fun and for work, they do nothing but [inaudible] all day and they know every single thing that’s coming out and the game schedule. They know every conference, every sub-conference, every blog, every major person on Twitter. These people live and die and breathe video games and they are terrific to work with and if anybody ever has a chance to do it, I actually highly recommend the experience.

But it was also an experience in getting things done extremely fast, understanding what is important and what is not, learning how to sort of weed out the egos from the job that has to be done because code has to be delivered. It is an educational experience in how to handle the pressure from social media. One thing to see one piece of feedback or one tweet on your product and it’s another thing to see it on Twitterfall when it’s coming at 10,000 tweets in a half an hour. Those are two very different experiences and I have had them both.

When it comes to shipping, it is a very high pressure environment. In a lot of places, the teams do pull together and they do pull together to get the job done. There’s a lot of frustration, a lot of people lose their patience and leave but there’s also a feeling of satisfaction when it gets out the door. It is a lot of hours, it is a lot of hard work, it is a lot of dedication. You have to want to be there and I wanted to be there.

The reason I left is because there was just some internal factors. You’ve launched AAA MMO and the parent studio is not happy with the launched and they’re interfering with everything now. It’s sort of some standard ZineMax story is a joke here from anybody else. Part of it was just some burn out at the end of that and I just needed to go and do something else for a little while. But hilariously, I just wanted to downshift so I went back to startups because I was looking for something slightly slower but it’s a terrific experience. A lot of people, I still talk to them, people who I work with there, I still talk to them every day. It’s an environment where you form friendships for life.

CORALINE: I think I have a good understanding of what you did at ZeniMax. You painted a picture for us. How does that compare to what you’re doing at Upside now?

EMILY: It’s funny because I really started on the ground floor here and I got to think long and hard about our learned lessons, about what we did really well and what we didn’t do so well and pulled a lot of the management direction that I felt worked really well and brought it here. ZeniMax was, for a very long time, a very move-fast and break-things environment. I’m a big fan of move-fast and break-things so I brought that ethos here, learned the plusses and minuses of agile versus Kanban versus team size, team communication, overhead, scaling. A lot of those lessons I brought here.

But I also try to leave some of the grind on the floor, simply because I believe this is a marathon and not a sprint. Videogame companies, most of their QA is outsourced contract so they don’t really care if they burn people out on third shift. I have more of an eye towards long term of growing people and growing their careers and retaining them and making people better people than the way I found them.

That’s a plus and that’s a minus in the video game industry, except for Ubisoft — I call it Ubi — a lot of places, they’re not really big in investment over the long term. I think it’s very important when building a healthy culture to have investment on personal level and in an organizational level. It’s just a little bit more of the CTO thinking of how we really should be, as a people and as a department and as a company, instead of just as a thing that needs to ship a thing out the door to the hordes that are waiting to play their game.

That’s the difference here than what I experienced before. Also, it’s very important for people who can be together to be together. People need to be together on a mission so we try to build mission here, which is also important. People need to come to work every day and feel like they’re doing a thing that’s important. That’s Upside. That’s a little bit of what we’ve done different here than we’ve done it in previous gigs.

Another thing that we’ve done here is that we’ve hired a lot more women here. We have women engineers who are working on main product. We have engineers of color who are working on main product, which is super cool. DC is a really cool tech city because we both have historical black colleges here like Howard College. In Howard University, there are [inaudible] and University of Maryland, College Park, UMCP plus Virginia Tech and because the government has these requirements for diversity and hiring and diversity in advancement, we end up having just a larger influx of diverse candidates that come to us who are very, very lucky in the DC environment.

We get to pick from people who otherwise, may not be or have the same opportunity out in Silicon Valley so it’s really cool that we can start diversity initiatives here and we can bring in more people. We have people that have worked all over from all different industries and all different backgrounds and it just makes Upside, especially Upside tech side of things, more vibrant than a lot of places out there.

CORALINE: Emily, you’re now a CTO. Was it at Upside that you made the transition from being more of a software engineer to more of a manager?

EMILY: I actually started making the transition from an engineer to a manager all the way back when I worked at Merchant Link, which is the transactional processor in Silver Spring, Maryland. When I had my very first report and then he quit on me and then I had my very second report, that was exciting. Then when I moved to ZeniMax and that’s when I was heavily introduced to hiring teams. When I moved to Luminal in 2014, I was introduced to hiring a building departments. Then when I came to Upside, I started building the engineering department. I’ve been on this track since about 2009.

CORALINE: I feel like I’m in my second time around in software development. The first time, I took a management track and got up the c-level but I found that the further away I got from code, the less happy I was. Around 2012 or 2013, I actually went back to being an individual contributor. I found that the things I liked about management, in terms of mentoring and team building and having some decision-making authority, I could get as a principal engineer. Do you find that’s your experience too? Is that what you like about management and do you ever miss coding?

EMILY: Well, I’m going to take that back — the missing coding because my daughter came to me with wanting to program a simulation about doing bacterial spread infections and I spent the next six hours reading SIR algorithms and going through all the differential equations and then finding out how to implement them in Python and then figuring out, reading a bunch of example code about how to implement them for zombie outbreaks. Then using a whole bunch of MATLAB stuff to pull in various maps in the United States to simulate zombie outbreaks in United States. Apparently, I do miss coding. I’m not going to say I don’t.

He asked me to look into a problem and I just go right down the rabbit hole. One of the things I’m especially good at and was the real sweet spot for me, one of the things I really enjoyed was the architect hat, which isn’t really so much coding anymore but thinking about projects on a large scale. Instead of just thinking about my one piece of code really deep, if you’re writing like some kind of file system and you’re trying to deal with some of the L1/L2 cache miss algorithms for your file system, it lets you really go and really deep in some operating system driver. That’s the principle engineer right there, all the way down to the metal.

My sweet spot was — and I’ve noticed this ever since grad school so this is not some new thing — the ability to think about all the pieces in the system and be able to hold them in my head and have them all work and then be able to follow the little traces in my head. It’s like having your own little tracing system that runs in your head where nobody can see it, which isn’t terribly useful to the team but was incredibly useful to me. To be able to work through some of those systems and I’ll be able to communicate back with product and UX and engineers and whoever else had a stake in it, here’s how the system is, here’s implications, here’s what we can do, we can design this. I still have some pretty decent whiteboard skills this day.

It’s interesting because I’ve taken that piece of skill set of being able hold everything in my head at once and I transposed it onto people, instead of just things. Sometimes, I joke and claim that I just see everybody who’s in engineering, just as a process list. I’m just walking through doing a ‘ps -ef’ and seeing what everybody’s doing and what exactly they’re working on and I can see all the processes running at once and how they’re scheduling on the processor that is Upside, which I think drives my direct reports nuts.

But I’d largely take the optimization program that I was running on systems and transposed it to people and how we deal with various things that are not working and how we rearrange systems and how we grow systems in a way that we can scale out the entire department, the entire business and how it interfaces with things like customer service or marketing or our growth team and how they all have little input and exports and how everything should work together.

I think I do drive people a little bit nutty because I will talk about it in a very dry engineering way of here’s how this should work and here’s how this process should communicate and here’s my deck and here’s the steps go. But it’s worked really well for getting Upside off the mark and getting us from 10 people to 100. It’s been a useful skill. I don’t think I would go back to building code. I don’t think I would go back to writing things other than fun evening projects trying to [inaudible] flow running or whatever I’m playing with today. I actually don’t miss being an individual contributor. As a kind of long winded but that was my answer.

JAMEY: That was really interesting. I have not done management track. I’m not sure that I ever want to. The thought of trying to move in to that direction is scary to me but it was really a fresh perspective to see how you thought about it so thank you.

EMILY: You are welcome.

SAM: It is interesting to hear about the idea of treating systems of people, at least in part, the way that you might treat a system of code.

EMILY: I will tell you that people are way more difficult. If computers do exactly what you tell them to do and people never do what you tell them to do. They’re really never. You just want to walk around and hook a debugger up to them and try to figure out where the code is wrong. Leadership is super interesting. It’s mostly putting out your vision and trying to build these North Star and say, “We need to as a team get to North Star but I really just wanted MVP of the things so please, just give me a little skate board. We’ll get to the North Star. Be patient but just give me a little bit of this. Awesome. Now, ship it. Now!” It’s fun in a different way.

CORALINE: A moment to take a second to give a shout out to our newest $25 level sponsor, Risse Rigdon. I hope I’m not mispronouncing your name. Risse is on Twitter as @risuikari and I want to remind people that as a Patreon, you get access to our exclusive Slack community. I think we just passed 100 people, is that right Sam? And we talked to —

SAM: Two hundred, in fact.

CORALINE: Two hundred. Wow. We talk about things that come up after listening to the show, you have the ability to suggest guest, to suggest questions to our guest and to just be around like minded-people who understand that software is about people and that, we are all greater than code. If you’d like to join that community, please go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Pledge at any level and we’ll get you in.

JAMEY: You helped make the show happened so thanks to all 200 of you.

CORALINE: Emily, I’m curious, at the beginning you talked about the importance of a PhD if you want to go into something like data science. We really haven’t touched on data science very much. Have you intersected with data science at any point in your career? In my personal experience, I see a lot more women in data science than in software engineering. I’m curious if that’s been your experience as well.

EMILY: Yeah. This is interesting because it’s sort of a two-pronged question. My first integration with data science was actually at ZeniMax. We stood up a giant data science system basically from scratch and hired a bunch of data scientists and discovered really horrifying facts about our game. We built fun simulations like the death map where you could bring up the entire map of the MMO and just see where everybody was dying at. Those are really cool. That was one of the best application. But you can watch like heat maps of what quests people were playing and what content was doing really well and what content wasn’t doing so well. It was in the direction there.

The entire premise of Upside is actually built on data science and we recently really put down the hammer on building a data science department. I have noticed that a much larger proportion of women in data science than there are in straight up software engineering. I suspect it’s because we’re looking for people in more of the hard sciences, where there’s been a shift that’s been moving since the late 80s. I know that in economics, it’s really bad. I read that flame war on Twitter. There’s another iteration of it going at economics Twitter right now about there’s no women in economics. I’ve seen that one.

But I do know that in biology and chemistry and applied mathematics and especially astronomy, it was a big one for a long time because it was almost entirely male-dominated, there’s been a large shift to being sort of this 90/10 to being closer to maybe a 60/40 representation. When you put out a call for data scientists, we get a really good gender mix between men and women who come in and apply. We need to go upstairs and count all of data scientists that just appeared one day here. It was remarkable but we’re running about 50/50 in our gender diversities here in Upside, which is super cool.

Majority of them do have PhDs. They don’t always have PhDs in applied mathematics. They do come from a diverse background. I believe it’s because data science largely came up through the bio track, through genomics and bioinformatics, where all the way back to my work in hospital IT, where everything was a little bit more gender parity. There’s been a lot of gender parity moving in biology and the medical field for really long time. It was very, very bad in the 80s but it moved in a much more positive direction there.

In the genomic field, it’s pretty much a 50/50 split and you can reach and you can get people who get data science there and a lot of data scientist say that they don’t really care the nature of the problem. They just really care about the data and doing actual science to the data that they collect. It’s a little bit different to thinking about things. It’s a huge growing right field and it’s getting people from all over. It’s not just this one skinny pipeline of software engineers going through college, coming out taking software [inaudible]. That’s my theory. I would need to look at the data to understand if that’s really correct or not but a theory seems to be burying itself out pretty well.

CORALINE: One of the things I worry about with any job that has a pretty high college qualifications is that you’re self-selecting for people who have a lot of privilege. You’re self-selecting for people who have the ability to afford to go to a master’s program or a PhD program. I worry that that means that we’re selecting for upper middle class white women, as opposed to focusing on other dimensions of diversity. Has it happened to your experience too?

EMILY: I think that is probably true. I went to Michigan and one thing that Michigan Engineering — which doesn’t overlap with data science but that’s my background — was very proud of its scholarship program for underprivileged children who are coming out of Detroit. I can’t speak about through any other university or any other universities program and props to my homies at Michigan, there was a lot of outreach and a lot of work to bring in students that came from, especially Detroit in particular but also setting them on flint in the sticks, bringing them in and getting them into programs where they would shine. I know that Harvard is hideously unbalanced. Thirty percent of the freshman class are all legacy and other bits of nonsense.

My husband went to Maryland College Park. He actually was in chemistry and not in computers and he was there for a bunch of years actually. They were very diverse department too and were very big about reaching in to DC and serving underprivileged students and getting them into graduate programs. I’m going to answer for that, as I guess my long winded answer is I know that the public universities are trying to do something about that problem and I can’t speak to the private universities. I can’t speak to the Harvards or the Stanfords of the world.

SAM: I do find it interesting that you’ve mentioned that you’re drawing a lot of talent from the other STEM fields, especially bio. I have the impression that there are not as many jobs in those other fields and they don’t pay as well so I wonder if tech is managing to attract a bunch of those people just because of all the money that’s currently here.

EMILY: I have a different theory, which was my theory is that they all went to fintech in New York and fintech isn’t all that hot anymore, now they’re all moving into the next field.

SAM: Financial tech, you mean?

EMILY: Yeah. For a while, especially before the Great Recession, fintech was draining data scientists out of the universe.

SAM: Really?

EMILY: Yes, there was a huge move. Especially PhD physicist was the biggest one but physicist and mathematicians, they were being pulled very heavily out of academia and out of the bio and moved into fintech where there was a lot of money to be made very fast. The problems were interesting because if you’re hiding vast amounts of fraud in the financial system, I guess it’s true, then problems are interesting with the crash and regulation. I saw a little bit in The Economist recently talking about the return of some of the synthetic CDOs at beta phase. I’m sure that they’ll all be pulled back to New York, sooner or later but the crash came and then they all went to a whole bunch of different industries, mostly to tech.

SAM: So there is a diaspora but not from where I thought it was. That’s really cool. Thank you.

EMILY: Yeah.

JAMEY: When you were talking about the demographics of the data scientist, you mentioned that you would have to get the data on that, which in addition to being very deliciously meta to me, it made me start to think about the ways that data kind of describes our lives. A lot of cool stuff has come out of that but I think the people have also been starting to realize that it’s scary in some ways, the data contained so much information about us. I know this is kind of a big question but I wonder what your opinion is about where that line is.

EMILY: There’s a very useful book that’s out called, ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’ by Cathy O’Neil who is also a data scientist who originally was teaching and then went to fintech and then left. At the end of that day, we’re just talking about algorithms that take training data and do computation on them and largely, some fancy calculus and some matrix transformations and some curve fitting and then spit out weights. That’s largely what data science does. It’s an optimization problem.

The problem comes from those models. We build models and we identify features on them that we actually wanted to test against and optimized for — some of that are data science language. We try to build a model and run a problem. An interesting problem that you could try to solve for is I would like to predict what is the fashion that are going to come out of the New York runway based on the Paris fashion show. There’s an interesting blog article where somebody did exactly that and took all of the pictures and fed it into a model and it started generating possible fashions and did a bunch of categorization and clustering.

It is interesting because you could see which designers have what kind of styles or what kind of styles are popular, how things are moving to the style world. That is a very neutral model. It doesn’t really help people or hurt people, unless you’re really into the fashion world, then you’re spending lots of money on it, then it might sucks some of your money out of your wallet. But models can be used in a variety of ways and it’s all based, more or less in the training data that is given. If the training data that it starts with is impure or is biased or it doesn’t have the right information that’s framing it and it’s just pushed through one of these models to the other side, it could definitely be a source of harm.

In Cathy O’Neil’s book, her opening chapter talks about the DC school systems and that they were trying to filter out the good teachers from the bad teachers. The training data that was going into a model that was done by some company in Boston that nobody had any say over, they were taking, basically the change in student’s test scores year after year.

The teachers figure this out and they would cheat or they would game the system in some way, that it would show that students would have this massive gain in their test scores during their year, during the tenure with that teacher and then they would hand them off to a teacher the next year and the teacher thinking that she was getting these students that had performed in these particular test scores that they would be at a certain level. They would come to her classroom and they would be like two or three levels below that. Then she would get hit by the model and say, “Your scores have really dropped,” because you’ve ended up the year before cheated and some teachers who are excellent teachers lost their jobs because they were given some random score that came out of this model that was clearly had some curve overfitting problems that were associated with it.

The teachers had recommendations and they found other jobs but it definitely damaged their reputation, not just the model in the process but also the school system. We see that a lot. One of the big places that these models are used is in advertising dollars. That’s probably the biggest place that we know of is used in advertising dollars and we’re seeing it right now with all the brouhaha over Facebook and Russians spending money on it and highly optimizing it. It’s got a neural net model that’s sitting on the back that you say, “I need you to optimize for people who live in Western Michigan that have labeled themselves as Republican and Christian,” because they pick up these profiles of people and the algorithm knows how to get ads directly to their very targeted eyeballs. It’s cheap because you’re maybe only putting out a thousand ads, instead of a television ad, which you pay for spots for whatever it costs for all those eyeballs at once.

There are some strong negatives about data science but on the other hand, if you start talking about, say that the genomics fields, data science is extremely powerful when trying to do combinatorial mathematics for finding new drugs. Otherwise, we would have to run the simulations on thousands of these drugs and it’s very expensive and it’s very slow. We started dropping the cost of drugs over time because now the cost of research is going down because we can have AIs, largely being able to just get rid of all the negatives before we even take a look at them.

Data science is a big plus and minus. We’re building a giant data science department here at Upside because we have an interesting problem, which is travel data. Travel data turns out to be huge. We were getting three terabytes of data a day and we had to sift through all of that to be able to find flights and hotels for people. The big question is how do we start building automated shoppers and sorting around your preferences. To be able to push all of the poor flights that have like two connections, don’t have any Wi-Fi or the plane is not comfortable, how do we push all that stuff to the bottom and bring up all the flights and hotels that are quality up to the top.

It turns out to be pricing is a huge data science problem, where there’s a combination of how do you set margins versus how do you find quality versus how do you set preferences versus how do you get in other stakeholders needs into the data to be able to bring up something that’s of high quality to the customer. In that sense, we give people quality and reduce the amount of time searching and be able to build trust so in that way, the models are very positive model because we’re basically an automated shopper that is for that person’s needs.

JAMEY: That sounds like a really interesting problem. When you are describing it, it seems almost building a program that can think the way that a human might think about what a human’s preferences would be.

EMILY: I wouldn’t try to humanize it like that. It’s a machine that knows from the way that we push data through it. It knows what is good and it knows what is not good based on our whole lot of data that have seen in the past. Based on knowing what was good in the past, it can make a suggestion about what it thinks will be good in the future. That’s the thing to remember about data science and all these models, especially I know that Facebook has them, Twitter has them, Google has them and everybody’s talking about how cool this AI is and if it’s good or if it’s evil.

The thing to remember about it is that these AI models, they’re not sentient. They only know what happens in the past because you fed the past to it and it can only make suggestions about the future, if no conditions ever change. That’s the thing to remember about these models. The moment that conditions changed in some way, the model is invalid and the answer that is given are now wrong. It’s not like a human that can take a new ideas and sort through them and synthesize them and then from that, be able to have a new answer. It needs to be told something has changed and if something’s changed drastically, it needs to be rewritten from scratch and rebuilt.

That’s why it’s so good for something like spam because spam, this is same kind of patterns over and over again. With an infinite amount of trading data, we just sort of push it through that, it’s like, “This is spam. This is not spam.” It gets better over time because there has a bigger and bigger data set.

CORALINE: That reminds me. I need to spend my $25 Amazon gift certificate, get some new windows and remodel my bathroom.

EMILY: Amazon’s got some great models that if you go and it suggests you, you’re buying this and here’s the other five things that you might like. It does a terrific job.

CORALINE: I’ve seen that fail pretty gloriously. I actually took a screen capture of this because it was so good. They recommended a septum to me because I bought the Zombie Survival Guide.

EMILY: Yes. That’s amazing. It think she’d love that. Based on your past purchases and past searches, it thinks that’s perfect for you because you bought a Zombie Survival Guide.

JAMEY: I literally just bought Weapons of Math Destruction on Amazon while we’re talking so I just went back to Amazon to see what’s recommending me. It’s still just like, “You should probably buy Star Wars Legos.” Now I’m like, “Yeah, that sounds like me.”

EMILY: Yeah, well, why wouldn’t you buy Star Wars Legos? Is there a Porg Lego yet? Does anybody know if they put up the Porg yet, as a Lego?

JAMEY: I think they have. The Last Jedi had just come out.

EMILY: I have to get the Porg chewy for my dog. I have to get one.

JAMEY: That’s why I was looking at them because the new type of Lego sets came out already for the new movie and I was like, “Yes!”

EMILY: Yeah. The algorithm absolutely knows what you want.

JAMEY: It does.

EMILY: Maybe, it is sentient but only in Amazon.

SAM: And then, of course there are the cases where you buy something that you only buy once every five years like a refrigerator and then Amazon says, “Here are five other refrigerators you might be interested in.”

EMILY: Well, you might want to buy five other refrigerators. Have you considered it?

JAMEY: You’re a refrigerator enthusiast now.

SAM: Well, I will now.

EMILY: I’ll think about. I spent a lot of time searching for a very strange books on Amazon so it’s totally confused to what I want.

SAM: You’ve talked about the importance of feeding good data to your model, which is something that we’ve talked about indirectly a few times on this show. I wonder if that’s something where having people with a background in doing actual science is helpful. Does that training include skills on how to analyze the quality of your data and find where the biases in it are?

EMILY: Absolutely. That is a big yes, especially the start point of people from economics. I know that they’re trying to make everybody the irrational actor and humans are not rational actors but it does give them the training to look for biases and to keep them from reflecting their own opinions in the data and allow the data to talk for itself to get down to real answers, which I have found from building a startup in a business to be unbelievably powerful.

SAM: I’m curious if that extends further to identifying bias in the data itself like the canonical example there being something like predictive policing, where you’re feeding it data that’s based on biased arrest reports and so on.

EMILY: There’s a chapter in Weapons of Math Destruction where she actually talks about this exact issue. I highly recommend the book, if you’re very interested in where data science is falling down. But there’s several companies that are startups out there, most of them are San Francisco startups that are trying to take a lot of policing data and push it through models to be able to predict clusters of possible crime so that police cruisers can be dispatched with higher efficiency.

But because it only knows about the past and it doesn’t know about the future and it knows that poor communities have a larger occurrence of low-value crime like somebody did graffiti or somebody going to the back of an alleyway or whatever, it makes it look like there’s a larger cluster of actual crime right there but it’s never going to pick out someone committing fraud because that’s a lower incidence of the crime. You’re not going to dispatch cruisers to go around in lower Manhattan looking for instance of fraud, although we know it’s all there. It’s going to go and just dispatched to the Bronx and because there’s a higher propensity of lower value crime and that just happens to be what’s in the data.

That can be a reflection of a human being’s biases and one thing we must be careful about is that we are not reflecting human being biases in the data when we filter into the model because the model is just going to amplify those biases. Always keep in mind that the model only knows about the past, then we know that the model can inadvertently have a racist overtones and tendencies. Even though it’s just a machine doing mathematical computation, it can look like it has racist tendencies if we happen to put that data through the model, if that’s what we’re looking for.

It’s a curve fitting problem. It’s a matter of putting the correct data from the beginning to train the model so that it does not have biases and what pops out of it is something that approximates the truth. That’s where we really get in trouble with data science. Everything is a logistics problem in the universe and we want to be able to dispatch and deploy our resources that we have because we don’t have many of them on the problems that are of the number one highest priority thing that we have on the table.

If we’re putting our biases in what we think is the number one highest priority thing, it’s not really but that’s what we’re putting it. We put in the model and it tells us, “You were right. That is really the highest priority. You should send all your police cars down to that neighborhood because that’s really were all the crime is,” then it becomes a self-perpetuating process and it’s something we need to be very cognizant of as we build all of these systems out.

SAM: What training do we have and what training do we need that would help us identify it?

EMILY: That’s a really good question. I think part of it is simply having an understanding of what the problem is from an unbiased point of view and it’s hard to get to that place.

SAM: So you’re basically saying we’re screwed.

EMILY: I don’t think we’re screwed. I think that we need to understand that these are just machines and they’re not all-knowing, certainly not yet and we need to be cognizant that we may be pushing our own human foibles into them.

SAM: Yeah, my joke was basically just saying that if we need to be able to look at something from an unbiased perspective and we’re all humans here, that’s kind of a bootstrap problem.

EMILY: Right.

CORALINE: We’re at the point where we should start wrapping up. Is there anything else, Emily you wanted to touch on before we do that?

EMILY: The only thing that I want to bring up really briefly is just back to the very beginning, the women in engineering topic. One thing that has come out of all the women enjoying in tech right now is really the importance of mentorship and internships for women who are very young and early in their career to be able to get the encouragement that they need. Even me on my side, I think it’s someplace that we’re falling down across the entire industry right now. At starting from high school, maybe even starting in middle school, I see it with my daughter. She’s in seventh grade.

Her science teacher is trying crazy to encourage her and she lives in a tech home so she’s can even encourage with her but I see it all along the pipeline and just as wrapping up, as we’re talking about women in engineering and data science and getting people more and more involved in the industry as a whole, that I think that it should start at the beginning. Instead of thinking about, “They’re in college. They just come out. How can we keep them here?” I think we need to talk about how do we keep them in 7th grade computer classes.

JAMEY: Coraline asked the question about how do you think your career would have been different if you had taken that bad advice from somebody and I wanted to ask the opposite question, how do you think your career would have been different if you had had more women on your teams and women peers from earlier on in your career?

EMILY: How would have been different if I had more women peers? It’s an interesting question. I’m trying to imagine what that would be like. I think I wouldn’t have gone for my PhD. I think I would have finish them at the Masters. I think I wouldn’t have gone all the way and that would have been a significant difference. I probably would’ve pushed into management a lot earlier as well. There was never any encouragement from my side. It’s just me go and get things done. I think I probably would have moved faster and harder in my career than I did and I probably would have taken a few more risky opportunities that were on the table than I did.

JAMEY: Emily, at the end of our shows, we like to do a little section where everybody gets to reflect on one thing that really struck them and made them think about what we talked about in today’s episode.

CORALINE: I have been thinking a lot about bias and we talked about bias in terms of machine learning but there’s another kind of bias that I was thinking about and that is my experience with being self-taught, with being a college dropout. I think I am biased toward hiring people with a similar background story to me, people who have taken an initiative on their own, learning what they need to learn to break into our field. I know I definitely have a bias towards people with that story and probably because it resonates with me in terms of my background.

I get the sense and Emily, I hope this isn’t unfair, that you have a bias toward people with degrees because that’s how you came up and came into the field. I think, we think all about our biases in terms of negative impact on things like diversity and getting more people in the tech from different ethnicities or different genders or different socioeconomic backgrounds. But I wanted to think more about other hiring biases like the resumes that do get to the top of stack. Are we favoring people with higher degrees or we’re favoring people with no degrees. That’s something I want to think about a little more.

SAM: Following on to that. We’ve talked about bias a fair bit and I wanted to mention that it’s well worth your time to do a little bit of research into the various cognitive biases that we have as humans that we are inherent because knowing about a cognitive bias doesn’t necessarily mean that you can vanquish it once and for all. It’s always going to be there but not knowing about a bias means you’re going to fall into that trap every single time. Even just going in and looking at the Wikipedia page list of cognitive biases, it’s super educational and you’ll learn something about yourself right away.

JAMEY: For my reflection, I am thinking more about how computers aren’t people and what we said about that, which sounds so obvious when I word it like that but I think that people in general have a real tendency that anthropomorphize things. I know that I certainly do but I think a lot of people do and that’s how we end up with Siri and Alexa and these computers that we speak to like they’re people.

It was really interested in what Emily was saying about how computers can’t think like people because they can’t take in new information and change their minds the way people can. A lot of the technology that is cutting edge these days is kind of scary for me. I’m kind of a little bit of like a skeptic in that way but that really hit the nail on the head about what’s scary about it to me. I was really happy to have heard that perspective so I can now think what has really on it and how it makes me feel about tech so thank you.

EMILY: I really enjoyed doing the podcast. This was a fantastic experience and thank you all so much for inviting me on your show. I really enjoyed it. My reflection is that I really do enjoy teaching. It’s interesting to be able to talk and dig into a topic with interesting people like yourselves and just sort of reflect on computers and people and society and what it all means.

CORALINE: Great. Thank you very much for being here. We’ve really enjoyed this conversation and I think our listeners will enjoy it as well and looking forward to seeing how people react to the podcast in our Slack community in some of the ideas we brought today. We’ve definitely covered a lot of ground. Thank you very much and to all of our listeners, we love you and we will talk to you very soon.

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051: Creating Safer Spaces with Soo Choi

Mandy Moore — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 05:00:38 +0000

Panelists:

Jessica Kerr | Sam Livingston-Gray

Guest Starring:

Soo Choi: @soosiechoi | DORA

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:09 – Soo’s Background at NASA and Superpower

06:01 – Wanting Attending Conferences and Speaking and then When Speaking at Conferences Goes Wrong

Soo Choi: Changing Diversity Constructs: My Journey as a Woman in DevOps @ DevOpsDays D.C. 2017

16:10 – Creating Safe Spaces: From Conferences to Workspaces

21:29 – Allies and Advocacy; Talking Salary

24:12 – Safe Spaces vs Safer Spaces

28:16 – Forgiving People Without Labeling Them (i.e. Sexist, Racist, etc.)

38:28 – Having “Fierce Conversations” and Collecting Better Tools

Aja Hammerly: We Don’t Do That Here

Reflections:

Soo: Sharing experiences in open and safer spaces.

Sam: Listening to each other’s experiences. Sit with cognitive dissonance, be okay with it, and see what it has to teach us.

Jessica: Learning from other’s experiences.

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Transcript:

SAM: Hello and welcome to Episode 51 of ‘The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.’ I’m Sam Livingston-Gray and it’s just my profound joy to be here with my fellow panelists, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Thank you, Sam and I am thrilled to be on this excellent podcast, which has a shorter than that. It is Greater Than Code.

SAM: Yay!

JESSICA: And today, we have a guest and her name is Soo Choi and she is part of the DevOps Research and Assessment Team, also known as DORA: DevOps-Research.com. In the past, Soo has been a senior product manager at Chef, a director at Rackspace for OpenStack Products, a co-founder and COO of Anso Labs and a program manager at NASA. In her spare time, she chases two children around the northern California coast. Soo, welcome to Greater Than Code.

SOO: I am really pleased to be here. Thank you.

SAM: Now, I just want to ask you about NASA.

SOO: Oh, absolutely. It was a really, really interesting experience. One of the first projects that I worked on was untangling NASA’s financial systems, helping standardize the NASA travel policy because it becomes really interesting when you have scientists who need to travel out to the middle of a desert and camp to test different instruments. Then from there, I was put on a project to really understand what do we do when we send something to space like a satellite or some type of intergalactic explorer and we’re not getting data for maybe five to 15 years and what does that next generation storage and data center look like.

JESSICA: What does it look like?

SOO: It looks like the cloud. You know, it’s really interesting that you can’t really build infrastructure for these types of requirement, especially due to the fact that while whatever instrument is out there in space is setting back this data, it’s actually considered top secret until it lands into our facility. You can build these things but then it will be obsolete by the time the data gets here. Then also, what if that instrument just didn’t work. Unfortunately, projects have literally exploded on the landing pad at launch or there has been a misconfiguration, then you waste all of this time and money and what do we do to make just-in-time data centers and that’s my time at NASA.

SAM: Cool, so from the data goes from space to the ground and back up to the clouds.

SOO: Exactly. It’s the great way to look at.

JESSICA: That’s interesting that you have five to 15 years to plan, except you have to plan for something that would be secure and state of the art, five to 15 years from now.

SOO: Yes. I don’t know about you. I have a crystal ball but my crystal ball isn’t that great, no matter how much I try to scrub it so you end up doing a lot of theoretical conversations and you end up really having to sort of step out of your zone and instead of making like these crazy project plans, you need to actually spend some time talking to futurists — people who really actually love to think about these things and not just in the context of your one little project but what the world will look like in that short time span. Ten to 15 years is not even a blink when it comes to how the world works in the age of the world.

SAM: Oh, wow. I just had a horrible thought.

SOO: What?

SAM: Does this mean that we’re getting XML from space?

SOO: Yes, all of your JSONs will be saved for us. I said that wrong. ‘All of your JSONs will belong to us.’

SAM: Very good.

JESSICA: Okay. It’s time for the famous Greater Than Code question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

SOO: I think my superpower is in fact people with a purpose and a sense of urgency. I’ve been lucky enough to be working on and leading some complex projects and it’s pretty difficult to get everyone on the same page when scope is pretty large. I feel like that that’s what I excel at.

JESSICA: That’s really valuable. You also did that at conferences?

SOO: I really try to make sure that my number one direction when I’m at my prime directive when I’m at conferences is to learn as much as possible and then if I can help make connections and infect people with a sense of urgency with whatever topic that is thrown at us, then it is my job to do that.

But honestly, the superpower question always cracks me up. I don’t know why but I always get like a little grumpy about answering it because I’m not like this sad person who has a horrible backstory of our parents dying and I’m an orphan and I have emerged with this honed special skill. That always sort of bothers me and it makes —

JESSICA: Superpowers are free.

SOO: Yes, that’s a good point but I’m warming up to the idea.

SAM: Yeah, for what it’s worth for a while, my superpower was being able to identify actors who were on Babylon 5, even if they had been under heavy prosthetics at the time.

SOO: What’s the giveaway? Is it the voice? Is it the mannerism? Or –?

SAM: I don’t know. It’s just this thing. I look at it and I’ll be like, “That actor was on Babylon 5 in Episode 27.” I may have been more than slightly obsessed with B5 but next to that, years looks pretty dang and good, doesn’t it?

SOO: Practice makes perfect.

JESSICA: Soo, when and why did you start going to conferences and speaking?

SOO: I felt like at this point, I was really excited about the work that I was doing. Even before that, I’ve always been interested in public speaking because conferences are probably the big thing versus speaking at a meeting and presenting ideas to an audience and that was important to me, honestly to get what my directive was at that time, for whatever interesting complex project I was working on.

From there, it seemed like we need to share this information, those to open data project. At NASA, we’re heavily involved in the open source communities and what I loved about that was this idea of let’s just share ideas without a common cause. Before then, when you go to conferences, it’s really about like how do you make and monetize something versus just sharing ideas. That’s really how I got excited, then I got un-excited really quickly.

JESSICA: Do you mean that before open source conferences were about monetization?

SOO: Yeah. I misspoke. I really feel like I got involved in conferences because I was already a leader in the thing that I was doing at the time. It seemed so natural and I was really encouraged to go out and share our projects story out to a bigger audience.

JESSICA: Okay, so at NASA, you were encouraged to go share the story and you like how conferences have progressed into a dialogue.

SOO: Absolutely. I think that format is pretty amazing. I love the idea that you are going to sit in a room with like-minded folks who care about said topic and discuss it in a humane way versus lots of shouting. There’s no politics in open spaces, right?

JESSICA: We tried.

SAM: That’s the ideal.

JESSICA: And then you said bad things happened.

SOO: Yeah and I think this is why I really have been speaking about making safe spaces outside of work and then also, that drives down to why do we need safe spaces and what’s going on within our workplace were lacking diversity. I feel like all of it is connected and I feel like the more folks that I could reach about my experiences from the perspective of going to conferences and bringing that home of our whole environment, when it comes to diversity and women in tech and inclusion, the better off we will be as a whole.

SAM: It certainly seems like there should be a positive feedback cycle in there somewhere, like the more safe spaces we have, the more people will stay in tech and not burnout and then the better representation there will be and then at some point, we’ll need fewer safe spaces, right?

SOO: That’s right. But I feel like — and tell me if you’ve felt this at all — we do create these safe spaces at conferences and then our participants go back to where they work and it’s not a safe space any longer. How do we take our code of conduct? How do we take that atmosphere that we create and help them create that in their actual working conditions?

JESSICA: Or even better, help allies to create that.

SOO: That’s right and I feel like allies and advocates are very important to make this happen. We cannot have this burden on ourselves, right?

SAM: Right.

JESSICA: Yeah. I should rephrase that. Because ally is a verb not a noun so how do we help all of us ally with people to create the safe spaces that they need without making them do it themselves.

SOO: Yep.

JESSICA: Oh, I wanted to back up. What year was it that you started going to conferences?

SOO: Oh, my goodness. I started going to conferences and I’m going to age myself and you’re going to think I’m old but in 2001, right after 9/11.

JESSICA: Oh, what a lovely time to start travelling.

SOO: Yep.

SAM: It’s okay because my first conference was in 2000 so you’re not alone.

SOO: At the time, I was working for a UK-based telecom named Cable & Wireless, who actually line of business was really all of the telecoms for all of the British territories that are out there so I had a chance to travel to the Caribbean and to many places throughout the world on behalf of Cable & Wireless because there’s new thing called the Internet and we were a bunch of webmasters.

JESSICA: Wow. Cool. I know you talked about this in your talk. Do you want to tell the listeners the examples of problems you had at conferences?

SOO: Absolutely. Imagine that you start your day off by getting on a plane and then you get off into a new city and I actually got into a taxi and the taxi driver decided that I need to meet his mom and started drive me away from the city and I had to jump out of that taxi and walk to a payphone and the police can’t do anything because what he did wasn’t necessarily illegal and nothing negative has happened to me, physically. They gave me a ride to my hotel and then you go to said conference and you try to ask a question and someone talks over you.

You say hello to someone that you sit next to and then they follow you up in the elevator to your room. You try that night to prep for your talk and someone has found out your room number and just keeps dialing your room over and over and over again. Then after the said talk, you start answering questions about your talk that had nothing to do with your talk. It’s actually questioning not any of the content of the talk or the way that we are seeing the world to help find a solution for some of these complex problems but actually questioning my authority and what right I had to actually stand in the front of the room. Then you leave said conference and you go back home. Overall, imagine that happening within a 24-hour experience or in 48 hours and you’re just exhausted.

JESSICA: My God. Why did you ever go back ever?

SOO: And then what happens is that it manifests itself in very weird ways. You don’t know how to talk about it when you get back. You get a lot of positive feedback from your peers of, “I heard you talk at such conference,” and there’s also this wonderful kind of feeling where you’re special because you got to go and speak on the behalf of said organization. But inside, you’re just sad. That just really blew and you can’t figure out why because back then, we didn’t have the words that we have now to talk about said things. But you get back on the horse and you try again and little things like I am completely miked up and I’m ready to speak and a guy comes up to me and says, “Hey, there’s no coffee,” and I thought he was offering me coffee and I was like, “Oh, thanks. I am jittery enough. Don’t need any more,” and he literally held his cup in his pen and made a clicking noise and he said, “No, you don’t understand. There’s no coffee.”

SAM: Wow.

SOO: Yeah, and I unleashed on him and I didn’t know at that time they turned on my mike as the audience was coming in and I wasn’t myself at my best. Then you get judged for that. You get judged by not being —

SAM: Oh.

SOO: Yeah, that’s right, Sam. You get judged by not being an outstanding member of the community and not beholding the values because you brayed at someone and you try to explain what happened. In the viewpoint of the person that I was yelling at, he made a mistake but in my viewpoint, I am talking years of embarrassing situations at a comfortable situations of being harassed that come out and get triggered at that moment.

SAM: I’m sorry. That was not a mistake. That was somebody who chose to be a dick to somebody that he thought was in a service position and that’s not okay. It wasn’t okay, even if you were the person who was supposed to get the coffee.

SOO: Sam, can I make it even more worse? Explaining the situation, someone asked me, “What were you wearing?” and I was like —

JESSICA: Oh, my God.

SOO: And I was like, “Excuse me?”

SAM: You were wearing a mike.

JESSICA: Yeah, really.

SOO: And I was wearing a white shirt and a black jacket and he was saying that, “Maybe he thought you looked like the catering staff.”

JESSICA: On stage?

SOO: On stage, like right as I’m about to go on stage, that you have to justify why you reacted that way, even though from that slight, my reaction and I could be pretty ruthless verbally when I’m unhappy about something. It was probably like a little too far but then having to justify what happened is also another horrible place where you feel alone and you try to talk to other women about it and many are supportive and their first reaction is WTF. Then they start sharing their stories about things that have happened in them in the workplace and at conferences or even at the grocery store or in parking lots.

It really does become completely overwhelming so we’ve got to find a way to talk about these things in a constructive manner and again, I really like the idea of taking the safe places that we build at conferences and bring that back to the workplace somehow and how do we do that.

JESSICA: You mentioned one thing. Maybe it was in the pre-call conversation. I don’t remember. One clear way that we do that is when a woman or an underrepresented minority or just anybody tells you about their experience, believe them.

SAM: It’s not that hard.

JESSICA: Yeah, when people listen to your story about the coffee, someone who hasn’t had similar experiences might be like, “Oh, it was just one incident. What’s the big deal?” But that that one mistake in a context of tons and tons of other harassment and dangerous harassment and obnoxious harassment but it doesn’t even have to be dangerous or obnoxious. Just those little things over and over and over, it’s a completely different experience, then something like that is the exception.

SOO: Absolutely. We have to ask ourselves, “Why don’t we believe these people? What about us doesn’t, that we don’t actually value them maybe equally as ourselves and our experiences?” That’s why I’m a huge advocate to build a safe space. You actually have to do things like make sure that you have equal pay for your team and that’s a leap for a few senior executives when I talk one-on-one with them, because in my viewpoint there is a reason why we don’t believe these people and the people that we don’t believe are people that aren’t like we just met them. We have work side by side, killing ourselves on these projects and then for some reason, we question the experience that they had and they don’t understand that. Why is that?

Let’s go and let’s try to make it an equal and fair playing field when it comes to salary, when it comes to salary bands, when it comes to performance reviews, to make it a safe space outside of the conference area because that is the piece that conferences don’t have. We’re not gunning for promotions. We don’t feel like there’s a scarcity of resources or power or control at the conference. I feel like they’re more like themselves at a conference versus at work.

JESSICA: That’s a fairly interesting point that at conferences, we don’t have the scarcity culture so part of making a safe space at work then, becomes encouraging a culture of abundance at work of there is enough to go around, there is enough respect, there is enough listening, there is enough salary.

SOO: Absolutely and performance reviews, for instance and there’s tons of research on this, women get very vague feedback and there’s terms like, “You’re too aggressive,” or, “You’re too docile,” and there is not a clear —

SAM: Sometimes both, right?

JESSICA: There is no win.

SOO: There is no win in that situation and why is that. How do we just even that out to, at least make sure that we are showing that we value everyone equally.

SAM: Yeah, that actually goes back to something you said just a minute earlier about equality in pay bands. A great way to show that you value people equally is to literally value with your money people equally. It seems like it should be obvious that that’s not a revenue negative strategy because paying somebody the same as the other people that are on their same level, especially when there has historically been inequalities in pay, it seems like it would be such a great way to improve retention and avoid all of those costs associated with people leaving and you needing to be hire and retrain for those positions but that’s a whole another rant.

JESSICA: Your company can benefit from other companies biases.

SAM: And disproportionately so because if biased companies are the norm, then you’re totally fair company is going to seem like a shining city on the hill, by comparison.

SOO: Very much so. That’s exactly right. One of the shocking things to me is when I do tell audiences at conferences and I do talk to senior executives, when they ask me what they should do about diversity, whether they refused to believe that that would help. They question it and they say things like, “It’s actually a pipeline problem,” so my response is if everyone knows that you pay people equally, you would be amazed at the number of resumes you will get in a second. Let’s count it down: 3, 2, 1, whoosh! Of all the resume’s and referrals that you will get.

SAM: People will be to pass to your pipeline.

SOO: Very much so.

JESSICA: It’s a pipeline problem and you are the pipeline.

SOO: I feel like that would be an amazing factor with creating safe spaces. I feel like that that is very tangible and you could do metrics and KPIs on that, versus touting that you have a safe culture to speak what you want to speak about.

JESSICA: As developers, and we don’t have control over salaries, what can we do?

SOO: You mentioned allies and advocates earlier, if I was an ally, I would tell my female or underrepresented minority what I make and share salary stories because I have seen that happen way too often and the women are so sad. I think a lot has happened due to the fact that we hired by salary band based on someone’s former W-2. If you’re coming out of college, you get offered $60,000 but your male colleague is actually making $72,000, 20% more than you are and you’re getting promoted and you’re getting pay increases. You’re never going to catch up.

They’re going to do the things to build wealth way before you will. As in, get a mortgage, pay off their car, pay off their student loan debt. Twenty percent is a huge amount when it comes to equality in the workplace and you’re seeing that your colleague is doing better than you are and you just don’t understand why. But there is that current in there and I think we need to fix that.

JESSICA: There’s a total taboo and companies really encourage this because it’s to their advantage to engage in price discrimination on hiring us. They discourage us to reveal our salaries to each other but it’s your salary. You can talk about it. That is not illegal and they can’t legally fire you for it, if that makes anything.

SOO: It is and I feel like there’s companies like CA, which is a large organization who stopped asking people what they made before and —

JESSICA: Then, it’s not about the pipeline. You’re not part of the pipeline nearly as much the narrow pipeline if you’re not attaching yourself to it in that way of basing salaries on previous salaries.

SAM: And the nice thing about that too is that it if you can get into one of those companies, it completely offsets the compounding problem that you have, where either you start out at $60,000 and you stay at the same company, you get 3% to 4% raises or you job hop. But even when you job hop and you get 10% or 20% or 30% raises, which is not entirely uncommon, you’re still getting those percentages on top of what you started with. As the years go by, it just gets worse and worse and worse.

SOO: It’s compounded exactly. It is your math class or your in-action. Or as they say in your math, which makes me quite jealous because I feel like they have more math than we do. I’d like to hear other people’s ideas on how we advocate towards building safe work environments that aren’t just about, even though they are important.

JESSICA: I have one.

SOO: I think I’m honestly tired of the touchy-feely things and I want action and I want it now. I want a big company out there… Oh, that’s actually a good point, Sam. What do you mean by safer spaces versus safe spaces?

SAM: My partner works in the nonprofit world and has for many, many years and she has a lot of anti-oppression training that she’s gone through. One of the things that people in that world apparently talk about is making safer spaces versus making safe spaces because you can never make a space that is completely safe but you can, at least introduce some mitigating measures to make things better than they were. As long as you keep doing that, you’ll keep getting better and making progress.

JESSICA: Oh, that’s a great point.

SAM: It’s a really minor point about one letter but it seems like something worth talking about because if you want to talk about creating a safe space, that can seem impossible but you can do one thing to make your space safer.

JESSICA: Right. As developers. We don’t have control over our workspaces but we have influence. We can make them a little bit safer. As an example, personally I think I’ve been incredibly lucky and have had very few problems as women in tech and some of the things that have helped me, I think are I haven’t felt threatened like I need to be on the defensive, like I need to constantly prove myself and be able to justify my ideas in meetings so I’m able to be open and ask questions and thrive. Some of that has been my male coworkers having my back.

I know that if someone is in a meeting who doesn’t know me and gets the impression that I’m dumb and makes a comment to that effect, my friends and coworkers are going to laugh at that dude and that’s really helpful. On one hand, especially when there are clients involved and people that we didn’t hire, we can’t be sure that a meeting is going to be free of sexism or racism. But we can make it so that our underrepresented peers know that if there is sexism or racism, we have their back and we’re going to say something so that they don’t have to fight that themselves.

SOO: I think that’s right. I’m sort of thinking about the idea of safer spaces or safe spaces because I really like that because that actually puts your brain in a place where it’s a continuous improvement of my workplace versus this ultimate goal of this ultimate checklist. I also like that idea as I feel like we have excluded some of these small ideas because they seemed too trivial or they seemed a little too weird or unpopular but I feel like, maybe if we just start throwing ideas in the way that we brainstorm about solving our clients’ problems or solving this next technology problem or trying to improve our mean time to recovery, if we take that energy and think about how to make a safer space for our colleagues in a workplace, think of what we would accomplish.

SAM: Yeah and you know, we have the same idea in agile, in the larger agile world of doing a retrospective and figuring out a thing that we can tweak can change and then gather information on that. There’s no reason that we need to apply that only to our technical practices or to our workflow. We can apply it to our culture as well.

SOO: Absolutely. I feel like we can challenge the old constructs that are out there of what it means to have to go to work. We could change that construct that when you go to work, you will feel as comfortable in your work environment as you do in your home. I feel like if we can make our workplace, our home, the conferences that we attend within the devops community, within the whole IT Industry, as a whole, imagine what that would feel like.

There’s something else I wanted to talk about and I’m not sure how popular this is going to be but —

JESSICA: — Those are the best.

SOO: Those are the best? Okay. I have my talk that folks can take a look at and I showed it to a few of my people I really respect in the industry and they asked me and they challenged me on a few slides and those slides were about, “How do you forgive people who may not know or understand their privilege and may not know their actions are actually having a negative effect without labeling them a sexist, a racist or a connotation that means that they are a bad person versus doing a bad thing?”

Then we spun off into this interesting world of morals and diatribes around that and philosophy of good versus evil. We had to pull ourselves back but I removed those slides just because it seemed like a distraction but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on how do we forgive these men and women and when people do things that actually hurt us and how do we share that and how do we give them immediate feedback, where they will take and move on and not alienate your entire community.

JESSICA: That is a great question. People are just [inaudible] behavior. Just as ally as a verb, but what I want to say, so is sexism. The point being… I mean, sexism isn’t a verb but I want it to be so I guess I’m talking about sexist behavior. You know what? If you have sexist thoughts in your head and you never speak them or act on them, I don’t care. I can totally work with you. This is fine.

SAM: Because you know what? We all have sexist and racist thoughts in our heads. It’s just part of the culture we grew up. It’s the air we breathe.

JESSICA: I sure do. It is and to say, you’re a racist is like saying you’re alive in America today. But to express that or act on it, that’s what we’re trying to change.

SOO: Exactly. How do we do that in a way where we would turn that person that did the negative thing and it’s caught what it is that did the sexist or racist or —

SAM: Oppressive, I believe is the general term.

SOO: Yeah and the oppressive thing and how do we get them to understand their actions, their reactions and recover from that? Then also teach someone else and recognize that behavior and help correct that person’s behavior. I call it the kindness chain but I’m not sure what we should call it. But I feel like that there’s got to be a way that we could start this chain reaction of this teaching in this moment and then hopefully, they will go on and teach and then everyone is an ally and everyone is an advocate and we finally put all of this to bed in the big women in tech, like big capital letters and it’s just all of us in tech.

JESSICA: That would be beautiful. There’s an opportunity there of if someone really does respect you as a person and you can tell them privately and quickly, “I know this was not your intention but when you said X, I felt Y and it’s because of the larger context in the culture in combination with what you said but if you could let not do that, it would help.” Then ideally, like you said, they take that as an opportunity to correct other people who didn’t know that.

It’s like the Party Parrot. In Stripe, at some point in Slack, I think I posted a Party Parrot emoji and it’s like this flashy, dance-y parrot thing and it’s very funny. But one of the people at Stripe get seizures from those flashy colors. Not seizures, migraines. But some people get seizures and because he told me about that, I immediately deleted the Party Parrot emoji and now I run around deleting Party Parrot emoji’s from every Slack that I’m in.

SAM: Or you can replace the Party Parrot with a safer one.

JESSICA: Yes, I do. I do have a different Party Parrot that’s like this slow, green Party Parrot. I think it’s really cute.

SOO: I like that Party Parrot, actually. He’s my favorite or she’s my favorite. I really like fierce conversations that are confrontation model, which as you name the issue, you select a specific example that illustrates the behavior and situation you want to change with that individual. I think it’s important also to describe your emotions around the issue. Then the next one I believe is you clarify what’s important and what we can gain, what we can lose if this isn’t addressed and not just for yourself but also taken in the context of the team that you work on, the company you work for. Then you might have contributed to this problem.

For instance, I might have not said and addressed the first two or three times that I witnessed this behavior but I feel like you have to also talk about your wish to resolve the issue and even though this is the fourth time that I’ve seen this, I really want to resolve this issue and you have to invite him or her to respond back to you and give them a moment to respond.

It is very uncomfortable to go through this and it’s very uncomfortable for the person on the other side too but I think that you will always come out with some positivity when it comes to your relationship moving forward. At least, you know where you stand on both sides, which I think that transparency is very important.

JESSICA: Oh, yes, so these conversations when they are resolved with mutual respect, build relationships. You mentioned in your talk that it’s harder to have these fierce conversations if the person on the other side doesn’t know the convention of fierce conversations.

SOO: That’s right and I feel like we have done a great job as an industry, making sure that everyone understands frameworks on the way that we work. We don’t do a great job of putting out frameworks or the way that we’re going to interact with each other when feedback needs to happen. If we had a framework and one of them that I like is fierce conversations or many others, for us to resolve an issue or to get it out there, it feels like the right move.

JESSICA: I like that, frameworks for interactions. It’s like having a debugger or observability.

SOO: Yes, absolutely. We have frameworks for everything. We have frameworks for conferences when it comes to a code of conduct. We know that we’re going to have breakfast and lots of coffee and then lunch and plenty of discussion around it. What we don’t have is some type of model that we all agree to and we know that we’re going to follow when it comes to giving feedback and that goes right into performance reviews. That goes right into accountability of once the feedback you’ve given the feedback and the other person has received it of what happens next.

JESSICA: Introducing this kind of framework for interactions, like the fierce conversations, is something that you can do to ally with the people who might need to have these conversations because it’s going to be easier for them to use the framework if they didn’t introduce it.

SAM: Interesting. I’ve been sitting here and thinking too about these things in terms of being tools in a tool box. Again, if I can draw a parallel between development work and what we’re talking about, as developers, we wind up with a bunch of tools like inheritance, delegation and if we’re talking about refactoring, we have a whole bunch of different tactical level of refactorings that we can do and we can employ at different ones at different times based on what seems appropriate in the moment.

Each of those is a tool and by adding more and more tools to your toolbox, you become better at handling problems more adeptly. Just in that same way, that sounds like these fierce conversations is a tool. It sounds like a very, I don’t want to say heavyweight tool but it’s a tool that requires a lot of energy to wield. That sounds like a really useful one. I wonder if there are other ones that we can look for as well.

I want to mention a wonderful blog post by Aja Hammerly called ‘We Don’t Do That Here’ and I’ll just leave a link for that on the show notes. I highly encourage our listeners to go on and look that up. Just this idea of collecting different tools is a wonderful way that we can get better at handling more social situations more adeptly.

SOO: For me, I feel like we can’t take this at a team by team basis but it does again, matter the culture of your organization if you let all of your teams to use whatever tool choice, for instance. But there has to be a basis of setting the tone and the culture that we give feedback and we know how to receive feedback in a constructive manner and also, pay everybody equally.

Those two things are pretty revolutionary because they’re not anything to do with making someone a better coder. This is not going to necessarily help you respond to incidents better. This is something that makes us, as a whole as part of the environment. The things like this don’t show up in a performance review or we don’t say these things to a CEO of a company. If we said to a CEO of a startup right now, “I think everyone needs that agile training,” money falls out of the sky. If you say, “We need to have feedback and confrontational model training,” you may have to write a business case but we have to make it okay to go ahead and spend money and resources on things in the tool box that aren’t tech related.

SAM: And going back to what you said earlier about being able to take feedback, that is something going back to what Jessica said about how we can ally and help make spaces safer, we can model taking feedback well and we can model it both in a technical context, which I find a sometimes easier to take feedback about a design that you’ve given because there’s just, in my experience less ego around that. You can also model taking personal feedback if you have the opportunity to get it.

SOO: Absolutely. It’s somehow tied with, if you have a culture of failure as acceptable. I have seen where failure is acceptable within an engineering organization within a team, you have blameless post-mortems. But when it comes to human reactions, people feel like they can’t fail on those and they need to express opinions and they feel stifled and then you have another group of people who have to deal with this emotional wake of this negative feeling of what happened from that situation.

JESSICA: Again, it kind of compounds.

SOO: Yep. It’s not an easy one but I feel like if we continue to have this dialogue and Sam love the term saver spaces and we continuously approve on that. I feel like there is a way that we can make all of our lives better.

JESSICA: We have reflections. That was just a beautiful ending note.

SAM: It was, yes.

SOO: Oh, cool.

SAM: Is there anything critical before you go to reflections that you want to cover?

SOO: There’s hope. There are shows like this where they have someone like me who is not an expert in this field in any way, shape or form. I can only talk to you about my experiences. There are plenty of other women and underrepresented minorities that you can have talk about this topic in a lot more authoritative way. Thank you for letting me share my experiences in my professional career because this doesn’t happen very often in an open space and a safer space like this.

JESSICA: Thank you for sharing them.

SAM: Yes, thank you.

SOO: That was my reflection.

SAM: I just wanted to mention that’s really all any of us can do is share our own experiences and that just means that we all have to listen to each other as many as we can.

JESSICA: Yeah, because when they described experience does not jive with your experiences, you could choose to be like, “I have to either reject my experiences or your experiences so clearly, I’m going to reject what you just said.” Or you could be like, “That’s totally different from my experience. I can learn from that. The world is bigger and wider than I thought it was.”

SOO: That makes me so happy that we can use the words to talk like that. I love it when someone says to me, “Huh? I forget that I came up in privilege where this was very easy for me. I didn’t realize how hard it is for other people.” That type of empathy versus negating that person’s experience makes me feel like I have just seen that person’s authentic self for the first time, even though I’ve worked with that person for the last 10 years in the industry.

JESSICA: Which means that any time someone shares one of these experiences with you, it’s an opportunity to build that relationship.

SOO: Absolutely because they are speaking on things that are affecting their mind and their heart and they want to talk to you about something that is risky and ultimately unattractive and so uncomfortable and they’re willing to share that with you and they’re not doing it to make you uncomfortable. What they’re trying to do is they’re being their authentic self to you of giving you feedback of what you’ve done and you need to be authentic —

SAM: And trust.

SOO: And trust. Oh, Sam, trust. Wow, that is just so important in these conversations for us to move forward on both sides.

SAM: I always just saying that when somebody shares that story, they’re trusting you. They’re trusting that you’re going to be able to hear it well.

SOO: Yeah and they trust you to help them to do the heavy lifting, to spread the word that you can help in the situation.

JESSICA: Yeah and they’re not trusting you to not feel uncomfortable. That’s a thing. It’s not about you can’t feel uncomfortable. It’s about how do you feel about feeling uncomfortable. If I feel okay about being uncomfortable in a conversation with you, then I can learn. So much of what we do isn’t about how we feel. It’s driven by how we feel about how we feel.

SOO: That’s right. I could totally relate to what you’re saying to that.

SAM: Yeah, I’ve been sitting here trying to think about this and I think about it in terms of cognitive dissonance. Somebody tells me a story that puts me or the people who are like me in a not so positive light and that creates cognitive dissonance because the story is at odds with my own self-image or the self-image that I’ve inherited from my culture. The problem is not that cognitive dissonance. The problem is what you choose to do with it.

I think that — this is my call-to-action, I think — we can all become better at just sitting with cognitive dissonance and being okay with it and writing through it and seeing what it has to teach us.

JESSICA: In fact, it is my personal opinion as of yesterday — I forgot what I was reading — that cognitive dissonance is not a weakness of humans. The fact that we can hold two contradictory observations in our head is a superpower because we can’t possibly see all the world. We can’t possibly model all the world. We cannot have one accurate model of the world in our heads but we can have multiple, sometimes contradictory models, that each apply better to different situations like the experiences I’ve had in my life versus the experiences you have had in your life. These are different slices of the world.

If we can hold dissonant models in our heads, then we can practice empathy as opposed to sympathy. This is the bit where sympathy is about how I would feel in your situation, which means my model of the world. Empathy is about I see how you feel your model of the world.

SOO: Yeah. For a lot of my career, I have been pregnant and I would show up to big client meetings and customer meetings pregnant and you should see their reaction of a woman traveling, that is pregnant on a plane and coming to see them and they’re like, “Do you need to rest? Are you okay?” which is funny because I’m always confused for a second because I’m massively pregnant right now, okay, yes. They’re trying to relate to me and they’re trying to be kind. But they’re having some cognitive dissonance right now of someone that they’ve only seen on video is negotiating a multimillion dollar contract with them and then they see me in person is what’s happening. I always found that very interesting that straight to about what’s going on physically with me.

JESSICA: That’s a surprise that they had when you didn’t look exactly like they pictured you.

SOO: Yes. If you are Korean, you would know that my name is the Jane Doe of Korea. It’s the kimchi of Korea. But a lot of times too, people don’t know because they didn’t grow up with other people of my nationality and they don’t know if I’m a male or a female. That’s always fun in chat groups.

JESSICA: Yes, sometimes it is.

SAM: Yeah, interesting. As somebody with a name that is applicable to both genders in our culture, I haven’t really noticed that but I think that’s because I am already on the side that most people will assume that I am in tech.

JESSICA: True. We’re not likely to be Sam or Samantha. Soo, thank you for joining us for this conversation today.

SOO: Absolutely and thanks Jessica. Thanks, Sam and please keep in touch and Mandy, thank you so much and I’m sorry, we had to reschedule but I really hope it was worth it.

SAM: It totally worked out.

SOO: Awesome.

SAM: Well, thanks listeners. We’ll be back at you pretty soon.

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050: Open Source Anarchism with Steve Klabnik

Mandy Moore — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 05:00:09 +0000

This episode is sponsored by Instrumental application and server monitoring!

Instrumental’s goal is to help developers answer application performance questions FASTER, with a powerful query language, real-time metrics, blazing interface, and automatic metric collection.

Sign up for a free developer account at InstrumentalApp.com!

Panelists:

Coraline Ada Ehmke | Jamey Hampton | Rein Henrichs | Lorena Mesa

Guest Starring:

Steve Klabnik: @steveklabnik | www.steveklabnik.com

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “Greater Than Crabmeat” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:02 – Steve’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpowers!

Skrillex

06:00 – Contributing to Open Source

_why the lucky stiff

Hackety Hack

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

11:07 – Succession Planning

The Meme Hustler

20:12 – Organizing Groups of People in a Non-Authoritarian Way

Mikhail Bakunin: What is Authority?

The RFC Process in Rust

Syndicalism

36:23 – Avoiding Using Language with Political Connotation

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39:46 – Is anarchy equally accessible to everyone or is it only accessible/available to a privileged class?

43:11 – Problems with One-upmanship and “Shittalking” in Communities

Aurynn Shaw: Contempt Culture

50:39 – Seeking Out Different Environments and Building Environments People Want

Reflections:

Jamey: Leadership and how important it is to not put too much power in the hands of a few people.

Rein: How do you build systems of governance that don’t depend for their success on the goodness of the rulers?

Lorena: How do we learn to speak with others in ways that are inviting and create a safe space for us all?

Coraline: The notion of intentionality.

Steve: Jargon and exclusion.

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Transcript:

CORALINE: Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 50 of ‘Greater Than Crabmeat.’ I’m here with the lovely and talented, Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Thank you, Coraline and this is the 50th episode of Greater Than Code and I’m here with Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Hello, thank you and I’m here with Lorena Mesa.

LORENA: Hi and it may have been a while but today we have a fantastic person we’ll be chatting with today. Steve Klabnik work at Mozilla, is in the core Rust Team and leave the documentation [inaudible]. He’s a frequent speaker at conferences and he’s prolific open source contributor and previously working on projects such as Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Welcome, Steve. We’re excited to have you today.

STEVE: Yeah, thanks so much. This gives me a lot of fun. I’m really glad to be here.

CORALINE: Steve, we’d like to open up the show with getting to know our guest a little bit better, getting to know the person behind the public profile and we generally start with the question, what are your superpowers and when did you discover them?

STEVE: That’s an interesting question. I actually have a story about this, which is I once had the worst superpower ever. I no longer have it though. A long time ago, I used to shave my head into a Mohawk and then I let it grow out so it kind of wore it down to the side, instead of being up in spike. It kind of looks just like I had part of my head shaved. This was also ended up being around the time that Skrillex became popular as the musician and since I also wear dark-rimmed glasses and all black, people used to joke that I look like Skrillex.

Now, at one time I was living in LA and a friend of mine was working at a music startup and he had a party to go to at Skrillex’s record label and there was a chance that Skrillex was going to be there so he invited me along because he thought that would be really funny if we could get a photo of me and Skrillex and be like, “Steve is different than Skrillex. He’s not actually the one.”

I walked into this party and I described it as having the most boring superpower ever, which is I could tell who knew Skrillex and who did not know Skrillex at that party because the people that did know Skrillex would look at me and just be like, “Oh my God, what a fanboy. This is so dumb,” and all the people who did know Skrillex would look at me and be like, “Is that Skrillex?” You just see either total contempt or total hopefulness in their eyes of everyone I saw at this party. That was my totally useless superpower. I no longer have that haircut so I don’t get the comparison anymore but it was pretty hilarious at the time.

LORENA: Just because I have to know, was there anyone that you were surprised [inaudible] hopeful eyes that you were Skrillex?

STEVE: I didn’t really know anybody that was at this thing so it was mostly just like a Saturday barbecue at this record label so I didn’t know anyone except for the friend that brought me.

REIN: I’m sorry. I’m just trying to imagine Skrillex at a Saturday barbecue because that doesn’t seem his —

LORENA: Like the place?

CORALINE: The barbecue sauce and the shirt, yeah. Big smear across his face.

LORENA: Hey, it’s LA. You’ll never know, right? I’m hoping you weren’t in ecopark [inaudible].

STEVE: Yeah, this is in downtown, unfortunately.

CORALINE: What about today, Steve? You still have superpowers, right? You’re still a superhuman?

STEVE: If I had to pick my superpower today, I guess it would be one of continuing to post on the internet far after I should stop. I should be able to get away from the internet but I seemed to be everywhere all the time and that is sometimes, very useful and sometimes, very harmful.

CORALINE: I have to confess that years ago I followed you on Twitter and you just overwhelmed my tweets streams and now you’re a little less and I don’t follow you anymore.

STEVE: Yeah, it’s cool. I used to tell people when I would meet them, they’d be like, “I’ll follow you on Twitter,” and I was like, “I’m really sorry.” Twitter is like just a stream of consciousness for me, basically so it is a lot and I tend to fall people who also tweet a lot so it’s totally weird how there’s this different segments of Twitter. It seems good.

LORENA: So mental note: watch out when 280 characters are starting in AB testing because you may completely overwhelm my [inaudible].

STEVE: Yeah.

REIN: Can I tell a funny Twitter story? It’s a short one. A friend of mine was talking to one of his friends and he said, “Do you know, Rein H?” and his friend said, “The Twitter socialist?” I really feel like my brand is getting out there and I’m really happy about that.

JAMEY: That should be in your bio, for sure.

REIN: Yeah.

STEVE: I tweeted earlier today, “Can’t wait to start all my tweets with ‘—PGP signature—‘ and there’s sign all of my tweets with the extra space.

CORALINE: I think my favorite suggestion for how to use all the extra characters was bringing back UseNet sigs.

JAMEY: My Twitter story is that the first time that I was going to a phase where I was putting a lot of jokes in my bio and my first conference that I was speaker at was AlterConf and I had totally forgotten that a few days before, I changed my Twitter bio to ‘Christian, husband, father,’ so everyone who saw my first conference saw and then want to follow me on Twitter. They just saw my face and it said, ‘Christian, husband, father.’

CORALINE: Nice. I tweeted out a job opening at Stitch Fix and was reaching out specifically to marginalized people in tech and then my director pointed out that my Twitter name was ‘abrasive AF.’

LORENA: That was so great.

JAMEY: I like to read AF as ‘as foretold.’

CORALINE: Nice. Steve, you’ve been a very strong presence in the open source community for a very long time, for as long as I’ve been aware of you, at least and a prolific contributor. I often wondered if you ever slept. What got you started in contributing to open source.

STEVE: This is basically, entirely by accident. Long ago in Ruby world, there was a person who went by the name ‘why the lucky stiff,’ like W-H-Y, the question. Then he dropped off the face of the planet. I had really, really admired his work. He actually came to the town where I was living at a time but I couldn’t show up and I was like, “I’ll just catch him some other time,” and then he disappeared so I never actually got to meet or talk to Why. But he disappeared and I thought his projects are really important. At the time I was really heavily focused on programming education and teaching people how to code. That’s always something I was scared about at the time, that was pretty much everything.

His biggest project in my mind and the thing that all the rest of his work was building up to, is a thing called Hackety Hack. Hackety Hack was basically a Ruby IDE but it also contains interactive lessons for learning how to program in Ruby. You actually started off with the entire DSL just for Logo. You started off by writing Logo code but in Ruby instead and then it would do all the Logo stuff and then, eventually it gave you the power of the full language.

That was really important and I didn’t want it to die so when it disappeared, the broader Ruby community kind of said like, “Who’s going to pick up all of his old projects,” and I decided that I wanted to help whoever came along to work on Hackety Hack. I basically said to the person who is handing out commit bits on these projects, “I don’t want to be in charge of this but I would love to help whoever comes along and does want to be in charge of this,” and he said, “Cool. Here you go,” and then no one else showed up. I kind of just de facto became in charge of Hackety Hack.

I had a lot of struggles with it at first. One of the things about Hackety Hack is it’s technically a C program with the Ruby interpreter embedded inside of it so it reach really deep into the guts of Ruby and this was Ruby 1.8 and for Ruby 1.9, they completely rewrote the interpreter entirely so all that code was completely invalid. Plus on a Mac, it use bindings to the old Carbon APIs and I had just gotten a shiny new MacBook that had the first version of MacOS that no longer contain those deprecated AIs.

The first six months of working on Hackety Hack was me just trying to get the darn thing to build at all and somebody who did Ruby all the time, I was not really that well versed in fixing C compilation errors and all that kind of shenanigans. That was really the initial part of it and that’s where work eventually led to me talking at conference. Somebody was like, “You should submit a talk to RubyConf about this,” and I was like, “The people want to hear about this at a Ruby Conference. I don’t know,” so I submitted it and people were so excited, I got asked to speak at a couple other conferences about it. From there, I continued working on Why’s projects. That sort of the origin story.

CORALINE: When I started with Ruby in 2007 or 2008, one of the first resources I came across was Why’s Poignant Guide and that was instrumental in me learning Ruby. If you haven’t seen it, you should track it down. I think it’s still available all over the place but it’s probably the most fun introduction to a programming language I’ve ever seen. It’s still sort of a cartoon, it’s a very tongue-in-cheek, it’s very whimsical but it really gets to the heart of what makes for Ruby-Ruby and it’s an amazing resource. I missed Why. He did a tremendous amount for the Ruby community in his formative years and I hope that wherever he is now and whatever he’s doing that he’s successful and happy.

STEVE: Same. To continue that story briefly, eventually I had to stop working on Hackety Hack and Shoes to underlying GUI toolkit. There are still some people working on Shoes now but Hackety Hack is effectively dead and I had a lot of conflicting feelings about working on this project because you’re basically taking someone else’s life’s work and making it your life’s work. I spent a lot of the time in the early days being like, “What would Why want me to do with this project, but if he was gone and it’s my project now then I should have done what I wanted to do with it. I have said a really complicated feelings so I’m sort have gone from all that stuff now and it was really big complicated.

I’ve lots of feels and eventually, he did come back and publish another work. I had no title but I call it, ‘Closure,’ and I also gave a talk about it because similar to the Poignant Guide, it is full of whimsy and instead of teaching programming, it’s more personal. It’s more of a pure story than it is a learning programming kind of thing.

CORALINE: I think one of the things that that story [inaudible] Steve is that with a lot of projects, at least in the Ruby world and I imagine in another communities as well, they started as one-person efforts. Eventually, people lose interests or people move on and there isn’t a lot in terms of succession planning for these things. That’s why organizations like Ruby Together have been formed to say, “Oh my God. This person who is working on Ruby Gems or whatever is no longer contributing anymore and this is really critical to our infrastructure. Somebody has got to do something.” Do you have thoughts on succession planning?

STEVE: Yeah. My thoughts are mostly I am often the successor and then end up abandoning it myself. That’s what happened with Hackety Hack. That also happened with Resque so that was originally written by Chris Wanstrath at GitHub and then went to Terence Lee and then went to me and now, I have handed it off. All of those things were like a situation where at some point time, I showed up and was like, “I want to work on this now,” and they’re like, “Thank God. Somebody wants to do this. Here, have the keys of the kingdom.” It’s hard and there’s no plan.

It’s tough to even have a plan though because you can’t know what people are going to have the time and energy to work on, both personally but also professionally. Part of the reason why I’ve been able to do this for so long is I’ve always worked at jobs where work on open source is part of that, like part of the job so if that was not true, I definitely would not have gotten merely as involved in open source and that’s a huge barrier, I think to a lot of people being able to work on open sources.

I made an analogy before and it’s like you don’t ask a jackhammer to continue jackhammering the sidewalk on the weekend for fun. This is our professional job but it’s also a thing we do for fun. It’s hard to know what life has in store in the future. I don’t know… Like succession stuff.

CORALINE: That brings to mind something, Steve a criticism that, I think [inaudible] makes an open source quite a bit is that it is a capitalist exportation of free labor.

STEVE: Absolutely. There is an old interview of me that maybe the internet is really mad a while back where I said that open source is a mega capitalist conspiracy. What I meant by that was not like a conspiracy in the sense of a bunch of men huddled around a table in some dark room, making evil plans but a group of people whose interests aligned them to work together against other people. This actually goes back to the foundations of open source.

Open source itself, again part of the reason why I said open source specifically is that open source was created as a way for companies to profit off of free software and it was deliberately neoliberalized in general but made a political and immoral and less restrictive so that companies could get richer. There’s a really great article in The Baffler called The Meme Hustler about this. It goes through some of these history. It was like originally created by mega libertarians so the companies could steal your work.

CORALINE: You said apolitical. Do you really believe that?

STEVE: That is what they presented. I don’t believe that anything as apolitical, personally. I think that liberalism presents itself as being apolitical as a political strategy.

LORENA: I think though the metaphoric to what you’re talking about earlier is around the idea of a jackhammer and really, we don’t give pause and think about the where’s that line, where’s me, where’s my labor and if you bring that with you or there’s kind of a continuity because it’s a part of your identity. I’m curious, can you give us some idea as having been the successor, what are some lessons from the trench that you’ve learned if you are talking to someone who might be taking on that role as a successor when there isn’t a clear succession plan? Maybe if not lessons, maybe just some things to observe or watch for.

STEVE: I think that part of it is knowing why you want to get involved in open source in the first place. It’s really easy to just like want to contribute to open source because that’s a cool thing or something or maybe people told you that it’s fun. But I think that if you have a strong understanding of why you want to do it, then that can be helpful in preventing things like burnout. It can also induce burnout. For example, the reason I work on open source, and generally sort of what my career trajectory has been, is that I want to work on increasingly bigger and bigger things that affect more and more people, to have more and more impact on the world.

For me, like Resque for example, I don’t actually care about Resque. I don’t have a passion for a job queue, server or projects but I do know that Resque was being used by hundreds of thousands of people and had no support or whatsoever so I figured I could do a lot of good by getting involved with Resque and helping out. It’s also why I have used to work on applications and then I started working on libraries and then I started working on frameworks and now, I’m working on a programming language and all of those things are moving down the stack of being more fundamental and therefore, reach more people.

If I write a web application in Ruby, only my users of my web app are going to be affected by it. If I write a library, then some other people that are in Ruby will be able to actually use my work so I go from an audience of basically no one to an audience of a lot of people. If I write a framework and gets popular, a larger chunk of programming community gets affected. If I work on a language, then literally every user of that language is affected by my work. That’s just me but I think that knowing why you want to do it can help.

JAMEY: I was really struck by what you said earlier about taking someone else’s life’s work and then making it your life’s work. I wonder if you have any advice on how to hit the right balance, I guess between being respectful to the original creator but also, bringing your own unique perspective to what you’re doing?

STEVE: Yeah. I was reading a blog post recently and I’d wish I remembered whose it was but I can’t remember it at the time. But the point of the post was communities are formed by creating shared values. If you want to work on another project and bring your attention to it, I think that by understanding the values that the project was originally created with and help you figure out what your answer to the situation was.

CORALINE: [inaudible].

STEVE: Yeah. Maybe. It might have been. I’ll find it later. Maybe, you’d look at the show notes and maybe we’ll laugh because it actually was you. But for example, taking over the Hackety Hack, Why’s core values were fun and whimsy and learning so if I had made Hackety Hack fitting where there was an ad on the sidebar that was like, “Take your programming lessons with whoever and started like making money off of it.” That would be an inauthentic continuation of the projects because it would be going against what they originally wanted. The way that I would express fun and whimsy and learning is different than the way that Why would do so, so it is like making my own project to a degree but it’s still within that original framework and vision.

Sometimes, things are just broken and you have to start over. I also think that if your vision of the project is significantly different, then forking it and renaming can be a really great strategy to making a project your own, while saying explicitly, “We have a significant enough break from the past that we’re now turning it into this other thing so I think that also can be a useful tool.” You don’t have to be totally bogged down by the weight of your predecessor like if it’s yours, you can do what you want with it. Sometimes that just means moving on and sometimes that means really significant changes. It just really depends.

CORALINE: You think that happens in response to communities becoming toxic?

STEVE: I have definitely seen it happen in response to community becoming toxic for sure. IO is the latest instance of that that I can think of. The other funny thing about this, which I’m sure all of you appreciate but I think it’s worth reiterating is that none of this has anything to actually do with the programming or code or textual aspect of these projects. That’s one of the reasons why this is difficult. I often think, if you go to school for this job, you’ll learn all these things but those are not the actual skills that I use every day. I’m not trained in conflict resolution or managements or any of these kind of things but are really, really important to running these kinds of projects.

CORALINE: That’s why this podcast exists. We don’t talk about tech. We talk about what it takes to make tech and the people behind it. That’s right along within our values.

STEVE: Yeah. I thought it was worth reemphasizing. Yes, clearly already true in this room.

REIN: One of the things that we talked about last week that everyone will get to hear soon when we release that episode is how do you organize a large group of people in a non-top down hierarchical authoritarian way. Let’s say you have an engineering group that has 150 people in it. How do you get work done? How do you collaborate in an effective way without resorting to totalitarianism?

STEVE: There is this article that is very old and I always get the dude’s name wrong. I always think it’s one of them and it’s always the other so it’s probably incorrect but I’m going to go with Bakunin because I think that’s right but I might be wrong. A famous quote from a noted anarchist, Bakunin back in 1800s and the essay is called, “What is Authority.” Authority is obviously a question that anarchist are really concerned with. Basically, the famous part of that essay is there is a difference between leadership and authority. You can lead as a leader. A lot of people call this ‘leading by example’.

An example he uses is a bootmaker. He’s like if I needed a new pair of boots and I go to a bootmaker to buy them and I ask his opinion on what boots I should buy, is that him having authority over me or am I taking into account the work that they have done and that’s a form of leadership. This person has worked to make boots their entire life, therefore they have expertise so I’m going to follow their lead when that comes to these boots or whatever.

Falling back to just ‘I’m in charge and therefore you must do what I say’ is not an effective way to lead people. At least, I don’t believe it as effective way to lead people. The best way to do it is to demonstrate what you want other people to do to inspire them to do the same so I feel like that is a much less authoritarian means of leadership, rather than just like, “I’m the boss so do it.”

CORALINE: Recently, as of the recording day of this podcast, we got into a Twitter battle with Robert Martin better known as Uncle Bob. It struck me that we hold certain people in our various communities as leaders, even when they don’t demonstrate leadership capabilities or even good judgment.

JAMEY: Yeah. He’s a jerk face and also, solid as in very good. Go at me.

STEVE: I believe I was involved with someone adding you on this very topic so I feel you.

CORALINE: Yeah, so how do you address when leadership is granted to someone or grandfathered into a leadership position, when they really have no business being a leader?

STEVE: I think this is extremely tough and it leads to all kinds of problems. I think that one of the best ways to defend against this is to not give that one individual that kind of status in the first place. It also ties in honestly, to the succession thing we’re talking about earlier like a long time ago, there was a Ruby Conference in Athens, Greece. I went there. I was really excited and one of the things that some of the people there had told me, they were like, “Steve, we’re really worried about you. You really need to take some time off and chill out. The reason that this is true is that you do so much right now in the Ruby world and if you burnout and disappear, then stuff is going to get bad. If you can manage to give away some of that, the system will overall be more sustainable.”

They were simultaneously concern about me as a person but also about this question of sustainability. I think when you have these people who are leaders that have too much specific power, then that can lead into these kinds of situations where it’s like, “What do you do to remove them? They’re the person in charge of everything so you can’t get rid of them?” Or sometimes communities keep around people who are toxic because they are so pivotal to the project that removing them would effectively be the death of a project so the solution there is to not have been relying on one individual so heavily in the first place.

Obviously, this is difficult when most open source projects are literally run by one person so obviously, they just by default, are completely in charge but as projects grow, I think that not putting the power in the hands of one person is most important. Basically, I don’t want to work on any project that has a BDFL anymore. I think that leadership model is inherently flawed.

CORALINE: That’s ‘benevolent dictator for life.’

STEVE: Yes.

REIN: Didn’t something like this happen recently with the DSA where I’ve actually only ever seen his name written — Danny Fetonte?

STEVE: It’s not really inherently about that. DSA is Democratic Socialists of America. They had a situation recently where the Austin chapter elected a person who was a cop to be on their leadership. That became very controversial for a number of reasons. To me, it was not so much about him having too much power. It was more of a question of like, “Can you put someone in charge of a socialist organization who is a member of the police?” I guess that could be construed as police have too much power in some sense.

REIN: Yeah. For me, I was more referring to the way that they went about trying to remove him from power and trying to deal with that situation.

STEVE: Part of the problem was that he was elected and then there was questions about whether or not he had covered up the fact that he was a cop. In his little advertisement for people to vote, he had said that he organized government employees when he could have said organized police and things like that. Then there’s the question, which came out after the vote like, “We have a democratically elected leader. Many people do not want him anymore. What do we do?” I don’t follow the DSA close enough to fully appreciate the nuance of how that process went down. I do know eventually, he decided to resign and kind of complained about it as he did so.

CORALINE: There’s one thing for the organizations to have a structure like a no-confidence vote or something like that but I think a lot of the leaders, at least in open source, they’re not there because they’re elected. They’re not serving at that… Oh, shit. What’s the word?

STEVE: Pleasure of a queen?

CORALINE: They’re not serving at the pleasure of their communities. They just happen to be the person who created something or they happen to be the person who stepped into that role or they happen to be the author of a popular book and you can’t remove them.

REIN: And these communities are also generally built by people who have no idea how to manage communities like that. They just accidentally happened upon that role for other reasons.

LORENA: That’s an uplifting metaphor but I do like to think about it as kind of like the fish at the bottom of the barrel. I think when people get so passionate about things and you get much more of these smaller group of people who are very, very opinionated about things, that regrettably how I see that. I’m curious, have you ever experienced anything like that yourself, Steve or if not, how can you be mindful of observing, “We have someone who’s grandfather [inaudible],” and how did you start a discourse to really push that idea at the top, like why are we doing this, how do we think about this, how do we tried to maybe change our position toward this pattern and moving at a different direction.

STEVE: That was really tough because in many instances, the happy path here is that leadership is reflective enough to understand that this is happening and then address it. For example, Rust, the programming language that I work on, originally had a person who created it. His name is Graydon and Graydon is a wonderful person and as such, he dislikes the BDFL model and he explicitly said, “I am not the BDFL of Rust. That’s not a person I want to be,” so when it became bigger than him, he end up creating a team of people to share the leadership responsibilities so we had a core team for a while and that’s pretty common on open source projects.

Eventually, the core team became a bottleneck, I guess is the right way to put it. It turns out that the project was working so fast that when you require all major decisions to go through, even a group of we have eight people at the time, that can become a significant hindrance so we actually restructured our governance so that now, it’s like a federated governance structure instead so actually, 60 people who are in charge of Rust. That enabled us to move forward in a good way but also, it’s like acknowledgement like, “One person or group of people has too much power. Let’s figure out how to spread that around a little bit.”

The first one was because he was expressly mindful of this. The second transition was partially us recognizing it. I was on a core team at the time and partially that enough people in the community who are agitating for it that made sense to do so. That’s ultimately the way that it happens if leadership is not insightful enough or also just doesn’t care because they don’t want to give up the reins, you pretty much have to agitate for change and if the powers of [inaudible] that don’t want to listen to you, then there’s a historical solution [inaudible] and that’s happened to a lot of projects recently.

REIN: Also known as revolution.

STEVE: Yeah, right.

CORALINE: It sounds like in the case of Rust, there was a strong sense of shared values, going all the way from the originator, to the core team, to the group of 60, to the federation and then —

STEVE: Yeah. He had a code of conduct in the first commit, in the very first part of the repo, for example so it’s spelled out from the beginning.

CORALINE: Then in other cases, there’s a mismatch either by other people coming in the community and a different idea of what the community values are that spreads, maybe from the grassroots up.

STEVE: And that can be both good and bad. For a long time before Rust 1.0, we’re worried like we really like the community we’ve built but as we bring more people in, how can we be sure that they’re not going to be jerks basically, because sometimes that’s a thing. People get involved and then it turns out that you don’t get along and things are bad. Every community has problems. I’m not going to say that Rust is free of problems but I guess, I’m just saying like it’s not just the leadership is bad, therefore I’m an agitate for good things. Sometimes it can be, “Leadership is good but I’m a bad person so I’m agitating for bad things,” and you also have to deal with community members who want to take the project on the direction of the rest of people don’t want to.

CORALINE: I worked in a lot of startups and I’ve seen a similar thing happen where at the beginning, there’s this sense of shared values and they start hiring a lot of people. Then you hire a lot of Chads because the market’s flooded with Chads. For those who don’t know, Chad is our playful term for the 25-year olds software developer who has no awareness of systems of oppression or other social justice issues. He’s very focused on the code and believes in meritocracy.

As Chads come into your organization, even well-intentioned Chads, you have a values draft. I think some of that comes down to communities not knowing how to communicate their values, not knowing how to express their values in a way that new community members can evaluate maybe before joining and evaluate their own behavior as they get involved to make sure that they’re fitting in with those cultural mores.

STEVE: Yeah. I think that sometimes too can get even more complicated in the sense that sometimes values are clearly articulated but it feels like no one understands that that’s true. The way that I feel about Rails is that David has been extremely upfront about his values and where wants the project to go but people don’t seem to notice. I got involved in Rails and had a very different idea of what Rails should be and what it should work on and that’s one of the reasons why I ultimately stopped working on Rails because I realized like, “Wait a minute. David has been saying for years what he wants this project to do and I disagree with that so what am I doing?” I feel it’s very strange sometimes, then you realize that there can even be people who project values onto a project and they’re not even in the stated ones, even if it’s not actually muddy and it expresses itself in a number of different ways too.

LORENA: I’m a little curious because you mentioned that the core team starts to recognize itself as a bottleneck. I’m curious because one thing, I think that’s [inaudible] Python community is you might have people who’ve been working with a tool or working from language for a long time and they just don’t have knowledge of where to go [inaudible] their concerns or where they can bring their [inaudible]. I’m serious, was this more be self-directed [inaudible] or was there kind of a push and pull from multiple faces? Can you walk us through that a little bit?

STEVE: Yeah. Part of the reason that this happened is a little bit of both is sort of the short answer. Longer answer is that Rust institutes this process called the RFC process on major changes to the language. Now, they can’t be backwards compatible so major additions to language, I guess at this point. Historically speaking, the core team was in charge of accepting or rejecting any RFCs. It was not just a feeling that was true but you could literally look at the metrics of, “There are now 60 RFCs that are waiting for us to review. There are 100 RFCs that are waiting for us to review. There’s 120 RFCs…” We’re clearly not keeping up with this influx of things that need to have decisions made on them.

We already had structuralize the way that people wanted to make changes and that made it easier to notice and this was actually happening. Again, this goes back to this diffusion of leadership, like even people on a core team are required to write RFCs. No one gets to just make whatever changes they feel like it so it’s all like pseudo-democratically designed in the first place. That’s also helpful in terms of not letting things get off the rails but it was really that but the RFC is piling up is like, “Oh, man. We clearly can’t be the only people making a decision here.”

JAMEY: I’m curious of the team of 60 people. I totally get why that’s convenient for not creating a bottleneck. When you’re giving so many people the keys, how do you prevent a single person from making unilateral decisions that other people don’t agree with?

STEVE: To get slightly more of the details to have this work so I think it’s relevant, there still is a core team and our job is basically cross-cutting concerns and big picture vision and stuff. Then in theory, resolving ties if there are tie breakers. One of the requirements for spinning up a team on Rust governance is that a core team member has to be on the team. They start the team off. This is partially to keep tabs on this kind of thing but also, if your job is cross-cutting concerns, you need to be paying attention to everything all the time. If that was the whole core team’s job and that still would reintroduce the bottleneck, the way that you do it is have someone whose job is basically like, “This probably needs to be brought to other teams as well because this particular initiative is equally about the docs team and the language team,” or whatever and making sure that coordination happens.

REIN: What you’re describing there, it sounds a lot like syndicalism.

STEVE: Yes, it is. I don’t say these things to those people. They don’t know. I like to joke that Rust is an Anarcho-Syndicalist Project but we just don’t use those words at all because it’s a structure that works. It was never expressively that and in fact, most of the people, I also should say that the Rust teams in general are politically, very ideologically diverse so it’s not like everybody on the Rust team is super anarchist or whatever. It just turns out that people that think about how to diffuse power have some solutions for how to do that so you use their ideas and modify them. We’ve constantly evolve the way governance works and are going to continue to do so in the future.

LORENA: I actually am very, very interested if I say, I might be describing these things and we’re seeing here some consensus like, “You’ve got anarchism.” I’m curious, are you purposely intentful on not using words that may have political connotation when you’re working in maintaining and a project or making decisions? If you are purposely trying to stay away from like that, I’m curious why you may try to stay away from language that might have a little bit of a political charge to it.

STEVE: I am expressly focused on not introducing this kind of thing into Rust spaces. There’s a multiple reasons for that. The first one is that you describe as a charge and that’s true. I think that a lot of people, if it was described in those words, would never want to do it but when it’s not described in those words, do and I care more about the doing than about using the right words. That is part of it. It goes back to my lead by example stuff for sure in the past to some degree.

The other reason that I do it honestly is there’s two other good reasons. I’ll do the boring one, then the interesting one. The one that is boring is that it’s actually off topic, I think. This is really complicated and I’m going to say it in the same broad terms and it’s maybe a little weird but bringing expressed politics in that way into an open source projects leaves to derailment. I don’t mean that in the sense of any kind of politics. Again, literally everything is politics like this is inherently politics. But when you use words that people have strong reactions to, it can distract from getting the goal done and I don’t always believe that that is the right way to do it. I generally think that I’m known as the person who’s usually being too over the top about bringing these kinds of things so I definitely agree that different strategies work in different times and places. But I think that it would actually obscure getting the work done, basically is a second reason.

The third reason is because as someone who has relatively extreme political views, given that I’m someone with a minority position on certain political at things, it’s simply self-defense. I don’t need people coming after me due to my personal politics. One of the easiest ways to prevent harassment on this angle is to just not ever actually use those words and just do my best. Then that way, I take less crap for it. I think those things are all intertwined.

CORALINE: That kind of lead to a new question that someone in our Slack community has. Before I get to that, I want to say Greater than Code is listener supported and you can support our program and support conversations like we have and received, by going to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Pledge at any level. You get access to our Slack community, which is wonderful. We are also looking for sponsors and this episode is actually sponsored episode and sponsored by the Instrumental application and server monitoring platform. Instrumental’s goal is to help developers answer application performance questions faster with a powerful query language, real-time metrics, blazing interface and automatic metric collection. You can sign up for free developer account at InstrumentalApp.com.

That being said, Steve we had a question from someone in our wonderful Slack community about whether you have opinions on whether anarchy is equally accessible to everyone or only accessible and available to a privilege class?

STEVE: I think this is also probably a good time to briefly mention that I don’t consider myself to strictly be an anarchist. This is probably too long to get into at the moment but I used to and I don’t anymore. I definitely agree with the sentiment overall that there is a tendency on the left to rely on what’s effectively a meme culture so it’s like, “Oh, you recognized this book written by that one dude that one time,” or, “You know this slogan that has been around forever and if you don’t, you’re not a real leftist.” I’m shaking my head while I’m saying this basically and this creates a culture of exclusion, specifically. I think that that is definitely a problem on the left.

It’s also difficult just in general. This comes across in programming a lot that jargon is necessary for people to have high bandwidth communication between experts but is therefore also exclusionary into nonexperts and this is a question I grappled with a long time with Rust for example and that whole shenanigans. That’s deliberately exclusionary because once you get to a certain level on a topic, you want to not constantly re-litigate the basics so you invent jargon so you’re on the same page with someone. But then, when it becomes all about the jargon, you’ll leave out all the people and you don’t get people room to grow into it.

I definitely think that anarchism and other forms of leftism have a problem with being exclusionary. I don’t think that it’s intentions but as we all know, that doesn’t actually matter. It’s just is so —

CORALINE: Intentions [inaudible] magical.

STEVE: Yeah, exactly. I think that understanding is not intentional. It’s a way to lead a path forward, rather than an excuse for the way that it is currently. To some degree, that’s why I try not to get super into the books or citing a specific details about, “Did you read this and that?” Because then, lots of people have written lots of books and lots of topics and they disagree with each other. I’ve had arguments that people that are basically both of us just citing books that were citing each other back at each other before and that’s boring and not interesting and not productive. I definitely feel the left needs to work on this as an issue.

REIN: It’s like that scene in Good Will Hunting, in the bar.

STEVE: Yeah, definitely.

CORALINE: What scene is that?

REIN: There’s a scene where Matt Damon’s character encounters a pretty snotty college bro dude who tries to humiliate Matt Damon’s character’s friend by being smarter and then Matt humiliates him by being smarter and it’s all like, “You’re in this year of history so you probably read this book. Well, next you’re going to read this book, which will demolish the position of the previous book that you read.”

STEVE: Specifically, he wasn’t even trying to be smarter. He was repeating an argument from a book as his own argument and Matt Damon’s character is like, “Oh, I saw you read that book, which is why you’re parroting its argument. Well, guess what? In the future, you’re going to learn that some other books demolishes that.”

CORALINE: Do you think that bleeds over into these sort of jargon ideas like one-upmanship? Do you that bleeds over into conflicts within communities but also between programming communities?

STEVE: Definitely and it also bleeds into our leadership celebrity culture example because again, if jargon is exclusionary, a great way to be perceived as an expert is to create new jargon because then if your jargon catches on, you’re the person who coined the term so you get to be the authority of it forever and no one can ever question your interpretation of that particular thing because you’re the one who said it the first place.

CORALINE: JSON.

STEVE: Yeah, or Rust or SOLID. This has reference earlier —

REIN: NoSQL.

STEVE: Yeah.

JAMEY: You guys are saying jargon words and I can also say jargon words. I mentioned thinking about how the person who coined the term ‘GIF,’ thinks incorrectly that it’s pronounced as ‘JIF.’

REIN: Fight me.

CORALINE: This can definitely lead to lots of problems interpersonally. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which I’ve been referring to as ‘shittalking’ between programming language communities, is that often new communities and their excitements of their new technology will create new jargon. Then people get old man at the cloud about it and they don’t like the new jargon so then they get upset about the jargon and start criticizing it for no good reason. This breeds contempt, which I think is very harmful to communities overall.

There’s a book thing but maybe I’ll explain it without referencing whose ideas this is because again, we’re trying to be not exclusionary here. I read a thing one time and it pointed out this difference between, you can express values in an active or a reactive way. Active values are all based on like, “I believe X. I want to do Y.” Reactive values are like, “That person’s values are dumb and that’s what my value is.” A reactive value is inherently about building your values off of what you perceive to be the problems of others values.

This is what I think that Rails got wrong with Node and also as one of the examples of the situation, again as somebody who’s had a good job of articulating his values, DHH really values tearing down other programming languages and language communities to the point where I have been on stage at a Ruby conference and been like, “You all do know that you’re not the cool kids anymore. You making fun of Java, makes you sounds really out of touch.” It’s a bad look for a number of different reasons so —

REIN: At the O’Reilly conference with 2000 people.

STEVE: Yeah. It’s one of those things where this then gets perpetuated and causes the repetition. Fundamentally, it creates and in-group and directs hate towards an out-group and if you want to become part of the in-group, you also target hate at the out-group as a way to gain social currency. That creates this really nasty feedback loop that is not only abhorrence ethically but also I believe leads to incorrect technical decisions. I think that’s one of the reasons why Rails has kind of fallen behind the wayside because DHH expressly does not care about investigating other people’s stuff. He misses out on a lot of things that are positive about those things that could help build Rails, for example. It seems like he’s chilled out lately, incidentally I’ve heard. Again, I’m also basing this on multi-years ago of situation of him.

One of the reasons I stopped working on Ruby is that I feel like it made me unhealthy as a person. It’s not because Ruby in general is not great and Ruby people aren’t generally great but there is just this culture of trash-talking other projects and it made me a jerk frankly and I didn’t like it. I saw this opportunity with Rust to sort of reboot how I interact with people in many ways because I didn’t want to be a jerk but my jerkish tendencies come out, instead of making them go away. We’ve been really mindful in Rust world that I will just not say something if I don’t like it, instead of saying that it’s the worst thing ever created, basically and it’s just a healthier way to be for all around in general for everyone involved.

JAMEY: I totally agree with everything you just said, Steve and I think that negativity breeds so much more negativity around it. People do this not in the tech community too. I’m using it in real life with air quotes around it but I know a lot of people who literally define themselves and their personalities by like, “These are things I don’t like,” instead of like, “These are things I really love,” and it’s so tiring to listen to people talk like that. It’s not interesting to have conversations about that. I think the same thing is happening in our communities and it’s making our communities tiring and uninteresting also.

CORALINE: Steve, I also have those jerkish tendencies and I used trash-talk JavaScript all the time. After reading Aurynn Shaw’s Contempt Culture, I realized how unhealthy that was and how negativity isn’t good for anyone. What I will tend to say now is that, for example Go doesn’t make me as happy as Ruby makes me, which is not a value judgment. It’s rather a reflection on what I enjoy or what suits my particular style.

LORENA: Yeah and then, I guess just because we’re all looking at it from different vantage points but I think what’s been really interesting to me as I come to arrive at spaces I felt comfortable, it is actually when I learned probably incorrectly early on in my programming career that if I didn’t come with strong convictions, if I wasn’t there with the five things to save for every one line of code written, that I was doing something intrinsically wrong. That kind of world view that outworker question to understand why as a programmer, that’s a very precarious situation at the end. It’s very fascinating to hear your story from working with Rails to growing into observing what it is that truly makes you happy and maybe sometimes, the absence of wrong positions that actually allows us to get more comfortable. I’m not sure if that’s exactly giving justice to what you’ve expressed but I think that there’s something there that we could dig more into it.

JAMEY: You don’t have to have a hot take on every single thing.

STEVE: Yeah and it also comes with the recognition that because I’m this way as a person or as Coraline put it, destructive tendencies in this regard, it also means that I will occasionally slip up and I need to, either apologize for those things or just figure out ways to catch myself from going into that thing. It’s also really tricky because criticism, I think is important. It’s a matter of what the criticism is. It’s not about not ever saying that something is bad because there are bad things but there’s the right way to go about it and a wrong way to go about it. It’s more complicated than just simply nothing is ever wrong. This give me a whole another gigantic long thing so I just leave it that, I guess.

REIN: You mentioned earlier about you chose to move to the Rust community — I think I’m paraphrasing you inaccurately here — because you felt like the community your in before it enabled these behaviors that you didn’t like and you wanted to move into a community where this behavior enabled the way you wanted to be. I think that’s really interesting for me because we know that humans mirror each other. We mirror our emotions. We mirror our behaviors. The way a community acts has a lot of influence on the way its members act.

When you see someone around you doing something, you think it’s okay. It becomes part of the norms. I guess my question is how do you gain the sort of metacognizants to realize that about yourself and to want to seek out a different environment? And how do you build such an environment where the behaviors that are unable are the wants that you want?

STEVE: I think this ties back in all of the other things that we had. This is an excellent thing. One thing I’ll say is that I didn’t actually come to understand this until after it had happened. I made this move for a number of reasons and it only later came to me that part of my underlying motivation were these aspect of things. Part of that was also, I had a couple of personal situations that caused me to reflect heavily on some things. That was also part of, not only the big move of things but also realizing the stuff that was a thing that made me reconsider a lot of stuff. That’s the metacognition part of it. It’s not like everything you do can ever be thought through. Sometimes, you’re just realizing why you did a thing after the fact.

In terms of building this kind of situation, I think that this goes back to early discussions about intentionality and values building. Again, Rust is not perfect. We have many flaws in this, just like anybody else, have tried to lead by example and bring other people on in leadership positions who share that same values that we hold. If somebody was trash-talking other people’s projects all the time, we would not put them on a team or take them off a team, if that was a thing that turned into that. I think that leading by example in that way holds it together.

Things are still relatively young so there’s always time for things to break and also, things are not perfect but I think that the problems that I see in the Rust world are like an extremely toned down version of the things that I used to feel happens in the Ruby world so it’s not like, “This person is being a massive jerk.” It’s like, “This person consistently gives unstructured criticism, instead of structure criticism and it would be much more helpful if they would give structured criticism instead.” It’s a difference of degree.

I realized sometimes and I go back and look at historical things, I look at GitHub thread or Ruby Mind thread or something and be like, “I used to think this was normal.” The problems I have today don’t seem nearly as bad as the ones I had back then because it’s not as intense but some of that just comes down to doing it for the long haul. Like I said earlier, a lot of this is about doing good things and not doing bad things and doing that over a sustained period of time is difficult.

The way that I present myself on forums is extremely different than the way that I used to and doing that over long periods of time is really the only way to pay more than lip service to a value, I guess. I don’t know, I guess that was a little rumbly but I hope that vaguely got into there. I guess I don’t really know of any other way to do it, other than find other people who want to do it and do it together and then eventually, other people who agree with what you’re doing will join up and you just keep including the people that share what you’re trying to get done on the world. I think that applies to everything, not just software.

LORENA: Yeah. That’s a great advice. Thank you.

CORALINE: I think that’s a great note to end on to, Steve. At the end of our show, we’d like to do reflections and talk about the things that we found most interesting or most poignant about the conversations we had and maybe some actions that we individually would like to take to enact before learning that ahead on the show. We’re going to move in to reflections. Who would like to go first?

JAMEY: I think I’ll go first. I feel like the theme that really struck me from this show was about leadership and how important it is to not put too much power in the hands of a few people. I had thought about this before, particularly in terms of the bus factor, which I was talking about recently with some non-tech friends. The bus factor is like if someone on your team got hit by a bus tomorrow, how would your team be able to go on. The idea is like one person cannot be the one source of knowledge in your team or your company.

I’m talking about this with some non-tech friends and they were kind of horrified that I was talking of people getting hit by buses, which also made me think that this metaphor is normal to me that I was just like, “Yeah, well what if?” It’s a really mean thing to say about your co-workers. But it’s not just in case if something happens to someone or if they decide to leave your organization but it also gives you and your community the power to remove people that are bad for your community. I had never really thought about the bus factor in that sense. It’s not just about security for our process. It’s also about power to make sure that we have a community that we feel good about and we don’t get stuck with contributors that make us feel uncomfortable. That’s what I was thinking about, I guess.

REIN: I can go next because actually, what I was going to say is pretty similar, I think to what Jamey was saying. It’s kind of funny, Steve that you were talking about moving away from anarchism because I think we’re sort of ships in the night in that regard and I am starting to incorporate more anarchist thought into my own beliefs. One of the things that I struggle with a lot is how do you build systems of governance that don’t depend for their success on the goodness of the rulers. You were talking about in Rust, you had a ruler who basically said, “I’m going to step down and give away a lot of my power,” and that only happens if you have a good ruler, right?

STEVE: Yup.

REIN: So how do you build systems of governance that are resilient to evil rulers and don’t depend on further success on having good people, being lucky enough to have good people in leadership position because you eventually won’t.

CORALINE: Lorena, do you have thoughts?

LORENA: Yeah. I’ve been re-watching Star Trek Next Generation and the whole part with the Q continuum, being both judge and jury and [inaudible] and who are you to judge us? But I think there’s something very real in that part of the conversation and I really appreciate that I was brought up to say, was how do you learn to speak with others in a language that is inviting and creates a safe space for us all. The idea that we might have strong ideas and convictions and beliefs but maybe because of loaded jargon or maybe falling into patterns of your community that could exclude others by knowing that and then how do you put yourself to a higher standard to try to create that kind of space, when you yourself try to both observe the community and make sure things don’t happen but also preventing yourself from being that person who might be reifying some of those structures.

I guess for me, that’s always an idea of learning to reflect on your own, be mindful of your own world and how these things can unfold. It means that you’re on open source and you’re thinking about, “How am I [inaudible] in this. Am I here for the right intentions? Am I actually working on this project because I care about it?” The idea that you’re caring open source just for the sake of being an open source that actually the right for you or as we heard story today, if you develop the eternal guideline for you how you’d get back to open source, then you can understand and check in with yourself. It’s about respect your personal space but also respect the community at large.

CORALINE: These are great points. One of the things that got out of the conversation is the notion of intentionality. That sort of touches on the importance of establishing values around an open source project, leading by example, which I thought was a great point and then figuring out how to communicate community values to new members of the community. I think all of that ties into this theme of value resilience, how do you maintain this values over time as the leadership changes, as members of the community change. I think you have to be intentional about those things, otherwise you’re going to drift into chaos. Steve, what are your thoughts?

STEVE: While this was a thing that I gave an answer to, it was also a thing that is leading me to more questions. The question about, not about jargon but was about this inaccessibility of much of leftist thought is a thing that has been rolling around in the back of my brain and having that question asked, lit some things up that allowed me to give that answer but I definitely am going to be continuing to think about, again with this idea of understanding things after they happen. I’ve been very interested in some people’s efforts recently to do things like discounted groceries drives or feed the people programs and Food Not Bombs and these kinds of inherently accessible political organizing because it’s not actually about what book you read but it’s about, “You need to eat some food, let’s make this happen.” Thinking about that as a non-exclusionary politics is very interesting to me and probably something I’m going to think about more.

My brain draws connections between things and I like to explain those connections. So often, I’ll bring jargon into a conversation because something will remind me of a book I’ve read and then I get excited about it and then I’m like, “There was this book,” but that is an attitude that can be exclusionary and that’s something I’m going to have to think about.

REIN: I also don’t know how you balance that with essentially, anti-intellectualism. One that I often mention books, at least in my mind so that I appear well-read, so that people know that I’m not the only person who’s ever thought of this. There is in fact a place you can go if you want to learn more about the thing I’m talking about.

STEVE: Yeah. I have totally had people mention a book and then I go and read it and I read everything else the author has ever written because I’m like, “This is really great,” but that’s a contextual thing. It’s not always perceived that way.

REIN: I would actually like to know what the book was that you wouldn’t tell us earlier.

STEVE: That was specifically Nietzsche and I totally forget which book specifically it is but the concept of the ressentiment and master slave morality.

CORALINE: Awesome. I think we all have some work to do and we all going to need some time to process. This has been a wonderful conversation, Steve. Thank you so much for joining us.

STEVE: Yeah. That’s great. Thank you for having me.

CORALINE: This episode marks, like I said, the 50th episode of the podcast. We have been doing this podcast for about a year now and we’re looking forward to more years of serving our community and bringing interesting conversation to you. Thanks, Steve for being a part of that and thank you everyone for listening and we will talk to you again very soon.

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049: Technology For the Greater Good with Reyn Aubrey

Mandy Moore — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 05:00:18 +0000

This episode is sponsored by Upside!

Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.

Panelists:

Rein Henrichs | Jamey Hampton | Coraline Ada Ehmke

Guest Starring:

Reyn Aubrey: @ReynAubrey | PocketChange | reyn@pocketchange.social

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “For Good or For Awesome?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:18 – Reyn Aubrey’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpower!

06:04 – Culture of a Company and Tolerance

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin

08:12 – Becoming an Entrepreneur at 19-years-old and PocketChange

10:40 – Charity Evaluation Criteria; “Wicked Problems”

pocketchange.social/charities (Coming Soon)

14:33 – Habitizing Donation

16:22 – Analyzing and Collecting Charity Data

GuideStar Charity Navigator

CharityWatch

19:02 – How PocketChange is Structured

20:34 – The Ideation of “Technology For the Greater Good”

24:28 – Reyn’s Path Into Business and Entrepreneurship

Start It Up: The Complete Teen Business Guide to Turning Your Passions into Pay by Kenrya Rankin

28:33 – Good Business Beliefs, Virtues, and Values

34:00 – Bringing Anarchist Organizing Principles Into Business

Colin Ward: Anarchism as a Theory of Organization

The ‘Two Pizza Rule’ Is Jeff Bezos’ Secret To Productive Meetings

37:23 – Advice For Others Interested in Social Entrepreneurship

42:00 – Launching PocketChange and Reserve Your Launch Day Invite

44:51 – Gathering and Raising Venture Capital

47:35 – Advice For Others Interested in Social Entrepreneurship (Cont’d)

Reflections:

Rein: Check out Stafford Beer.

Coraline: A culture being defined by the least of something you’ll tolerate and entrepreneurs should solve for “Wicked Problems” — not pain points.

Jamey: All charities are not created equal.

Reyn: A value that isn’t acted on is at best an inspiration and at worst a pretense. Also, non-dominance based work relationships.

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and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

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Transcript:

REIN: Hi, everyone. I’m Rein and welcome to Episode 49 of ‘For Good or For Awesome?’ I am here with my friend, Jamey.

JAMEY: Hi. Just a reminder, even though we are both good and awesome, the actual name of the show is Greater Than Code and I’m here today with my good friend, Coraline.

CORALINE: Hey, everybody. It’s Coraline. As Jamey mentioned, you may know me from such podcasts as Greater Than Code, For Good or For Awesome and many others. We have a very special guest with us today but before we introduce our guest, I wanted to mention that this episode is brought to you by Upside, one of DC’s fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers who want to disrupt the norm and they’re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team to learn more. We’re very thankful for our sponsors. If you would like to sponsor us at any level, go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and you’ll gain an exclusive access to our Patron-only Slack community. If your company would like to sponsor us, please send them to GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors for a prospectus.

Now, it’s my pleasure to introduce Reyn Aubrey. Reyn is a 19-year old student entrepreneur. He’s on five businesses. The most recent of those is PocketChange, which is a tech company harnessing social media for good. Reyn has won a variety of awards, recognitions and competitions and he’s currently the youngest competitor ever to be in the Denver Startup Week’s $100,000 Pitch Challenge as a semifinalist. Welcome, Reyn.

REYN: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

CORALINE: Reyn, the first question we ask any guest on our show is what is your superpower and when and how did it develop?

REYN: I would say that my superpower is my ability to really listen to people and understand where people are coming from on things. I think that everybody’s got a really interesting perspective and you can’t really assume anything about anyone based on what you can see. It takes a lot of time to get to know somebody. I guess my superpower will be I’m willing to spend that time getting to know people as people versus as a label or as whatever group they fall in or anything like that.

I think that definitely has come from my background. I’m originally from Hawaii. I’m a white male but I’ve always been a minority and kind of have a loose sense of the word because Hawaii is very predominantly other ethnicities and definitely one of the biggest melting pots in the US so I really been able to shift how I see people and how I view people and really come at them and come at all interactions and conversations with open mind. My ability, I think to hear people for people and listen to people for people is really, really unique in terms of the way I look at the world.

CORALINE: It’s interesting that that was part of your upbringing. I think that learning, that ability to understand people generally develops as we mature. Was that something that you even experience in your childhood?

REYN: Incredibly, yeah. For me, it was all about the people that I surrounded myself with. I had, I think two white friends out of all everything else and I never really understood how unique that was because that was the only frame of reference that I had. Hawaii is one of the most isolated land masses in the world and when you’re there, that becomes your whole life. Having that kind of be a part of me since I was a little kid, I think was kind of really interesting. I’m not going to come out here and say, “Oh, this is super unique. This is great,” or anything like that but I think it just gives me an interesting perspective on people and the way things work.

Now, that I’m on Denver for school and the school that I go to is a predominantly more affluent white school, it’s been a really interesting shift for me and kind of interesting challenge of how I do business and how I think about myself and who I am and all of that.

REIN: What’s it like, I guess immigrating into a predominantly white group of people when you come from a much more diverse upbringing?

REYN: It’s really weird. I think that the biggest thing I noticed that was weird was that a lot of people never really had thought about their race or their background or that kind of thing. I don’t want to generalize but for a lot of people, college is kind of the first time we’re able to have this discussions and kind of a safe area or a brave area. I just thought it was really interesting so coming into it, I really had to understand that and understand that other people were not coming from the same place that I was coming from, in terms of their understanding of all these different things. That’s not to say that I understand the struggles of all of the things that are going on right now because I definitely don’t. I’m still a white male.

But I think that coming to the school and being fair to people who had never thought about race or never thought about that privileged was really an interesting thing for me and I had to approach it with an open mind and had to constantly remind myself for that if someone would say something that was ignorant or they didn’t know something, I kind of viewed it as my responsibility to be willing to call it out. Not to have the answers but just be willing to have a conversation about something that I wasn’t comfortable with or something along those lines.

CORALINE: That’s something that I wish more white people or more white males would take responsibility for. I think a lot of the emotional labor and a lot of the work being done to address racism in this country is being done by people of color. There’s this persistent message on Twitter that people of color cannot end racism and it requires white people of talking to their racist families, talking to their racist friends, calling out racism when they see it in public. It’s really refreshing to see that at 19 years old, you have an understanding on that. At 19 years old, you’re brave enough to do that.

REYN: It’s interesting. I was actually reading a book called Tribes by Seth Godin and a lot of other entrepreneurs have read and it talks a lot about culture of a company and if you allow me to go down this tangent real quick. A culture of a company is defined by the least amount of something that you’ll stand for, your baseline, your cut-off point. I was actually having this debate yesterday, this conversation yesterday that in terms of when issues come up where there’s something that is not okay or you’re not comfortable with, regardless of if that situation is resolved by you saying something, setting the line of this is okay and this is not okay is fundamentally incredibly important because it sets the tone for your community and then if we can get enough people to set the tone and set the line that this is not okay and this is okay in super small ways, I think that’s how we push something forward. It’s not through big programs or in a massive marketing campaigns or viral Twitter videos. I think it comes from a whole lot of people coming together and saying, “This is not okay and this is what I stand for in my personal life.”

JAMEY: I think I totally agree with that. I think that even if you say something in the moment to someone and you don’t change their mind, maybe they’ll think about it later and start to internalize that information slowly and even if they’re maybe not listening to you, maybe someone else who is listening is listening to you and is getting something out of that, which I think about a lot when we’re having these discussions online, that if I make a comment to someone, maybe it’s not getting through to them in the way I hope but who know how many other people are going to read that comment.

REYN: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.

CORALINE: I really like what you said. I assume it’s a Seth Godin quote and it’s about how much of something they’ll tolerate. In our politics currently, we’re seeing some people calling for tolerance of ideas that are actually damaging to our society and our culture and our country and other people are saying rightly so that there is no space in public discourse for people who hold opinions about other people being subhuman but other people being inferior and it really comes down to what we as a country will tolerate.

JAMEY: Reyn, you describe yourself a couple of times already as an entrepreneur. I’d like to hear more about how you got into being an entrepreneur and I also like to hear about your new company, PocketChange. Is that it?

REYN: Yep. That’s correct.

JAMEY: Tell us about it.

REYN: Sure. PocketChange is my first foray into technology for social good. I believe that at core entrepreneurs solve problems but traditionally, we’ve been using entrepreneurship to solve pain points not problems. Anything from convenient travel to booking, email, productivity and whatever it is and we’re leaving the really, really big problems unaddressed: climate change, racism, gender inequality, LGBTQ rights. I really wanted to see if there was a way that I could use technology and my passion for business in a way that really benefited the world and left something bigger than just an IPO or acquisition or something along those lines.

PocketChange is a technology that we’re working on creating that aims to target the moment when someone is really genuinely motivated into action and remove all the barriers for that action. Right now, we’re creating a button that sits on Facebook, next to every piece of content and lights up when you see a post about a cause. Post about a cause could be anything from an article about Hurricane Irma to a video about poverty. Maybe it’s a livestream about a crisis in another country, whatever it is, any cause in any area, our button will read that post and analyze that post, determine a specific cause from that post that relates to it. For example, there’s a video about climate change, our technology will be able to identify that is a video about climate change.

Then we have a research team that analyzes all charities that do work in the area of climate change and trying to tackle climate change and the term is the single most impactful organization that is tackling that issue. Then in two clicks, we allow our users to donate 25¢ to $2 to that organization all within page. Again, in the moment, if someone really wants to do something, we remove all the barriers for that action. We’re creating a like button and actually makes a difference.

One of the interesting things we have to do is choose charities and evaluate charities. Our belief is that we don’t have to be experts on every topic. We just have to be experts on how we go about choosing charities and what makes a good charity and what makes a poor charity. We’ve spent a lot of time researching and doing a lot of work in that space.

CORALINE: What are your evaluation criteria? I’m really curious about that.

REYN: We do basically two things. We look at quantitative and we look at qualitative. We start by trimming based on efficiency. When you’re only donating 25¢ to $2, it’s really, really crucial that that charity is actually using the money. I think it’s always crucial that the charity is making sure that they’re using the money for a program expense, rather than purely administrative or CEO salaries. We’ve all heard the stories of these massive charities ripping people off and taking their donations —

CORALINE: Red Cross.

REYN: Yeah, exactly. We really make sure that all the charities that we work with are spending the vast majority of their money on actual programs and are running a lean mean machine. Then we basically select charities based on diversity of program, along with a lot of other things. We look at leadership and we look at vision and we look at geographic areas and how they’re adapting and using asset-based programs and all of that kind of thing. But we understand that for the problems that we’re looking at, which are called ‘wicked problems.’

Wicked problems are essentially problems that are really, really hard to solve and can’t be solved by a simple cause and effect solution, things like climate change and racism and all of the examples I’ve mentioned before. The way to solve wicked problems according to current literature and example in testing and all of that is you solve them by tackling it from a variety of different angles. There’s no one solution to any of these problems but a variety of solutions brought together becomes incredibly powerful. We look at programs and charities that have programs in a really diverse set of areas.

Perhaps with climate change, there are definitely things that they need to do. For example, short term fixes, providing food and resources immediately but then also the really more important thing is lobbying in the government and making sure that laws are created and running educational programs so that people understand things, setting up recycling programs so that it’s easier for people to do that, marketing campaigns and awareness campaigns to really let people know what’s going on and trying to engage and tackle the problem from a lot of variety of different angles. We really work with charities that are great at a lot of different things, in terms of tackling their problem. If provided the right amount of funding, they could scale those solutions and really make a massive impact on that issue.

CORALINE: You make the evaluation data public?

REYN: Yes. We’re finalizing in the next two weeks. It’s been pretty crazy. We just got into Denver Startup Week. If we won, that would really speed up our development time so we’ve been focusing all of our energy on that. But in the next two weeks, we will publish all of the information on how we choose charities, specifics on why we chose each charity and our whole process and you get to meet the research team and all of that at PocketChange.social/Charities. That page isn’t up but in the next two weeks, it will be with all of the information that we need.

Then we’re also really looking at how can we make the things smarter because we fully acknowledge and understand as 19-year old students, we have some older people on our team as well. But as primarily young people, we’re never going to have all the answers to all of these things and we’re never going to be the smartest person in the room. Our power is the ability to acknowledge that.

We’re looking at trying to figure out ways to incorporate all of the brilliance of our PocketChanger community and get all of that involved in our charity selection process. Starting with a simple ‘send us your feedback,’ updates and all of that kind of stuff but then trying to figure out a smarter way to go about evaluating charities and harnessing the people that are donating through us and to us, to make that process a lot smarter and constantly improve and get better.

JAMEY: To be honest, I think this list of charities evaluated by all of these criteria alone is a great contribution and that’s not even really — products, maybe the wrong word but your end goal, like the end goal is to actually have people donating to these. I’m really interested about the fact that it’s donating between 25¢ and $2. I feel like there was research and decision making that went into that. Is that true?

REYN: Yeah, there is definitely a lot to it and we’re still testing. As all of you know, testing is constantly something you do as an entrepreneur when you’re building a product: launching and testing and launching and testing and launching and testing. But we set on 25¢ to $2 because our real belief, if the donation is hard and it shouldn’t be, we really want to create something that people can get behind and use without feeling guilt into it, without feeling like it’s going to hurt their wallet and they’re not going to be able to pay rent, without any of that. We really want to habitize donation.

Our belief is that — exactly what we were talking about before — if we can get a lot of people to come together in a really small way, it creates a super, super powerful and beautiful world where people can say, “Whether we disagree politically, whether we disagree about all these different things, we can agree that people are hungry and they need food and we can agree that this issue is bad or this is not something that we’re willing to stand for,” and we can bring people together. That simply doesn’t happen when you set $50 pay walls that exclude so many people. It also doesn’t happen when we’re just on Facebook, which we acknowledge. It also doesn’t happen when we’re just using technology because a lot of people don’t have access to that so we’re trying to figure out ways to get around that but we have to choose the path with least resistance for now.

We set the 25¢ to $2 to really habitize how people donate and make it something that people can donate without feeling bad about or without feeling it’s something that their guilty into doing or forced to do or anything like that so removing all the stigma and difficulty and baggage that comes along with donation and really simplify that whole process.

JAMEY: It’s really cool.

REIN: I’m interested in understanding how you get your data about the charities. I know that there are charity watchers and things like that that publish some information but what do you do that’s different from them and how do you analyze these charities?

REYN: We do use a lot of the online databases out there. There are some really great ones that called directly from IRS filings that the charity is required to file legally. We use a GuideStar Charity Navigator and CharityWatchdog sometimes to really pull our data. The biggest thing that we do is we aggregate so we don’t necessarily fly out to the charities and interview them and do any of that stuff because it’s just simply not scalable for what we’re trying to do. But what we do is we make sure that we pull information and find any conflicts between information from a variety of different sources and make sure that that information is accurate.

We know all the numbers to look at, whether that’s administrative costs, program expenses. We look at percentage of executive team salaries based on donations, restricted versus unrestricted funding, where donations are coming from. Whether it’s coming from foundations or whether it’s coming from individuals, whether it’s coming from a specific area, all of that kind of stuff. We really try to look at donations and charities as honestly and analytically as possible and be as transparent with that data as possible so that any time you donate you have access to all the same information we do.

If you disagree with us, that’s completely okay. We understand that everybody’s going to have a different philosophy and perspective on things so we enable users to input their own charities if they like one better or choose one of our other options. We provide three options if you do not like your default so users really do feel empowered while at the same time, still simplifying the whole process for them and not to have you and your wife go through and see if you can figure out what charities actually going to donate the money and what charity is just going to take it and have a $40,000 launch.

We also believe that no one’s really done what we’re trying to do before. If we can do it well, we can really become a very trusted name in the charity space. Whether you use PocketChange or not, our belief is that if we can choose great charities and more people donate to great charities, that’s amazing for us. If we can laser focus people on donating to just the best charities, it becomes really, really impactful. Maybe PocketChange isn’t the right tool for anyone. Maybe people don’t use Facebook or whatever it is, maybe they want to donate more so we want to make sure that all of our information on charities is super easily accessible to anyone, regardless of if you use PocketChange or not.

CORALINE: I’m really curious kind of mechanically how PocketChange is structured. Do you have a team of data scientists that’s working on that charity data? Who’s doing that work and what specialization do they bring to that process?

REYN: Basically, what we do is we have a team of people that follow the process that we outline and then we also have an advisory board of people that go in and look at charities that are real experts in the field. Actually, it’s kind of funny. We don’t really use too many data scientists because while charities are very database, they are also is a lot of value to the qualitative side of it. We, actually on our advisory board team, have a lot of social venture capitalists and social investors. There’s a big organization here called Bettcher and there’s a lot of basically rich foundations that do a lot of investing in social good projects. Then we have a lot of their team on our advisory board to help refine the process: the head of philanthropy at Western Union, it’s a big one that we have on the team.

We have a process and we standardize that process so that everyone has access to it and can see the information that we’re working with and how we choose things. We really standardize our decision making and we really believe that that’s important for our transparency but then, we also have a team of ridiculously smart, ridiculously talented people who help make the process smarter and who can make decisions, if something goes wrong.

REIN: How did you come to decide on this project? Where did you get the original idea? What made you decide this is what thing you want to focus your energy on?

REYN: Funny enough, the idea came from these tiny showers we had in our freshman dorms last year and I was sitting in there and I had just seen something on Facebook and 20 million people had watched this video and shared it and everyone was saying, “This is so sad. I wish I could do something,” and I started thinking about this happens every day, millions of times a day and everyone seems to want to do something but there’s no way for us the target it in that moment. Usually, ideas don’t happen as eureka moments but this one kind of did.

Going back a little bit further than just that moment of ideation and creation was I had run a hoverboard company back home, about a year prior and it became the most successful hoverboard company in the State. The hoverboard being two-wheel self-bouncing devices that were pretty popular in 2015. I launched that company and run that company and it was doing really, really well. I remember, I was really lucky in it because I got to face a lot of things that many people don’t get to face and I have to face it when I was 17. I remember one day I was in my room and we just made a whole bunch of sales, right in the middle of the Christmas season and I was counting all this money to be deposited into our bank account and I remember thinking, “This is pretty boring. If this is what I’m going to do the rest of my life, if the end goal is to make cash that I can buy useless things with, it’s just a waste of my time.”

I think that we all have an opportunity to do something bigger than just that. I am of firm believer that we should use the things we’re passionate about in a way that really benefits the world. Now, let’s not say that other projects don’t but it’s just something that I was really lucky enough to kind of brought to my attention and face at 17. I knew that in that moment, I had decided that the next project that I wanted to do would be a social venture, without a doubt. I knew that I loved business and I was in love with the business process but I didn’t want the end goal to be profit so I wanted to launch a business that really help the world.

Going back to one of my first points was I think that over the next 20 years, it’s going to be one of the most interesting periods of time that we’ve ever seen. I think that a lot of things are coming to a point in the next 20 years, whether it’s clock-ticking on climate change or the incredible racial tensions and things that have been bubbling up in our country, all of the debates that we’ve been having like resources running low. I think that a lot of things are coming to the head definitely in our lifetime and those problems, I think there are massive opportunities for you to actually do something that really helps a lot of people, not just solves a problem for the minutiae of people who have 98% of the problems in their life already solved.

I think that there’s massive opportunity to really help others to increase social standing and bring people onto the same page and empower people all around the world that isn’t just focused on who’s the 1% of rich Americans who can afford to buy our [inaudible] product. I think that it’s really, really important that we target problems that are bigger than things that we traditionally face in business. I know that’s definitely not an easy thing and most businesses like that will fail, potentially PocketChange included obviously. But I think that there is nothing more important than giving that a shot.

JAMEY: I’m really impressed and this big idea and it’s great but I’m also really impressed that you had the background and the experience and the resources to put this together into a real company at age 19. You talked about loving business. I’d like to hear a little bit more about your path into business and entrepreneurship and some of the other projects that you’ve worked on previous to this.

REYN: Sure. I guess technically the very first entrepreneurial venture I did was a lemonade stand when I’m six years old, I think. A lot of people can relate to that but I vividly remember, I did one day of the lemonade stand and I remember vividly learning about cost of goods sold because I made all this money and I was super excited and my parents were like, “Now, you got to pay us back for the cups and pay us back for everything,” and I was like, “Oh, man. This isn’t fun.” I did one day of that lemonade stand and I was like, “I can do that but it’s not my full potential,” so I hired a bunch of my neighborhood friends in my community and they actually ran a lemonade stand and I was the marketer for the lemonade stand. I went to the local pool and I gave out like little pieces of paper that said, “Come outside and get 25¢ off of our lemonade,” or something like that.

I remember running around and getting the business more into a legit business and I wish I could say it turned into some multimillion dollar lemonade franchise because it did not —

CORALINE: Lemonade.io.

REYN: Yeah, exactly. Lemonade.ly were now a tech startup. That was my very first venture into the business world. I was always doing entrepreneurial things but I’d never known that I was entrepreneurial until 8th grade. When in 5th grade, I tried to do a break dancing class and charge my friends a nickel, which was not super profitable. Then I tried to trade currency in 7th grade. I was always doing things that were entrepreneurial but I never knew that that was a legit path that I could go down until my mom bought me this book called Start it Up by, I believe her name is ‘Kenya Rajins.’ I’m not sure I’ll go in and get that [inaudible]. If anyone wants to read it. It’s an incredible book about getting started.

She got me that book and I remember reading about it and saying, “There’s all of these people out there that this is what they do full time. They get to run businesses and bigger than anything I’ve ever dreamed about. They get to have tens of thousands of people on their team all working together towards a goal and everyone is serving a function that’s crucial to the business and it’s beautiful.” I think business is one of the greatest art forms in the world because it’s so difficult to get two people to work together, let alone 10,000. It’s pretty incredible.

I remember reading about that and I was like, “This thing is legit,” and then I started an online business. I sold my old Legos. I figured out I had eight giant bins of Lego. I was a huge Lego nut as a kid. I made stop-motion animation videos and I love Legos. I was like, “I no longer want these Legos and I want to give that to other people because I love them so much.” I figured out that there was a missing piece in the eBay market, where if you package them up in 100-piece sets and put a mini figure in each of them, they made awesome stocking stuffers. I did that, I wrap each one and I put a sticker that said, “Love, happiness and Legos,” on it and sold eight bins in, I think a month or two. Then started needing some more supplies so I started going on Craigslist and buying other people’s lots and packaging it in a smaller lots.

Actually, I started buying my competitor sets and breaking them up into smaller sets and selling them and earning more, which is pretty funny. Then I got into a whole bunch of other businesses, buying and reselling things on Craigslist, which I found a lot of fun. Then I scaled out and eventually, built a Lego mini-figure company where we make custom mini-figures and package them in sets and we’re selling thousands of them. That was really fun and then the hoverboard company and now, PocketChange.

REIN: You talk about having 10,000 people on your team and I think that’s a wonderful sentiment. But the traditional model of business, the way it works is it’s a hierarchical top-down, almost totalitarian structure, where people get told by the people above them who get told by the people above them what to do. I sense that that may not be how you want to do things. Is that correct?

REYN: Yeah, that’s definitely correct. I want to put a qualifier on that. I think that 10,000 people can’t be reporting to one person, obviously but I’m a big believer that good things don’t happen by somebody telling you to do them. They happened by everyone being super invested in it. I think the best companies really, really understand that and really value every single person on the team. One thing we do at the company that a friend of mine just told me about and we adapted it in two hours was we don’t call anybody employees. We call team members or changers for PocketChange.

My real belief is that everybody has something to offer and siloing people like you’re marketing so you can look at tech or you’re tech so you can look at sales or you’re accounting or whatever it is, really misses out on some really hidden talents that people have. For example, at PocketChange, it’s obviously not 10,000 people. We’re a team of six people but at PocketChange, we were putting together a pitch for the Denver Startup Week actually and I’m traditionally the pitch person. I’ve won all the pitch awards and that’s definitely one of my strong suits.

But one of our people on our team came out and it was like, “I think you should word it this way,” and it was perfect. It was exactly what I was missing. That wouldn’t have happened if it was like, “You’re a tech so tell you manager to tell their manager and tell that manager to get it over and send an email or whatever it is.” I think that the best businesses can come when there’s a real cross disciplinary interaction that happens between people. We try and do that at PocketChange. It’s obviously real easy when it’s six people and we’re all can hop on a Skype call together. It’s a lot harder to 10,000 can hop on a Skype call together. But I want to try and build businesses in ways that that make sense for.

CORALINE: I did some consulting for Starbucks, I guess maybe 10 years ago now, some tech consulting and I was really impressed by one of the things they did. First of all, similar to what you’re saying, everyone at Starbucks was, I believe they call them partners. They actually did a thing where regardless of your position at the company, even at the VP or CEO level, you had to work a certain number of hours every year at one of the stores doing the job. I was really impressed with how people at every level, regardless of their area of specialization: be a tech or marketing or what have you, had intimate knowledge of what happened at the store. They were super focused on making the people at the stores efficient and happy and in turn, making customers happy. I think it’s really valuable kind of baking that in your culture. Do you have any plans for how to kind of codify clarify that so that, if hopefully as PocketChange grows, you maintain that culture of cross-pollination?

REYN: Yeah, definitely. We do a couple of things right now and I want to keep them super involved as we grow as a company. Some of this was stolen from my incredible mentor at a company called ‘Full Contact’. His name is Drew. He’s really helped me a lot and I’m like, “How you go about doing this?” We do a couple of things. One is we have every week with weekly stand ups where everyone talks about what they’re working on and everyone else can put in their two cents and they can bounce ideas around the room and all that kind of stuff, any issues that they’re coming up with, all of that.

Then also, charity selection is obviously a big part of our business. We’ve talked about that a lot. Everyone in the team, primarily head of technology to our head of marketing, all of that, we all go and we all are going to be working in choosing charities for parts of our job. I think it’s crucially important that everyone on the team can justify exactly how we go about doing that and people are a lot more unified if we can understand like, “I understand this issue because I ran into it as well when I was doing it.”

Obviously, I’m not a technical person so I can’t hop into Mark’s code — Mark is our head of technology — and try to understand everything that he’s doing but what I can do is I can have a conversation with him during our weekly stand up about the issues that he’s facing and see what I can do and how I can understand those issues better. As a team member, I can help in whatever way. Maybe there is something that I heard about that I was like, “I read something somewhere,” and he goes, “That’s perfect. That’s what I was looking for.”

Every week, we have this weekly stand up where people bounce around what they’re working on and the issues that they’re facing and everyone hears about it and puts in their two cents and debates and all of that. Then everyone goes through and does the lowest, more grind part of our business, which is the charity selection side. Then we also want to incorporate as much as possible, a roundtable discussion about vision and all of that stuff, into what we’re doing. I am the founder and CEO but that doesn’t mean that I’m the only one with good ideas at the company. By no means is that what that means. We try and incorporate that into everything that we do.

REIN: One of the things that I’ve always wanted to try to do is to bring sort of anarchist-organizing principles into business. It’s very easy to do it when there are six people or 10 people but the harder questions are what do you do when there are 500 people, how do you organize that in a way that isn’t hierarchical and bureaucratic? There’s a bunch of prior arc here that might be interesting to you, one of the concept is a syndicalism. Basically, people get together and form temporary, voluntary function based teams and then they federate responsibility and organize it a higher level by setting delegates and things like that.

REYN: I really, really like that and we’re still figuring out. We don’t put a ton of thought into it because we are six people but it’s something that I think is potentially one of the most important parts of the business.

REIN: There’s an essay by Colin Ward called ‘Anarchism as a Theory of Organization.’ That was published in 1966. You can find it free online and you should read it and see what you think.

REYN: Awesome. Thanks. I will.

CORALINE: Rein H, I’m curious. How do you see that working in practice, say I have a tech company of 100 people and hopefully, I’m doing something for social good. How does that syndicalism actually work in practice?

REIN: I think one of the questions always is how do you take groups of individuals and give them a common purpose and manage their work at a higher level. The answer is we don’t really know. We can barely do it in a hierarchical structure as it is, given how many companies are failing to do that. But the basic idea is that the role of a CEO in a company is a function that the company needs. It doesn’t make you the master of the people that you work with.

There are functions that are necessary to organize and provide structured of a company that don’t require you to be put into a dominance relationship with other people in the company. They’re just a function that has to happen and someone who is good at that function should be elected to do it. It could even be a small team does that and members rotate in and out. There are ways to organize that don’t just grant the privilege of royalty to whoever happens to have the title of CEO at the time. For me I think, the four fundamental principles are organization should be voluntary, it should be based on function, it should be temporary and it should be as much as possible small. When you need to build bigger things, you will let the members and you delegate responsibility in the same way for a period of time, for a particular purpose.

CORALINE: I love that. I want to be in an organization like that.

REIN: Me too.

REYN: I know that Jeff Bezos has a great rule, the ‘Two Pizza Rule.’ If your team can’t be fed by two pizzas, it’s too big. I think that’s exactly what you’re talking about and it’s great.

REIN: Yeah. Some of this goes back to human nature and tribal sizes and the number of relationships we can hold in our head with other people because it’s a non-linear thing. The power set of all of the people is how many different relationships you can form at any one time. People have said like 150 people is the most you can have in a village before people don’t know each other and things like that.

JAMEY: I am really impressed that you have this background in business or turning a profit is such an important part of that culture in many ways. Then you took that were able to say, “Turning a profit isn’t the most important thing for me. I want to do something important.” I’m serious if you have any advice for other people that are in business and entrepreneurship, maybe have existing companies and how to integrate social entrepreneurship into what they’re already doing, if that makes sense.

REYN: Sure. I think that one thing that’s really great that a lot of companies can do relatively easily is as much as possible, create something of a space for people to share new ideas. But then once you do that, make sure that all of your employees take maybe three days out of a year or a week out of a year to go volunteer with local organizations. If employees and team members went out into the communities and volunteered and saw problems in their communities firsthand, they could bring some of that back to the business and say, “I just volunteer at a recycling organization and for our company lunches, we use all plastics. Maybe we can convert and we’ll make that and then we become a little bit more green.”

I think one great policy that people can have is make sure that everybody at the company really gets down to the community and sees real problems that are happening. Then the other thing is, I think if it’s a shift in how a company operates, it really has to come down to the leadership team of that company, setting the example so you can’t come out and say, “We’re now a green company. We’re now a socially responsible company,” and then the leadership doesn’t follow those practices. I think it’s really crucial that leadership, not only follow common understanding and common practice around social issues but also that they have an understanding of the issues that they’re passionate about and they are wanting to solve a brand that I think does it really well.

We work with a lot of brands that are socially conscious. It’s one of the ways that we actually make money at PocketChange. But one brand that I think does it immensely well as Stella Artois, the beer company. Their founder is really, really understanding and really care about clean water so they recently just started a partnership with Water.org, on a multimillion dollar donation partnership and we could talk about charity selection and all of that for the rest of time but the core intent of that was the founders understand that this is a major issue. They understand that their business is uniquely situated to be able to set an example on the market for a company caring about clean water and they all came from the leadership pairing with Water.org.

I think a leader setting that example for the rest of their team and saying, “As a company, this is who we are. We believe that we can use our business to do good as well as make money. That’s what social entrepreneurship is. If it comes from leadership and if it comes from, also every team member who is going out to the community and seeing the problems that are there and seeing how their business might be able to help tackle that, I think then you can really set up your organization for amazing and awesome socially-conscious things.

CORALINE: I would argue that you cannot be a green company, you cannot be a socially-aware company because these sorts of things are not things that you are but they’re things that you do.

REYN: I love that.

CORALINE: I think it’s easy to make claims and claims require certification and certifications require bureaucracy. I like to say that a value that you hold but don’t act on isn’t really a value. It’s at best aspirational and at worst, it’s a pretense.

JAMEY: I think, also people sometimes get very attached to these words that they’ve used to describe themselves, such that even if a value is, like an aspiration something they want to do, people are sometimes too quick to be like, “I did a good job and now I’m done,” rather than continuing working on that and valuing it and devoting yourself to it in your life.

CORALINE: Ethics and awareness, they shouldn’t be nouns. They should be verbs.

JAMEY: I agree.

REIN: There’s a concept in systems thinking called, ‘the purpose of a system is what it does.’ The idea there is it doesn’t matter what you claim the purpose of the system is, what you actually have to look at is what it’s doing and then you’ll know what it’s designed to do. You can be a company with all of these values and Coraline is saying, “If you don’t act on those values and that’s not the purpose of your company. The purpose of your company is something else.”

CORALINE: Reyn, I’m curious, how far along are you in launching PocketChange and is there a beta program that people can take advantage of now? If so, what’s the process for that? How do they get that button on their Facebook feed?

REYN: We just launched a real close beta and we launched that in mid-June, actually in the end of June and gather a lot of awesome feedback about it but realize that we have a lot more work to do as we’re just talking about. We don’t currently have a product in market that people can download. What they can do is they go to PocketChange.social. There’s a ‘Get PocketChange’ button, right on the home screen. They can click that and put their email in and we should have a product in the next few months.

We’ll do everything that we really wanted to do. We will be launching early access beta in the next few days that won’t really do what we wanted to do but will allow users to create PocketChange accounts and get the process started. If anyone out in the Greater Than Code community is interested in doing that, just go to PocketChange.social and click ‘Get PocketChange’ and we’ll let you know when we are ready to have some people to hop on the program, start testing it and giving us awesome feedback.

CORALINE: Yeah, please do let us know and we’ll share with our listeners when that goes live because I think that’s really worthwhile. It’s definitely something that people and our listening community would be very interested in. As an implementation question, not technical, don’t worry, are you in collaboration with Facebook on this or is this something that you’re adding on in a third-party plugin way?

REYN: We’re starting as a Google Chrome extension because not only does that allow us to over land on top of Facebook but once someone has a download and once we have our technology built, we can instantly go over to Twitter, to any news sites, to Google search results, to email, to anywhere that someone browses. We’re starting as a Google Chrome extension because integrating with Facebook is real difficult but once we prove ourselves, we’re also trying to get mobile by making mobile extension.

Then also integrating with a lot of other areas that people see content that inspires them. We’re currently talking with Flipboard and Pocket — two big news apps — about integrating our platform there and then a couple of other smaller social medias that would be perfectly situated for it. We’re also in discussions of how to get that naturally embedded into their platforms but we still have a lot of work to do on our product. We’re starting as an extension just because it allows us to super easily and quickly over land on top of everything. But the end goal is to integrate into as many platforms as possible.

We’re still going back and forth between whether we would want to get acquired by Facebook and be Facebook exclusive or whether we want to remain cross-platform which is the real distinct point for us. We go back and forth but right now, we’re a browser extension.

REIN: I want to ask as a company whose goal is not profit, first are you structured as a nonprofit or are you structure as a corporation?

REYN: We’re structured as a public benefit corporation.

REIN: So a B corp?

REYN: Actually, it’s a separate entity. B corp is a certification that you get. It’s really expensive and there’s a lot of great B corps but many companies will just get that certification to look good but a public benefit corporation means that you have a dual focus of profit and for your stakeholders and then also social capital.

REIN: The question I want to actually ask is what is it like trying to get money from VC and other investors as a company that structured like that and doesn’t have a strong profit motive as some other companies? Also, what advice would you give for other entrepreneurs who want to move towards doing stuff for social good?

REYN: In terms of gathering VC, I can’t speak super and up about it because we’re not currently actively raising. I’ve talked to a lot of VCs and we have a lot of interest but we’re keeping the door shut on VC money right now. I think venture capital can often kill a company before it really gets off the ground because you don’t know what you’re doing yet. But in terms of actually raising venture capital money, I think investors do want to do good but they also care that their money comes back and it comes back more.

Social entrepreneurship is beautiful because you’re not a nonprofit. You’re a for-profit company that just understands that there’s other problems to be solved out there. In terms of raising that money, it’s pretty similar to traditional for-profit companies, in terms of having really good financials and having a plan that makes sense. But then it’s also comes down to reaching out to the right investors. In Colorado, we have a lot of social venture capitalists that want to invest in these types of companies so we can harness them.

Then also for social entrepreneurship, there’s a lot of grant money out there and grant money is pretty awesome because you don’t have to give up any of your company to get it. There’s some pretty incredible things out there for companies that are trying to do good. I would say just Google it and reach out. Oftentimes, grant writers will write grants for free and take a percentage of whatever grant you get so it makes total sense to reach out to any grant writers in your area and see if there’s any Angel groups that are socially focused. In Colorado we have a couple. Back home in Hawaii, we have one. There’s a pretty decent chance that there’s at least a small community somewhere, wherever you’re located that will allow you to raise money in that way and have investors that understand that your business plan is not to IPO in five years or to get acquired in five years. It’s to do something bigger and also make money.

REIN: And then what would you say to someone who maybe doesn’t have much experience with entrepreneurship or maybe does but only in the more for-profit areas that wanted to get into this sort of thing, instead?

REYN: I would say, speaking to first to people who have done entrepreneurship before, one of the biggest things that you’ll probably have to face is that it’s harder to get honest feedback from people. People don’t generally like to ‘hate’ on social ventures so it’s a lot harder to get real, honest critiques. One way to go about doing that well is to really set up conversations in a way that’s like, “We want you to tear this idea apart and that will get better.” That’s one thing that a lot of for-profit to more social enterprise companies have to face.

But in terms of people who have never really done entrepreneurship before or are more in that boat and want to build something socially conscious or something along those lines is in my opinion, I think it’s pretty equally difficult to launch a for-profit company and a social entrepreneurship company. A problem is a problem so definitely there are problems that are easier to solve than others. But a lot of social entrepreneurship, if you can spend the time to understand the issue and talk to the people that can understand the issue, a solution is a solution. Whether that’s applied to rural agriculture or whether that’s applied to email, it’s a very similar process in terms of talk to the people that really understand it, talk to your customers that would use it or your users or your clients or how will you break it down and then go out and start building it. Entrepreneurship is hard but there’s no reason why people can’t spend their time and their energy trying to do something in a more impactful way than just more traditional entrepreneurship.

REIN: As you may know at the end of the podcast, we like to talk about our reflections on what we’ve just discussed and anything we may want to leave with our listeners or what’s been really meaningful for us. For me, I’m really interested, especially in these social good entrepreneurship businesses. I think there may be an even more of an opportunity there for actually functional horizontal organization. One of the places I would suggest to go to look into that is there is a socialist who was also a management cybernetician named Stafford Beer and he wrote about organizing companies and businesses like they were neural networks, for instance. Some really interesting stuff.

CORALINE: A couple of things that struck me while we’re talking. I love what you said about a culture being defined by the least as something that you’ll tolerate. I think that that applies in all cultural contexts, whether you’re talking about a startup or a group of friends or a conference or an organization or a Slack community. I think that’s a really interesting of turning idea of values on their heads and not just saying, “We believe in these things but also we stand united against these other things.” I think that’s a really valuable thing to think about.

The other thing, I’m not a big fan of entrepreneurship because I’ve been on the receiving end of bad entrepreneurs way too often but I love your idea that entrepreneurs should solve their problems and not pain points. I think one thing that the business-minded among our listeners should consider and even the non-business people among our listeners can consider is identifying what you defined as wicked problems. Maybe we don’t need another startup for food delivery but maybe we need to work on some of the larger issues that are facing our communities and our culture. I think identifying those wicked problems is a really valuable first step in actually doing some good in changing well for good. I thought that these points are really, really interesting and thank you for sharing this.

JAMEY: I was really struck about this idea that all charities are not created equal. When we want to donate to a cause that we care about and give our money, it’s because we want to make an impact on something that we think is important. I think there’s a bad feeling associated with realizing that you gave your hard-earned money to a charity and finding out that it went to something that you disagree with. That could be high CEO salaries that we’re talking about or it could even be a charity that is then taking money and giving it to something you actively disagree with.

There’s been a lot of stories about, for instance like the Salvation Army supporting anti LGBT stuff and if you don’t know about that, you might be giving money to something that you don’t want. I think this idea of going through, finding out which charities are using money efficiently, which charities are using money to the things they say that they’re using it for and which charities are really making a difference is like a huge service.

Even on its own, I think that something that really struck me as amazing and needed and why don’t we have this before and I’m so glad that we’re going to have this. The fact that that’s only part of what you’re doing is so amazing to me. I think that you really hit on a really important thing that had been floating around maybe in a lot of people’s heads but you were able to bring it into a concrete problem and a solution. I’m really impressed by that and I thank you for doing that and for coming and telling us about it.

REYN: Of course. I think it was actually you, Coraline that said this but a value that isn’t acted on is at best an inspiration and is at worst a pretense. I thought that was a really, really interesting concept and something that I want to go back and reflect on with the team because every company obviously has or should have a set of core values. But I think that it’s very easy to let those slip in the day-to-day operations of something. I really want to go back and talk with everyone and see how we can go about making sure that everything that we say we do, we will do. I think that’s crucial for trusting an organization.

Another idea that I really, really like was this idea of non-dominance based work relationships. I think that it’s something that’s really crucial and I don’t really know how you implemented it at scale but I think it’s something that we need to be able to figure out if we want to be able to grow in a way that makes sure that we value everyone who is a part of the company. I want to go back and talk with everyone and see how we can go about figuring out how to implement that into all parts of our businesses.

If anyone has any ideas or wants to brainstorm or help on a Skype call or grab coffee if you’re in Denver or something along those lines, whatever you would like, I’d like to open up the dialogue and conversation around those ideas. You can e-mail me Reyn@PocketChange.social. I’m sure Mandy can put it in the show notes or something along those lines. Those were my two biggest takeaways that I really got out of this.

CORALINE: Reyn, it has been an absolute delight talking to you. I think you’re very inspirational. I’m very impressed with your acumen and with your devotion to doing some good in the world and I think we need a lot more of that so thank you so much for coming on.

REYN: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

CORALINE: With that, we will wrap up. Thank you everyone for listening and we will talk to you again in a couple of weeks.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

048: Finding Our Lane with Marco Rogers

Mandy Moore — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 05:00:31 +0000

Build and maintain complex distributed systems.

We are proud to be partnering with O’Reilly Media. Be sure to check out velocityconf.com for all of the dates and cities coming this Fall.

The O’Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place to learn about continuous delivery, DevOps, operations, and performance. If you want to build distributed systems and apps that stand up to today’s technological challenges and customer expectations, make plans to attend Velocity in New York, NY (October 1-4) or London, UK (October 17-20). Register with code PCGTC to save 25% on your Gold, Silver, or Bronze pass.

Panelists:

Jamey Hampton | Jessica Kerr | Astrid Countee |
Janelle Klein | Sam Livingston-Gray

Guest Starring:

Marco Rogers: @polotek

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “Greater Than Code: Like Uber, But For Not Being Shitty” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

02:04 – Background and Superpower

03:03 – Being Outspoken and Dealing with Pushback on Twitter

04:41 – “Staying in Your Lane”

11:12 – To Engage, or Not to Engage?

16:10 – Mixing Social Justice and a Tech Career

20:49 – Having Conversations Re: Diversity and Inclusion

23:16 – Making Workplaces Inclusive and Changing the Culture

35:56 – Educating Others — But Not on Demand

38:28 – What is the right way to be an ally? Reading Spaces

43:59 – Starting/Organizing Working Groups

45:34 – Advocating for D&I as Leaders

Reflections:

Jessica: Diversity and inclusion is hard because it’s more than just one thing.

Sam: Don’t have conversations or be in them to not just be wrong.

Janelle: Training, teaching, and educating, versus putting together a working group to get things done.

Jamey: It’s okay to be wrong and sincerely apologizing.

Astrid: It’s hard to be who you want to be in a world where people are constantly picking sides.

Marco: How dynamics pay out for people who aren’t fully engaged in the D&I conversation yet.

Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag, and bring us to conferences near you? Support us via Patreon!

Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

JESSICA: Guess what? We have a special sponsor for this episode.

SAM: Yes, this episode is sponsored by O’Reilly Media. The O’Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place to learn about continuous delivery, DevOps, operations, and performance. If you want to build distributed systems and apps that stand up to today’s technological challenges and customer expectations…

JESSICA: Then, you should go to the Velocity Conference. There’s one in New York on October 1st through 4th and there’s some cool people speaking there like Carin Meier and Neha Narula, Ines Sombra and Jess Frazelle. Although there’s one in October 17 to 20 and that one looks even greater because Kiran Bhattaram is speaking there. She’s awesome and Angie Jones and Anne Currie. You should totally go. Also if you go to VelocityConf.com and register with code: PCGTC which is for PC Greater Than Code, then you get to save 25%.

JAMEY: Hi, I’m Jamey Hampton and welcome to ‘Greater Than Code: Like Uber, But For Not Being Shitty.’ I’m here with a bunch of my friends today, including the great Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Thank you Jamey. I am super happy to be here today with Astrid Countee.

ASTRID: Thank you Jessica and I’m really excited to introduce my friend, Janelle Klein.

JANELLE: Thank you, Astrid and I’m here with my amazing co-host, Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: I’m having a fanboy moment today. If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know our guest already because I retweet him so damn much. Marco Rogers describes himself in his Twitter bio as ‘web developer, movie buff and pretty much the best guy you know.’ Interestingly however, his LinkedIn profile shows his title is director of engineering so you can be sure that we are going to get to the bottom of that. Marco, welcome to the show.

MARCO: Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me.

SAM: Marco, I guess one of the ways that we like to start out is by asking you, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

MARCO: I think if I have a superpower, it’s probably a little bit of a cheat and it’s really just kind of thinking really fast on my feet. You mentioned my Twitter presence and I have people ask me all the time like, “Do you think through all these amazing tweet storms that you do?” and I’m like, “No, not at all.” It’s really just whatever the last one was. If there’s one that flows from that, then I write it down and if I don’t have any more thoughts, then I guess I’m done. That’s why, I think Twitter works really well for me. It’s something that I try to admit that people because the only thing that I’m trying to do is work through issues out loud so that people can potentially follow along and maybe, we can figure something out together but I don’t think my thoughts are more cogent than anyone else’s. I just have them a lot faster, I think so I can go through more. Truly a volume thing that I’m going for.

SAM: I mentioned that I retweet a lot of your stuff and part of that is because you’re just so outspoken about lots of things but especially, social justice issues. I know you get pushback for that but I’m wondering how much and how do you deal with it.

MARCO: I think that I’m in a very rarified space right at this moment. I’m earlier in that arc, which I would say started. It got kicked off by Ferguson and the whole thing. I talked to him a little during after trailing Martin and his trial and stuff but it was really Ferguson where I was like, “We have to talk about this,” and I found myself doing a lot on Twitter and having people actually respond. But I think there was an arc where what I did a lot was argue with trolls on Twitter and then I realized that that wasn’t what I wanted for my life. Then there was an arc where —

SAM: Imagine that.

MARCO: Yeah, I think there was a period where what I was really trying to do was reconcile, being an outspoken and talking about controversial topics and how that played with my employer. I think I’ve been really fortunate but there’s always a line and I was definitely wary of finding that line. But at this stage, I feel I have found that line with my public presence and with my professional presence. At this stage, I also have managed to avoid a lot of the really most controversial conversations and really stay in my own space and talk about things the way that I want to. I think I’ve managed to strike the right balance like the audience that wants to hear what I have to say. They know how to find me but I don’t go looking for trouble, nearly as much as I used to. I think it’s working out great for me right now.

SAM: Cool. We’ve talked a little bit on the show before about staying in your lane, which I think is a phrase you use fairly regularly. What does it mean to you?

MARCO: I love that phrase. I think I picked it up from Ta-Nehisi Coates, actually. I read Coates a lot, even before he wrote his great book and the article in recreations. He’s a big deal now but I have been following him for a long time. I cribbed the way that I use it from him, which is that there are always a set of things that I think each person can speak to, either from their own personal experience or their background and have a perspective that actually is grounded in reality. There’s a whole set of other things that we have opinions on, where those opinions are not actually informed by very much at all.

More so, if we bring too much of our opinions into that space, we’re going to end up joining out of people who do have that experience and we’re creating noise that covers up signal. When I say stay in my lane, what I mean is that I have opinions on everything all the time and I’ve learned to temper them and recognize that not all of them are valid, not all of them are coming from a place of being informed or having experience or really having anything really cogent to say about it so maybe I should just not say anything because there are people in that space who are going to do it much better than I am.

JANELLE: I was really intrigued by this idea of finding the line and normally, when you find the lines, it’s with crossing over them and then realizing, “Maybe, I shouldn’t have done that.” This is something it seems we all have to go through and figuring out where those boundaries are. I’m just wondering, is there an experience that stands out to you where you felt you were over that line and something you learned from it?

MARCO: Oh, yeah. There’s more than one. Let me reach back and try to pick out some of the more salient ones. It’s directly related to finding my lane. There’s a thing, like I said I think what I’ve gotten good at is being able to have a conversation on Twitter, that has more complexity and nuance, then people are good at right off the bat because Twitter is a very difficult medium to actually pull that off. I think I’ll admit freely that it’s just practice that I think has made me good at it but Twitter is definitely a terrible medium for doing it.

But I think what happens is that practice also gets you in a lot of trouble. What I would do is I would go into conversations and try to participate in a way that was not very helpful and it was really just about me making sure that I was a person who was seen as having these conversations and there was a lot of wrong motivations. Like I said, my early arc I think, taught me a lot about what we’re trying to do here in a lot of social justice movement that we talk about, in a lot of the conversations that we’re having. It’s not just for the sake of conversation. We’re actually trying to figure things out and the people who are closest to that space are actually way more equipped to do that than randoes on the internet, which I am one.

The one that I think sticks out to me the most is when I started to feel like I had the right to speak for other underrepresented groups, just because I felt like I had come to understand some of what their issues were and particularly the LGBTQ community and talking about gay people and trans people and actually trying to speak in a space where their voice is needed to be heard. I was trying to do that thing where I articulate what their issues are. It’s not to say that I was doing a terrible job of it, maybe I was, but that wasn’t really the problem.

The problem was I found myself at odds with people who are gay and were trying to tell me that not only was I kind of getting it wrong but that my input was just not necessary. The conflict there was that the particular person that I think was trying to push me back a little bit, I felt like they had made some really problematic mistakes. I was on that mission to just be like, “I need you to understand where you’ve gone wrong,” and we went through a whole thing and this person did not back down and it was really uncomfortable even for me towards the end. But I was in that space where like, “You couldn’t check me. I was too good for that.”

That’s also a really bad space to be in because you are also not in it to learn or to try to help or to elevate the right kind of signal. You’re just in it to not be wrong. It took me a long time to come around to that conclusion that I have some of those predilections and I really need to resist them. What happened is we had a whole blowout. I had that thing where the people in my Twitter mentions like, “What is happening right now? What are you doing?” and these are people that I respect and I should have listened to their input but I was like, “You kind of get into that internet fight mode,” and it was really not a good look.

I log off and I was like, “I’m done for today,” and I had a really, really long time to think about it. I really slept on it and came back. It came down to one really simple thing. All the other stuff where I thought other people were wrong. It was still in my head but the thing I think I learned from that more than anything else is none of that mattered if I was coming into a conversation where my input was not solicited, where I did not actually have the lived experience to actually represent any stance that mattered. I was using whatever leverage I had to actually push back on the people who should have the voice in the conversation.

I came back and I really apologize to the several people who were involved. I think my takeaway from that was a really big one, which is if there’s a conversation that needs to be had in the LGBTQ community, it’s not going to come from me. I’m not the person who needs to have it. It’s not even up to me to make sure that it happens by coming in and starting trouble. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to be because that community works it out for themselves and like, “I’m the problem here,” and I had to really admit that, regardless of what other things people had done that were ‘wrong.’ It’s just not my conversation to have. It’s not my lane. What I ended up doing is just getting really good at apologizing to people too, which is like the whole thing.

SAM: That’s a superpower right there.

MARCO: Yeah, it is. Actually, I should move that one to the top. That’s actually really, really important one is learning how to really apologize to people in a way that is authentic and actually conveys that remorse for being wrong. Being wrong is okay. I think I tweeted about this too.

JAMEY: Another thing that you’ve mentioned a couple of times now that I think is a superpower is this idea of knowing when not to fight with internet trolls. I like what you said about making a conscious decision about that and I think it’s very important. You also mentioned like being in an internet flight mode and I can totally relate to that. That’s a feeling that I’ve experienced. I wonder what your advice would be about learning when it might be okay to engage and when engaging is the wrong thing to do.

MARCO: That’s a really great question. One thing that I feel is really important to do that seems obvious but it’s not, is to really establish what do you mean by internet trolls. We are talking about those people who have no intention of actually having a conversation, who have no intention of actually learning anything and changing their minds and are literally just there to start trouble and to try to get a rise out of people. The trouble is that there is another set of people who have some really bad and misguided ideas who are ignorant, who are actually real humans and the line between those two things is very, very thin.

I think where I was at first was saying like, “I’m trying to figure out if there are real people behind these accounts,” and if there’s a real conversation to be had because we try to tell ourselves that we should be open to having these conversations even with people that we disagree with. But the reality is there’s a point of diminishing returns there. Like I said, I’d ask myself, “What is the point?” Am I trying to change somebody’s mind? That super unlikely over a short, 140-character texts. That is not going to happen. If I’m not changing anybody’s mind, if I’m not learning anything myself, it’s literally a waste of my time.

Once I got on that train of thought, I was like, “What is valuable about this? What is valuable about coming into this space on Twitter?” It’s really for all the people who are potentially listening and potentially getting something out of, maybe the thoughts that we’re trying to put together in this conversation and that has nothing at all to do with trolls and it doesn’t even require arguing with people.

I think there’s the lowest amount of real informational value in that argument and instead, if you look at where I am today, what I do is I mostly stay in my own space, which means a lot less replies to direct people and a lot less of ‘tweeting’ other people so as to start a conversation and instead, I just put these thoughts together myself on my own timeline for everybody who follows me. I get a lot of engagement there. I’ve been using this phrase, ‘kind of go looking for trouble,’ because I think we have this idea that there’s a lot of value in the back and forth. I would just essentially kind of started at it. I think it’s actually quite wrong.

There’s a very little value in the back and forth. Both sides are really entrenched. There’s not a lot of movement on either side and the only thing that it does is teach people how to argue and fight and be really terrible. That’s the only thing that you get out of it and that’s not what I wanted. I just do a lot less of that. I still I have my moments. I still fall into the trap sometimes but I just come around the idea that there’s just not a lot of value there. More so, there’s much more value to be had by talking with the people who are actually wanting to listen and there’s not a lot of conflict there.

JESSICA: That’s interesting, so when someone else says something that you have completely different thoughts about, instead of fighting against them, you just put your own different thoughts about out there, in parallel.

MARCO: Yeah, absolutely. That actually happens quite explicitly. A lot of times, I have a very diverse timeline now and I get all kinds of different thoughts that come across my timeline that make me kind of think about things and either I choose to be on my own space and maybe expand on a lot of thoughts that made me have or even if I want to go and contradicting, even if I want to paint a different picture of things, I still do it in my own timeline, most of the time without trying to bring those people into it directly and have them feel I’m talking directly for them or that they’re being attacked. All of that stuff is really counterproductive, to be honest. But there’s still an opportunity there for me to provide a counterpoint to some of the stuff that people might be hearing.

I found that to land super well with people. I think the thing that made the biggest impression on me is that I get messages all the time and direct messages in other ways, where people are like, “I’ve never talked to you before but I just want to let you know that you’ve changed so much of my perspective,” just being a person that I kind of get to listen to passively and like, “You’re always giving me stuff to think about.” It just really brought home to me that reality, that there are a lot of people who are listening and that you can have influence on them. The people who are fighting the hardest, worth the least amount of your time.

ASTRID: I have a question about how you makes some of the social justice stuff with your tech career because you mentioned in the beginning that you had to find the right balance for you and to make a little bit of time to do that. In talking to a lot of different people, I often hear that they have a particular opinion or maybe they have an experience that they do want to express but they also don’t want to be like an expert on whatever this issue is and not be seen as just a developer or just an engineer. How did you figure out your path on that?

MARCO: I think I’m still struggling with that to be honest. I definitely have these moments. I used to talk a lot more about tech and I still have a lot of opinions about it. I really am struggling because it feels like the things that I’m talking about in social justice and just in the larger world, they are so much more important than the tech conversations. I haven’t found a space where I feel like I can talk about both and give each one the appropriate amount of weight. I think that’s something that I’m still struggling with and I think that if I’m looking at other people that I run in the same circles with, I see a little bit of that too. They’re like, “The only thing I really feel comfortable talking about is the tech stuff,” and like, “I know this other stuff is so much more important but I don’t know how to engage there.”

I think there’s a little bit of that tension in the community today. I’m struggling with it myself so I don’t know if I have really good answers there. If you followed me for a while, you realize that I talk about tech a lot less. It’s still something that’s a very big part of my life. I still have lots and lots of opinions on it and yet, I’ve kind of chosen to backburner that because the other stuff, I think is so present. I think we all kind of go through those phases.

JESSICA: It’s almost like we need a podcast about the things that are more important than the tech.

MARCO: Yeah. I throw this out and I think this is just me being really candid in taking some ownership. I have these people that I know and either I talked to them a lot online or I’ve actually met them in real life. I know that they’re good people and I really care about them and they only talk about tech and I’m like, “I only talk about tech. There’s other things happening. I never hear you actually mention them.” It’s really, really silent but I realized that it was a judgment of mine that I was having a really hard time with. I want to see other people processing the stuff that’s happening in the world to know that they’re affected, that they’re human and they are here with us doing that.

When it makes me feel some kind of way about it, then I’m still trying to figure out. But I’m really kind of careful not to say anything because I know that’s my issue and not their issue. Everybody is dealing with what’s going on in their own ways. Twitter may not be the place that they are comfortable being vulnerable about those things but I think something that’s kind of in my head today is like trying to figure out where everybody stands. I think that’s where we are. If I’m talking to a person, where you stand in the major issues that are happening today, it’s really important for how I’m thinking about our relationship and it’s sometimes difficult for me to pull that out to make that a thing that’s known. I’m struggling with that too, I think.

JANELLE: I think that’s really easy to relate to you. I’m thinking about this meltdown panic attack that I had, just seeing all this craziness and stuff happening around me like during Thanksgiving. Everyone on Facebook was posting about their perfect turkeys, making the perfect recipe and getting everything all perfect and I was like, “How can you sit there and talk about turkeys?” I just want to scream at people like, “How can you not see all the suffering happening around you?” I think I had that similar response of just some things just are more important.

I had to, at the same time, in that moment, come to terms with my own hypocrisy that, “Oh, I’m the one perfecting the turkeys too. I’ve got my own bubble of stuff that I’ve been living in. That’s me too.” I think there’s two sides to it. One is how we cope with stress all of us and I think detachment is one way to do that like just forget about everything going on in the world and focus on your life. You can’t really blame people for that, either. I think tech is kind of the same way like who really cares about unit testing right now? I’m just wondering in terms of you interacting with other people and seeing the people in different spaces like that. How those experiences have changed you?

MARCO: The last several years where the conversations about diversity and inclusion have really grown and kind of taking a center stage, have been really, really important for me personally. I guess for me, I moved to the Bay Area in 2011 and it was a couple years after that, I would say that the conversation really was able to start about diversity and inclusion and for me, it was like, “We can have this conversation now?” I remember being really taken aback like, “Oh, we’re talking about this now? We’re talking about the fact that there are no other black people around ever. Cool. I could talk about that. I just think I thought we weren’t allowed to talk about that.” It was a really, really big change in my life to have people acknowledging something that had just been the way the things were for so long and it wasn’t something that I felt like was appropriate to talk about. But now we could.

We went from being able to talk about it to being able to say that it was important and that’s something to strive for, to being able to actually take action and to see things change and like, “If I look at the way that things change me, it’s really big to me that I frequently walk into rooms full of tech people and I’m not the only black person,” and that was like a story of my life. That was the thing that I would joke with people about when I talk to them about being in tech or going to this conference in doing X, Y and Z. It’s a thing that, I think black people have tried to turn it into something that we laugh about but it’s really something that, I think affects us really deeply where we just have to accept the fact that most people around, if we’re going to move towards where the opportunity is and where the success are, then we’re going to leave more and more people that look like us behind. Today, I have to make that choice less and less.

I’m able to be in rooms where lots of people who look me are able to be in the room and doing the same things. It’s so huge for me personally that representation matters so much and to have people be able to talk to me and look at me like I’m a person who kind of inspired them to reach [inaudible], it just has had a really profound effect on me personally, I think.

JAMEY: I’d to talk a little bit more about inclusivity and workplaces, which I think it’s really interesting topic that we’ve been getting closer and closer to as we’ve been talking because we’re chatting about and not discussing tech and discussing these more important issues. I feel like now we’re wrapping it all up in a way like important issues in tech and I really like that. I like this perspective that you have of walking this long road and watching it as the culture has changed and the scenery has changed.

I know you’ve spoken before making on workplaces inclusive. We had a couple of listener questions about this too actually and what would be really interesting, I think would be to hear some suggestions about how junior devs or people that are earlier in their career, lower in the hierarchy, things that they maybe could do to make workplaces more inclusive. There’s a lot of advice, I think for senior management and what they can do from their level, where they have a lot of influence but do you think there’s anything that we could suggest for younger people to help contribute to that environment?

MARCO: That’s a really good question. I want people to feel like they do have something to contribute there but it’s hard. If I’m really thinking about your question, my initial reaction is that, it actually feels really bad to me to go to them and say, “You have to be the people to carry this forward.” It feels like we’ve done so much work just to get them here and then the first thing we do is give it to them like, “You have to help us because we have no idea what’s happening.”

Even if that’s actually true to some extent, I think it’s really difficult and they already have a difficult job. We’re talking about inexperience people. They already have a really difficult job, which is to come into this space in tech where the stakes are really high, the expectations are really high, there’s a really strong culture of examining what you know and don’t know and impostor syndrome is rampant and they’re trying to make it. They’re trying to get established and to make themselves feel like they’re successful here and not get pushed out.

I find it very hard to say that we’re going to give them another job, which is helping us be more inclusive. All that said, I do want to try to answer your question, which was about what advice can we give them on what can they do. I think my answer is a lot more probably kind of diplomatic than people would to hear. I could be a lot more militant about it but I would be doing them a disservice because it doesn’t work — being militant. It doesn’t work at work. In professional space, it does not work. I could tell you stories about that too. Instead, the advice that I had for people kind of going into these work spaces is to take a stance where you want to find the right venue to talk about these things but then be really open and transparent so that other people can see the conversations that are happening and choose to find ways to learn and get onboard. I’ll try to be more concrete because I think that’s really vague.

The thing that I’m seeing a lot more that I think works well is having diversity and inclusion working groups inside companies. There’s a set of people who are passionate about this and who want to help educate and help make change within the organization and they don’t have to push very hard. Instead what they do is they just create a group as a space for them to talk about it and to figure out what are the ways that they can try to influence the organization. Then that group can start to do things like ask for executive sponsorship, like have someone from the leadership team actually to come in sit in so that they can hear directly and learn. Ask for things like resources like, “Can we make tweaks to how the onboarding works.”

One of the big things that I ended up doing at a previous job was to have D&I as a message be part of our onboarding for every new hire so they would get a message about how diversity and inclusion was important to us and why and how to think about it. That’s actually really important, if you think about all the other ways that companies try to establish culture and how important they think culture is. Putting that message along with all the other culture messages was a really big win.

My goal is to get people to kind of get together in the company, to find a way to be effective and talk about these things out loud but to make it really, really practical like talk about what you want to see happen at the organization and make real requests and not just talk about the issues and expect people to figure out what you need them to do. I hope that that’s a helpful answer and I think that working group, once you establish it is a really good place for new people from different underrepresented backgrounds, when they come into the organization, to find like-minded people to find support and it could be really good.

JAMEY: I think that there can also be problems with bad attitudes that have gotten stuck in an organization. When fresh people come in and have a good attitude about something, I think there can be something very refreshing about a younger person coming in and acting just like, “Of course, we’re going to be understanding the people. Of course,” and I think that that can make people think about things differently. I read a lot of employment advice columns and stuff like that and one of the advice things that I see a lot when people like, “I want to ask my boss for this thing. I think it’s really reasonable,” is just ask them in a way that makes it sound you’re being totally reasonable like, “Of course, I know you want to help me with this so how can you help me?”

I think if you have a lot of fresh people coming in and just treating diversity and inclusion like that, like an obvious thing that we know you want to do but how do you do it, that might maybe take out some of those stuck attitude if possible. Maybe that’s an idealistic way to look at it but that’s kind of how I feel about it.

MARCO: I think that’s a really great way to look at it.

JESSICA: Yeah, especially if the company is growing quickly and you have a lot of new hires, you can change the culture just through quantity.

MARCO: Yes. That’s true. Maybe, I should phrase it more as a question because I want to hear if other people have had an experience where you do manage to get a D&I conversation going, maybe you do even manage to affect the hiring but you bring in a bunch of people and all the people who are talking about it are the new people and it starts to feel like a cultural rift to people, like the people who have been at the company that are like, “I’m going to hire nice people,” and they want to have all these really uncomfortable conversations and they’re really changing all the culture around D&I stuff.

I’ve seen that be a place for a lot of tension to arise, especially in the way that you say which is like they’re taking over. Even if that’s happening, even if you might be starting to win with quantity, those people who have been there, they actually have a lot of institutional power and they can set up a lot of really conflicting conversations. I’ve seen that happened.

ASTRID: I did have an experience a little bit like that. It was not at a technology company but I got invited to this diversity and inclusion training, which like a workshop. Being a newer person at the company, the team I was on was pretty diverse. We didn’t really have discussions about it but it was kind of known that we were trying to get as many different perspectives as possible. But when I went to the training, there are a lot of people who had been at the company for a long time like 20 years and this was the first time they’d had some diversity and inclusion training. It became pretty intense pretty fast because there were some people who were saying for the first time, experiences that they had had every day that were bothering them, which made other people feel like, “I’ve worked next to you for 15 years. Why didn’t you ever say anything? I thought we had a real friendship. Now, I feel like I don’t know who you are because I didn’t know this was even an issue.”

I was just sitting there and like, “Oh, my gosh. What is going on at this company?” because I can tell that a lot of things like what you said Marco, are kind of deep-seated and they’ve been around a long time. I think it’s hard to figure out, how do you scrape that out and start again because they were trying to move in a new direction. They had done a lot of things like make these resource groups for all kinds of different groups of people, different types of populations of people that might work at the company and those groups seem to be functioning.

But I think it kind of had the problem within our little group. There was an LGBT for instance so within that group, then everybody there is fine. But then when you go back to the group that you might work in every day, that hasn’t really changed. You might feel more comfortable individually in certain circumstances but you’re not really feeling comfortable talking about this at work or even expressing situations that may arise and how that might not be the best way to handle it. I think it’s a really big challenge because it’s not easy when I think is a lot of companies ignore it because it’s like how do you get to that person who is senior or who has been there for a long time and may not even know what they’re doing and how what they’re doing is affecting people?

But then also, how do you get to those people who maybe they aren’t actually doing or saying the wrong things but they’re friends with those people and they don’t know how to think about them now because it’s a new set of information that you’re giving them about how to behave and how to think about certain things and they don’t know what that means. If I’m friends with this person but they hold these views and they’ve expressed them before, how do I work with them again?

MARCO: That’s really huge. I really appreciate you sharing that. I think it’s a really big problem. If there’s something that I’ve also kind of had to come around to, it’s the idea that even though a lot of these things are important and need to change, we can’t take it for granted that people are going to get there soon and this shouldn’t be hard for them. We can kind of tend to talk about it. It should be obvious or this is just the right thing and people kind of just realize that. It actually is a journey. It takes a long time and there’s a lot of discomfort that people have to go through.

When you amplify that with working relationships, it’s going to be tough. I think part of what I heard about what you’re getting at is this thing where people who have a working relationship and all of a sudden have presented with all these really tough conversations about diversity and inclusion. It’s their same coworkers who are starting to speak up about these things and admit that they’ve been made to feel uncomfortable. They’ve been made to feel like people are using micro-aggressions against them. They feel like they’ve been held back and there’s going to be reactions to that like, “We haven’t talked about this. You haven’t said anything to me.”

I had that problem for a little while in different context when I started talking about how black people have to deal with being in friendships with white people and I have all of my white friends coming to me like, “Have I ever done anything that makes you feel uncomfortable?” and I’m like, “Probably, yes but we don’t have to talk about it all the time.” It’s not a thing where we have to make it a big central part of our relationship but they were having a lot harder time with it. All of a sudden, they have to contend with the fact that I have not been sharing my full self with them as a way for us to be friends. That’s what it is.

When we talk about privilege and being marginalized, it’s really that difference in comfort level, where you can bring your whole self into a situation and feel your whole self is going to be accepted. When you’re on that privilege side, that’s what you do. You’re not holding anything back from people because nothing that you could tell people is going to be a problem. Whereas, there’s a different kind of person, they have to actually be really scrutinous of the things that they are public about that they share with people and they only bring part of themselves into all of your relationships, especially at work.

Then when the people on this privilege side of this dynamic start to really understand that, then they realize the whole conversation that they’ve been having with this person now feels like it was wrong. I even had people feel like they feel that they’ve been deceived like, “I thought we’re friends but we’re not.” Do you know what I mean?

There’s a whole journey that I think people have to go on. I don’t think that it’s something that we can help with to be honest. But I do think we have to, at least acknowledge it and let people know that we have to provide space for people to go through that if we want to preserve those working relationships, if that makes sense.

SAM: As somebody who’s been the white person on that side of the conversation once or twice, I think for me it’s really important that I try to make sure not to fall into the trap of making my friends take care of me through that process.

JAMEY: I’ve had a lot of experiences on that too. I’ve talked about this before because I’ve given people advice like, “If you says something that makes them feeling uncomfortable, just apologize and move on.” Otherwise, you get this weird reverse situation, where I have to comfort people. My friends will call and be like, “I feel so bad. I messed up your pronouns again. I’m such a bad friend. I’m such a bad person,” and I have to be like, “I’m not mad at you for trying but now, I’m comforting you because you mis-gendered me and that’s really tiring.”

MARCO: Yeah, or you have to tell them how to do better and give them an impromptu education class like here’s what you should do, here’s what you should have done.

JAMEY: I like educating people but I like to do it when I feel up to it, not when I’m on demand for it.

MARCO: Yeah, for sure. It’s tough as a community, especially [inaudible] circles, we don’t get to talk as much about how this stuff affects persons or relationships. I’ve been talking a lot about it in the context of politics. There’s a real rift in people’s families, where there’s so much going on right now and there’s such a sharp divide between people but these are your family. These are your close friends. You can’t really stop talking to them. You’re very restricted in a way that you can kind of protect yourself from having to have some interaction with these people and yet, it can be traumatizing. It’s a real issue.

I think we need to talk more about how we can actually start to tackle these things on a personal level because to be honest, I think the wider movement is really, really good and it’s really, really necessary but we have the most leverage with the people who were closest to. The most actual power to help people understand and to educate them and to help bring them along are the people who are close to them and have that power. Yet, it’s the most challenging for the person who has to go into that really charged situation. I think there’s a lot of value to talking more about it but it’s also tough.

ASTRID: I read something that [inaudible] said, “Facebook makes you hate people that you know and Twitter makes you love people that you’ve never met,” and I think that’s what you’re talking about.

MARCO: Yeah, I saw that. That was great. It’s really accurate but [inaudible].

SAM: On that note, if I can flip that earlier question around, for somebody who like me, maybe at the center of the intersection of all the privileges, are there ways that I can help champion people and advocate on their behalf and help educate folks while still staying in my lane? Are there things that you wish somebody might, like me, could have done for you? And I realize that ‘for you’ is sort of loaded.

MARCO: Yeah, I hear you, like what’s the right way to be an ally, I think is the conversation that we’re having in. It’s not something you take for granted. I think allies are also having a really hard time these days, for better or worse. It’s a tough space to be in. The stance that I take today, say we’re picking context and say, we’re talking about how to advance diversity and inclusion at work. I think the right thing to do is to make sure your voice is heard in support of the people who are trying to push initiatives. The thing that happens a lot is if I’m pushing an initiative that has to do with trying to bring more people of color into our hiring funnel. I think a lot of times people choose that moment to say, “That’s not my lane so I shouldn’t say anything.”

But what that does is create a dynamic where it feels like I’m the only person that’s pushing for things or like I’m the person that has to do all the work to make something happen. That’s not a great place to be. My goal when I bring this stuff into a company is for it to be a company-wide value. That doesn’t mean that everybody has to be onboard. There are no company-wide values that every single person agrees with but what I do mean is that I want to know that people across the company are invested in seeing these things happen, because they’ve been set up as a company-wide value.

I think diversity and inclusion is one of those where we fall short because we allow the burden to fall on the underrepresented people like, “Oh, yeah. They’re going to do a thing and I’m just going to stay out of the way and try to not mess it up,” which is a stance that you can take. But honestly, what I think needs to happen is for everybody to show support in a way that makes it easier for it to actually be a company-wide activity.

That can look a number of different ways. If I say I want to put on an event, to bring in underrepresented people and have it hosted at the company, then it’s really great for other people who are not me to say, “That sounds really great. I want to help out with that,” or like, “I’m going encourage some other people to help out with that.” Use whatever privilege you have to get other people engaged. There’s a thing about letting people drive the initiatives and those should be the people who are definitely centered but we still need help. We still need support and there’s more than just the spearhead part that goes with it. Just showing up and showing support and being ready to help is really great. That’s the thing that I think we need the most and it goes back to the conversation we’re having about having a critical mass of people, it really gives these things momentum. I think there are a lot more people who agree but then feel they shouldn’t show up.

I’ll share something I think is a little bit more concrete, which I think was really eye-opening for me. We had a working group at a previous job — D&I working group — and there were people who would always express that they appreciate what was happening but they never showed up to the working group meetings and they actually volunteered to help with any of the initiatives. There was a white woman and I went up to her and I feel I had a good enough relationship with her that I could just ask so I asked like, “Why don’t you show up to the meetings? Is there a problem? I’d really like to hear if you feel there’s something that’s keeping you from feeling welcome.”

I was expecting to hear a number of other things but what she said to me was actually surprising, which she said, “No, I’m totally onboard. I totally like it but I feel like as a straight white woman, I have almost the entirety of the privilege that we’re talking about with one exception so I just feel like I should stay out of it because I don’t want to take up space where I feel like I have a ton of privilege already.” She was seeing the group as a place where you come to get resources, rather than one where you come to help and execute and actually make things happen and shows support. I think there’s definitely a conversation to have about what people think the purpose of these D&I initiatives are and who should be involved. We definitely need people to be involved. There’s just like, we can have to talk about the right way to do that.

SAM: That’s interesting. That’s another line that I have a hard time walking is trying to read a space and figure out whether it’s a space for mutual support, where if I go in and I’m deluding whatever’s happening there versus a place where I can show up and help.

MARCO: Yeah. We had those conversations in the working group. I think it’s really important to establish the goals and the mission and governance and stuff. It’s going to feel like work. It should feel like work if you’re doing it right but I think we try to find the balance. Sometimes it is about being able to have these conversations in a space where people are like-minded but it’s also about action like it should definitely be results-oriented, which is something that I think people struggle with sometimes. They want to spend more time on the talking because they feel they have a lot to learn and that’s totally fine. You should do it but it also has to be results-oriented, I think.

JAMEY: If someone want to do get involved in something like that or even start their own working group like that, do you have any advice on a good place to start?

MARCO: Meaning like what should the group do? Is that what you’re asking?

JAMEY: Yeah, like what’s a good thing to focus on in the beginning and if you have any advice on how to organize?

MARCO: It really only takes just having a meeting. I think the way that you socialize, it matters. I think you can connect with people individually who you know to be like-minded and you shop that idea around with them. Then you go to people that you think are allies or that you can, at least trust to have the conversation with. You go to people in leadership and you have that conversation with them to know that they are not going to be obstructive. If that conversation doesn’t go well, it may be a challenge to start a group. But if they’re onboard and they’re supportive, then you can ask about the right way to broadcast so you can tell people like, “This is happening. It’s totally optional but show up. We’re going to have our first meeting and talk about what we want to do.”

I think the first couple of meetings are just going to be about getting to know why people showed up and what their expectations are and then you can go from there. You’re going to have a plethora of people show up for different reasons. That’s okay but start to establish what you think the group is about and what you want to see happen. The primary thing, I think to ask and to go around the room is what do you want to see happen at the company around D&I and that should help drive a lot of things.

SAM: We mentioned at the top of the show that transition that you’ve gone through from web developer to director of engineering. I’m wondering, as you’ve gone through that journey, how has that informed your approach to how you advocate for a D&I.

MARCO: It’s a big shift. I believe that managers and leaders at the organization have the most leverage. They have the most institutional power to make these things happen, to make them acceptable and to really drive action. I think when I became a manager, a lot of my impetus for doing that was so that I could see the things happen that I cared about the most. It’s not because I really wanted to be a manager. It’s not because I felt it was a great promotion or whatever. It actually felt terrifying to me and also, I was really sad that I didn’t get to program as much.

It was really kind of bittersweet transition but when I was thinking about it, all these things that I care a lot about like there’s a moment I think where, if you care a lot about something, you may have to decide that you should do it. If there’s a problem and you want to see it get better, that might mean it’s your job. I had to really take responsibility for that and then figure out how to use that leverage as a manager. The thing that changed to your point directly is that I went from advocating for things to putting myself in a position to say yes. That is what you can do that is fundamentally different as a manager is that you actually control resources and that you can be the person to say yes.

When we’re talking about companies, a lot of times it is individual contributors who want to see things happen and they are talking to leadership. They’re talking to the company. I think it’s great if you can get the executive level people involved. It’s great to have that buy in at the executive level but they’re not going to do things. They have a whole job of running a company. They’re really busy. They’re not going to actually show up to make things happen. There’s going to say, “Yes. This is awesome. Do [inaudible] and I will support it.”

I think as a manager on my team, in my department or however wide I felt I can stretch my influence, like I show up and just try to say yes to things so that they can move forward and that’s my direct contribution to making these things happen. The upside of being a manager is that people don’t tell you not to do things. As I see, you can have all these initiatives and you can try to carry them forward and someone is going to be like, “I’m not sure it’s the right time,” or they can give you some push back and you learn to recognize that institutional push back.

As managers, we all have that problem like I can do things and I can have other people do things like I’m telling them, I’m pushing them forward or whatever. I’m sponsoring them. I’m the person who’s kind of advocating for this. It’s much harder for people to shut me down. It’s just a big part of when I tell people how to make D&I work at their company. If you’re management layer, that middle management layer, above IC but below the executive team, if they’re not engaged, it’s going to actually be really difficult to make things happen. I do my part there by showing up at that layer and saying yes to things.

ASTRID: This is the time of the show when we have reflections and we talk about something that stuck out in our conversation.

JESSICA: Way back at the beginning of this show, Marco said that a while ago, he felt he had the right to speak for other underrepresented groups but then, he decided he didn’t. He can only speak for himself and this illustrates why diversity and inclusion is so hard because it’s not one thing. You can’t just like be more accommodating to not white men. You have to be more accommodating to women. You have to be more accommodating to black people and you have to care about LGBT and that’s not just one group. Diversity is inherently about a lot of people and that is one thing that makes it so hard so I really like the part about, if you start a group about this, start by listening to people, to lots of people.

SAM: One thing that stuck out for me again towards the beginning of the show, Marco, you were talking about your transition and how you found your lane and you said a couple of things that really stuck out for me, which were making sure I was seen as a person who was having these conversations. Then you talked about being just in it to not be wrong. Both of those are traps that I fall into all the damn time so I’m really glad to have those named and have a little bit more of a specific label on it than just plain defensiveness, which is the category that I feel that those fall into, at least for me so thank you very much.

JANELLE: One of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about with this sort of results-oriented approach is this difference between training and teaching and educating about things, versus putting together a working group to actually get things done and supporting that working group to actually get things done. I want to thank you for that.

I think in general, we need to shift the way we think about education and putting all of these type of things that we do into actionable results-oriented things like thinking about what type of company we want to have, what type of world we want to live in, what type of community we want to live in and what they’re going to take to get there and how can we start putting working groups in place to actually get us wherever it is we want to be and then support those groups.

JAMEY: One thing that I really took away from this is the idea that it’s okay to be wrong and that brought up earlier in the context of you can admit you’re wrong and that’s okay. But I think there’s even a flip side of it, where I’ve been in situations where I’m so afraid that I’m going to be wrong that I don’t want to do or say anything and it’s just paralyzing like, I’m going to post something and someone’s not going to like it. People don’t have to everything I post and if someone doesn’t like it and they say something that makes me change my mind about it, I’m also allowed to change my mind about it. That’s why I think what both Marco and Sam said about sincerely apologizing being a superpower is really true and I’m going to think more about that in practice and then maybe I won’t live in such fear of being wrong.

MARCO: Just as an aside, it does take practice, like giving sincere apologies actually feels terrible for a while and then actually it feels great so. I definitely recommend practicing.

ASTRID: I think what I got out of our conversation is how hard it is to be who you want to be or be the person that you think you are in a world where it feels like people are constantly taking sides. You want to speak up, you want to have something to say, you want to support the right people, you don’t want to just be on the sidelines but then sometimes, maybe being on the sidelines is the right place until you understand what’s really going on and that’s hard.

I think there’s a lot of conversation about authenticity and how great it is to just be yourself all over the place and everywhere and not enough recognition of how hard that is to be yourself everywhere and it comes with consequences. Maybe, it shouldn’t. Maybe, we should be accepting people but I think that’s kind of why everybody is up in arms because that’s not the truth of how you live in the world. I think what I get out of that is just because you’re struggling to deal with that, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong because it is hard and that everybody doesn’t have it figured it out but you.

MARCO: Yeah, that’s great. I love it. Thanks so much for having me. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. It’s really great to dig into some of these things with a smaller group of people, where we can really expand on some of these ideas. It’s also super helpful for me to hear other people’s thoughts come together and reflection to my own so I really appreciate the opportunity. I just wanted to say thanks.

In terms of reflections, the thing that I think is sitting with me that I’m definitely going to take with me is the reminder in what we talked about and how these dynamics play out for people who aren’t fully engaged with the D&I conversation yet. I can be really strident in a lot of ways and challenging people to get better at this and to really learn about it and to do better but I also try to balance that with a certain level of empathy. This is actually a really hard journey to go on for everybody. I’ve been on it myself in different ways. I have a lot of axes of privilege for myself and I think that it’s really easy to lose that empathy for the people who are experiencing things changing really rapidly around them.

Whether their anxiety comes from the right place is worth talking about but that doesn’t make it not real. It doesn’t make it not valid that they have a journey to go on and it can be jarring and difficult for them. I think it’s just a good reminder because we also have to deal with the consequences if we don’t acknowledge the importance of that. That’s why it’s hard. That’s why we’re on opposite sides because we have made things very difficult in a way that is difficult. It’s harder for people to kind of come along so that’s just a recipe for conflict.

I think it’s something that I’m thinking about a lot because there’s a set of things that are important to me that I’m not going to back down from and that I’m not willing to compromise on but at the same time, I’m really worried about the conflict, both in the wider space and just in the tech community. I don’t want my life to be kind of fighting with people on the other side like I mentioned before. We have to find a way to find that space. We have to find a way to allow people to go on that journey in a way that it doesn’t cause them to kind of dig in their heels and entrench.

We still have to be human with each other and that’s really the goal of it to me is for us to all be learning how to be better humans. I mean, it’s everybody, not just us. I feel I have some more thinking to do about whether I’m really living that today but I really appreciate it and it got me thinking.

SAM: All right. Well, thank you very much, Marco for coming on the show. We had a really wonderful time and thanks listeners. We’ll be back soon.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.

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047: Communicating Across Boundaries with Declan Whelan

Mandy Moore — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 05:00:10 +0000

Panelists:

Janelle Klein | Sam Livingston-Gray | Jessica Kerr | Coraline Ada Ehmke

Guest Starring:

Declan Whelan: @dwhelan | Leanintuit

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “I Rolled a Natural 20 For My Agility Check” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:31 – Background and Superpower; Empathy

09:08 – Cross-Cultural Communication Dynamics

Women in Agile

15:48 – Biases, Understanding Dynamics, and Facilitating as an Ally

“To have biases is to be human.
It’s not a bad thing.” @dwhelan @greaterthancode

— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) August 30, 2017

21:02 – Being Authentic

25:31 – Is Agile something that you are or something that you do?

35:37 – Adopting Practices Across Teams

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

People love consistency. Ask, what are the benefits? then
strive for common outcomes, not common practices. @dwhelan @greaterthancode

— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) August 30, 2017

41:57 – Technical Debt and Technical Health: How do we amplify what we want?

Code Climate

Reflections:

Jessica: Strive for common outcomes; not common practices.

Coraline: Some situations should be taken as a promise for a conversation.

Janelle: Ask for permission.

Sam: Identifying and clarifying outcomes that we want.

Declan: Figure out how you can have effective conversations with your teams.

Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

Thank you Declan Whelan for your patronage!

Also, tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

JANELLE: Hi, everyone. I’m Janelle Klein and this is Episode 47 of ‘I Rolled a Natural 20 For My Agility Check’ and I’d like to introduce my fabulous co-host, Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Why, thank you, Janelle and because you called me fabulous, I will gently point out that this is, in fact Greater Than Code. I am also very pleased to introduce my recent birthday-having friend, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Thank you, Sam. Yesterday, I got to hold three snakes, a scorpion, a tarantula and an alligator. But today, I get to hang out with you all, especially Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hey, everybody. We have a special guest today, Declan Whelan. Declan has been fascinated with technology for a very long time. He hand-soldered his first computer, graduated with the first computer engineering cohort at the University of Waterloo and has been immersed in software ever since. Along the way, he got a new extreme programming in the broader agile movement, where he does coaching, speaking and thought-leadering. Declan is a board member of the Agile Alliance who is particularly proud of co-chairing on agile, the Agile Alliance Online Conference and for helping bring and deliver agile to life. Welcome Declan.

DECLAN: Hello. Welcome everyone.

CORALINE: Declan, your bio is very interesting. I’m particularly interested in the fact that you hand-soldered your first computer but what we always like to do when we start out is to get a sense of who you are as a person and we start out by asking, what is your superpower and how did you discover it?

DECLAN: That’s a really great one. I sort of have this Canadian modesty thing going where I’m thinking, “Do I have any superpowers?” Maybe I have a lot of strong powers, I think and probably one of them would be around empathy. For various reasons, I tend to be quite good at picking up on where people are at in interactions and looking to make outcomes for training and work be more productive because I’d feel I can engage people and meet them where they are.

CORALINE: You’re Canadian. That’s really interesting. Does that mean you’re going to be answering all the questions in both English and French?

DECLAN: No, it just means I’ll preface every response with, “I’m sorry, but.”

CORALINE: Nice. Our fabulous editor will have to edit these ‘sorrys’ out.

DECLAN: And how thankful I am that we have the prime minister that we do right now.

CORALINE: I’ll trade you.

SAM: Yes, please.

DECLAN: Join the list. You’re about 20 up on that list that had said the same thing. But trying times for sure for everyone.

CORALINE: Do you think you’re always empathetic person or is that something that you developed over the course of your career?

DECLAN: Oh, I think it’s something that was in our family. I remember having that as far back as I can remember. I don’t know if that’s innate or whether it was something that was fostered growing up when I was very young but I feel it’s something that I carry with me.

JESSICA: Interesting. It’s easy for me to see empathy as something that’s fostered. Is there an innate empathetic ability?

SAM: There’s certainly a lack of it, right? Witness sociopaths?

JESSICA: That’s true.

CORALINE: I like to think that empathy isn’t something that you have but something that you do. I think you have to practice empathy and as you practice empathy, you get better at empathy. It has been demonstrated that empathy can be learned.

DECLAN: Certainly, empathy can be learned although I have not studied it but that makes sense to me. I think it might be, in my case with my family, we weren’t super expressive so to understand and interact with the family, it was a matter of really picking up on a lot of non-visual cues and so on because we were very low conflict family. I think it was a good breeding ground for empathy because you have to read between the lines on a lot of things.

JANELLE: I had a question here about this because I’m listening to this and we have semantics of words like a word has a certain meaning attached to it. When you talk to different people and they’re describing something they experience and attributing a word to it, I feel like the meaning of what you’re saying is valid in terms of pointing out this quality that is innate. It’s just that empathy has this secondary meaning that it’s more skill-oriented, I think in addition to the innate thing because I’m thinking like my past and I used to be really hyper sensitive to emotional energy in the room. I felt like going around the school, it feel like there were thousand eyeballs on me and I can feel everything.

Then after going through this super tragic experience in my life and getting traumatized and shoving all the stuff down, essentially I spent half my life trying to be who everyone else wanted me to be because I was so focused on what everyone else was thinking that I couldn’t feel myself. Then I made this transition in life where I flipped and I shut all that stuff down so that I couldn’t feel stuff anymore and that innate ability thing kind of went away. But it’s very much attached to empathy. I guess what I’m wondering is if you were to come up with a different words to describe this thing in your experience, what kind of words or definition would you use to describe the thing you’re talking about?

DECLAN: Maybe in terms of interactions, which is where empathy would clearly show because you’re interacting with people, it would be just being in tune. Being in sync with the dynamics that are going on around me in terms of where people are and what they want to accomplish and reading between the lines, that’s a lot of words. It might not even be ’empathy.’ It’s an interesting point now maybe it’s not quite the right word.

JESSICA: Declan, you talked about how in your low-conflict family, you are acquired to learn to read between the lines on a lot of things. That’s a great skill to have but can you really ask other people to do that? Is that a good expectation to have for people you work with?

DECLAN: There are some downsides to that. For example, I find it difficult to be in high conflict situations but when I talk to other people, they say, everyone does so I have no idea. On my meter scale, is it more difficult for me? I think it’s neither good nor bad to some extent. I think it just was the way I was raised. I think a higher level would be having the courage and directness to have open and frank conversations when needed. That’s something that I definitely had to work at, rather than not being sort of anywhere nurtured in my youth.

JESSICA: Yeah. Those explicit conversations that are open and frank but not aggressive, not attack-y, those are something that we can fall back to because we’re from different cultures and we didn’t all grow up living together all the time. We don’t have to seem interpretations of those subtle cues or lack thereof.

SAM: Well, there’s a segue here into cross-cultural communication dynamics where as Americans, we value direct forthright communication and we also interact in a very egalitarian way, where we prefer to be called by our first names and other cultures have more highly contextual communication, where somebody will say something that hints at something else and you’re supposed to have all of this context in your head to be able to interpret that comment correctly. Those cultures can often also be more hierarchical, more formal as well. There’s a lot of different axes that this goes along.

JESSICA: What do you do when you’re not naturally in sync with someone else or with other people on the team?

SAM: Empathy?

JESSICA: But that’s totally different from guessing. You don’t guess with people you don’t share a ton of contexts with.

SAM: Right and that’s why I wanted to point that out. It’s because everybody tends to think that everybody else thinks the way they do right. But as Americans, we are often totally unaware that there are these other layers of conversation going on, especially when we interact with people who did not grow up in our culture. It’s incumbent upon us, as Americans, to be aware that there are different cultural communication styles and try to have, at least some idea first that there are different ones and secondly, what they are and how to adapt your own communication style to deal with that, which is why I said, “Empathy?”

CORALINE: Declan, have you been into that in your work where you’re working with teams, consisting of people from different cultures and how to adapt a communication style that’s more inclusive of different ways of thinking?

DECLAN: Oh, yeah, for sure. I think it’s becoming more prevalent. I live in Toronto so it’s a very high multicultural element to the makeup of society. That happens a lot and it can cut, not only on culture lines but gender lines and power status with any organizations. But specifically about culture, for example, where I have the challenges more with cultures that are more direct, where it’s expected to say what you really think. That direct conversation is I find to be somewhat challenging, especially if there’s a lot of people in the room because those people can tend to dominate.

I was a thinking that what I strive to be is just authentic. Just showing up as me and cross culturally, I think people get when you’re being authentic and if people trust you that you don’t have a hidden agenda, that you’re being honest and frank, then I think that really helps cut through a lot of cultural barriers. I am not an expert in this by any stretch but I think, a lot of non-verbal cues tend to be more consistent across cultures.

It doesn’t always work. I noticed when I worked with people from India, they’ll often shake their head, they’ll put their head sideways, going side to side when they mean yes. That’s the signal that they’re following you. It’s a subtle yes. I don’t know if you’ve encountered that. That took a while because they’re saying yes but your brain is seeing no. That can be interesting.

SAM: Right.

JESSICA: As Americans, do we have a greater privilege to be ourselves, to express ourselves and be understood because of basically Hollywood. I feel like, especially being from the Midwest, freaking everybody can understand my accent because it’s the accent that’s used in television and movies.

SAM: Yes, we absolutely benefit from cultural hegemony.

DECLAN: Especially, I think with English as a first language. To me, English first would be huge. I always have tremendous respect for people that are having deep conversations in their second or third language.

CORALINE: I grow up with a Swedish and she puns multilingually which is very impressive.

DECLAN: I have a Swedish friend and he practices by doing my cryptic crosswords in English. I can’t do a cryptic crossword in my own language.

CORALINE: Sort of go back to talking about with trying to read between the lines, trying to put yourself in someone else’s position and trying to be aware of the power dynamics that are inherent in some languages, how does that relate to the practice of agile methodologies, which are very rigid and very terse, at least in my experience.

DECLAN: That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have been term them that way. I think maybe because things like stand ups had to be terse. Is that what you mean, Coraline?

CORALINE: Yeah, in terms of stand ups, where your communication style is very terse but you have very important things to communicate. How can you ensure that you’re being respectful of your audience and also, how can your audience assure you that they’re hearing what you’re saying?

DECLAN: I actually think of agile as being the opposite. To me, you do have the stand ups but they’re really just nothing of substance of any depth should be happening there. It’s just more of like, what are you doing today, here’s what I’m going to do, what are you going to do and then it’s like, “Oh, we’re having an issue with X. Okay, Well let’s take that off line.” The empathetic conversations are likely to happen outside of that terse event. Maybe we’re into some things like retrospective, which I feel like if we’re going to do one agile practice, it should be about respective. If you’re facilitating retrospectives, which I often do, then you’re really have a responsibility to make sure all of the voices in the room are heard and now, you’re into a wide variety of facilitation techniques. I think agile actually provides for much deeper conversations because things like user story or a promise for a conversation. My experiences that agile done well is actually a very rich dynamic context for interaction.

JESSICA: I think pairing does that for me.

DECLAN: Yeah, or mob programming even to a wider extent with teams.

JESSICA: We talked about trying to be explicit and having room for larger conversations in order to convey across cultures but those cultures, as Janelle and Sam are pointing out in the chat aren’t just the cultures you grow up in. They’re also the cultures you worked in like are you a tester? Are you a manager? Are you frontend developer?

SAM: Yeah, the classic cross cultural barrier there, of course is tech versus management, which is often very much framed as a versus.

DECLAN: Yes. What might be interesting is I had the good fortune of agile in 2017. I’m going to an event, which was called Women in Agile. Before the conference, they had a half-day session. They had a keynote, which was sounded awesome. Unfortunately, I missed the keynote and then they had some open space sessions, followed by some lightning talks that were mentor talks. It was really interesting as a man being present there and the dynamic that puts for saving me as the ‘privilege’ one in that context. To some extent, I think there were mirrors with that and the tech management role or the cross cultural one where you sit in a privileged position, you’re working with people that may, for whatever reasons not feel as empowered as you might.

I hosted an open space work session really on how men could become better allies. I think some of those things that emerged from that session would be good insights to human nature that would support, not only gender of diversity but other forms of differences across people.

JESSICA: What are some of those?

DECLAN: I guess — and I’m repeating back what I learned — one of them was — and it was sort of an insight to me — just to recognize that we all have biases and to have biases, to be human. It’s not emphatic. It’s just is. If you’re a human, you have biases and being aware as an individual that you may carry those biases. For example, when we started the session, it was named, ‘How men can become better allies,’ and then we quickly change the title, ‘How everyone can become better allies,’ because it was pointed out that some of the biases that I might hold around, say women in technology, women would might have those very same biases. There could well be a societal bias. That was insightful for me to realize that the biases that I carry might actually be shared by others, including the people that I might feel are in a ‘less powerful’ situation here. That was insightful for me to glean that.

But there’s a lots of little things that came up. Some of them just boiled down to good facilitation like have everyone speak as soon as you can in some organized session. Like within the first few minutes, just make sure everyone has had an opportunity to have a voice and to say something with us in a single word or a complete thought and giving room for people to speak soon and early. One that I noticed in the conference, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this, I ended up being at a table with a woman who I knew quite well and this very nice guy sat between us and then the three of us worked together on this exercise. I noticed that this guy who I didn’t know, would actually direct most of his attention and interest to me and what I was saying, rather than the woman. He had no reason to do that because we were complete strangers to him.

I was aware he was probably making some unconscious bias towards somehow treating me as a more credible voice or something, than the woman. What I would continually do in those as interactions is I would look at her, I would ask her for her opinion. If she said something, I’d say, “Oh, that’s a really good insight. Can you tell us more?” I really try to dial up and try to focus this other individual on the other voice in the room. I think some of this across cultural and perhaps gender diversity is really about being present and watching and understanding, whether dynamic are going and trying to pull other people in and redirect other people to be aware of those other people.

JESSICA: Because if you’re present in the moment, then you can notice your own bias and that of other people and here’s to direct your attention and to compensate.

SAM: Like you were talking about you also a modeled the behavior that you wanted to see, which I thought was really interesting.

JESSICA: It does take extra brain power to do that. Yeah, thanks.

JANELLE: It seems to go back to the initial point to about empathy and authenticity in creating bridges between people. It seems like you could put the same ideas and principles in terms of the things that you learned with your superpowers. do you have any thoughts with regards to how do you see the skills and things that you brought into the table and how you see yourself using these superpower abilities that you learned? Can you relate those things back together again?

DECLAN: I’m not sure. I guess I would say, as I got to my career, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this but when I was younger, I would be always tried to be the person that people wanted me to be and I want to be the expert in this or I’m not good at that or whatever it might be. But primarily, it’s about trying to look the way that people are expecting you to behave. What I’ve noticed in my career is that the more truly authentic I can be and pulling those skills in so it’s truly me showing up, then those generally lead to better outcomes.

One thing that I have really learned that has worked really well for me is just asking for permission when unsure. Would you be open to some feedback right about now or would you mind if I jump in on that point because when one challenges an ally, I think often as a male say in gender diversity, “I don’t want to be sticking up for people that are more than happy to stick up for themselves. Thank you very much.” When I feel like the situation demands and I feel like I might want to interject or redirect because of some cultural or diversity, I’ll often find a way to ask permission from that person because ultimately, I’m trying to support them.

JESSICA: That’s beautiful. That elevates them into a position of respect just by our example. We talk about authenticity but that it’s so abstract. What’s something that you do or say differently when you’re being authentic versus when you’re not?

DECLAN: That’s a good question. One thing that I find works well for me is to really show vulnerability because I think people put up a facade and if you’re able to show, “I’m quite technical,” and if I screw up with some technical thing like I mistype something or made coding error, I just make a joke of it. “Oh, silly me. Look at that.” You’re showing that I’m not trying to have a facade of being the expert but we’re all human and we just all here doing our best. I think showing vulnerability, to me has been really effective for people to then and say, “It’s okay for me to just be who I am and show up how I choose to show up.” That would be one example of a practical authenticity.

JESSICA: Okay, so pointing out your own mistakes and not freaking out over them. That’s one example of authenticity and vulnerability?

DECLAN: Yup. I’m really good at having really bad jokes so I don’t hesitate to have really bad jokes that people grown over and then my lack of humor becomes another joke and it then becomes infectious and people find it, “It’s okay if I say that joke,” and then a lot of barriers are just dropped and people just acted as humans, rather than fulfilling a role that they perceive a need to in the context.

CORALINE: It seems to me that both of those ways of being authentic are a way of addressing a power imbalance or a power dynamic that you might have. I find that if I’m pairing with someone with less experience than I have, I actually will intentionally make mistakes to prove to them, to show them that I’m not infallible and everyone makes a mistakes and they shouldn’t feel ashamed of making mistakes themselves. I think it’s important to demonstrate that kind of vulnerability, to demonstrate that it’s okay not to know everything and it’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to get things wrong and no matter where you are in your career, those things are going to continue to happen to you.

SAM: It sounds like something that [inaudible] said once where he was talking about when he joins a new team, he will try as quickly as possible to force the team into a failure mode to make something go wrong because he finds that making something presumably small and trivial go wrong is a good way to build trust in each other and in everybody’s abilities to pull themselves back out of that failure.

JESSICA: Yeah. Being able to deal with failure is so much more important than preventing it.

CORALINE: Failure is inevitable, right?

JESSICA: Right, and Declan just pointed out that failure is also a tool.

DECLAN: Yeah, Coraline. I really resonate with what you’re saying there about showing vulnerability. I must say, I’ve done that too. I have manufactured failures to show vulnerability. I prefer not to force it because people might sense that you’ve actually constructed this scenario. Maybe it’s ironic. I prefer just to be authentic and if something goes wrong, just deal with it in a moment.

Another example that happened to me a while ago, which was interesting. I was working with a management team and I was explaining something to them and they say, “How are we going to do this?” I have no idea, and they were very stunned. “I thought, you were the agile expert?” I said, “No. We’re cutting some new ground here. No one’s ever done exactly what we’re doing so we’re going to figure this out together. I have some ideas but let’s figure this out together.” That’s another way to show vulnerability is you don’t have to have the answers to everything.

JESSICA: Oh, say, “I don’t know.” Yeah, that is a good example.

DECLAN: Especially, if you’re in a situation where you’re brought in as an ‘expert.’ Early on in the conversation, you say, “I don’t know,” that I think opens up and models that we’re going to figure this out together.

CORALINE: It seems to me that this sign of expertise is a willingness to collaborate and learn it and experiment, not expertise being always knowing the answer.

JESSICA: Yeah, part of our job is to be not afraid to fail.

SAM: We talked earlier about empathy and the way I put it in the chat was that there’s a verb and a noun. I know, empathize is the verb form or whatever. But as I was trying to sketch out my question, I realized that empathy and ally are both words that people think of not necessarily as nouns but as attributes of a person. Rather than verbs, I think we should push people towards viewing empathy and ally as a behavior. I’m wondering, is the word agile is another one of those that falls into that pattern? Is agile something that you are or something that you do?

DECLAN: I think a lot of agile where it does not work well is because it is doing in the sense of following the practices and the cargo cult of agile. I’m in the US, I can say ‘agile.’ in Canada of course, I would say ‘agile.’ Certainly, my experience is much more about, maybe it is a lot about mindset in terms of agile, which I do think of as more noun, like present, like the way that you act. But I think going down the superficiality of implementing practice, the acts that would occur in terms of conversations and the way that you plan and interact and pair from that behavioral perspective, I would agree that agile should be more of ‘here’s what we do around here to succeed,’ rather than a set of practices just to distinguish those two different levels of doing, if you see what I mean.

SAM: Yeah, that makes sense so there’s the behaviors that people think that performing them makes them agile, which are completely distinct from the actual behaviors like learning and adapting to feedback.

JANELLE: I’m just listening to this and my feathers are ruffling a little bit here because I think one of the problems with agile is the name agile and fundamentally, there’s this idea from a systems thinking level of this emergent behavior that we’re trying to describe of agility. If we are agile, if we do the agile things, then there’s an expectation that these emergence system level properties will un-exist. I see people trying to map this description of the system into a first person dynamic, then they’re doing all the things and they’re being all things and agility is an emergent from that particular system. There’s a huge disconnect.

If you think about how most organizations run, it’s more of like a barge that can’t steer whatsoever than agile. I feel like there’s a huge disconnect, not only between the being, doing and as you’re saying, the two different types of doing but just a problem with a lack of words and ways to describe the system that we’re trying to create. I don’t know if that’s a question. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that if that jump in your head.

DECLAN: Maybe, a key part of truly being agile and I say truly with air quotes, is the notion of what is a system that can work for us. Rather than following an agile system, what is the system that we can construct together that’s going to achieve what we mutually want to get done. The system is in effect ours to build. I think maybe being agile is really being intentional about understanding the system that is and the system that you want and learning and iterating your way to that future state.

JANELLE: I love that. That was beautiful.

JESSICA: I like to think of us not a system builders anymore but system movers.

DECLAN: That’s really true because there’s always an ‘as-is.’ It’s where we are now and how do we steer towards what we really want.

CORALINE: I’ve heard a distinction made at different companies I worked for where people are kind of apologetic about their agile methodology and they’ll say something like, “We’re not ‘capital a’ agile. We’re a ‘lowercase a’ agile.” I wonder if that’s an attempt to say, “We’re not rigid practitioners. We’re not cargo culting. We’re actually trying to adapt to real working conditions,” although none of those companies actually, I would say demonstrated agility. Why do people make that distinction, do you think?

DECLAN: That’s a great question. Maybe it’s the same what you’ve heard, Coraline but I also heard like, “We’re not true agile.” I know if you’ve heard that. Maybe ‘big a’ agile to me is like the doing in the sense of we are doing these practices and to me, ‘small a’ agile means we’re really adapting and the way that we work aligned with the principles of the agile manifesto, like we’re living and breathing that way. That’s what I think people mean by ‘big a’ versus ‘little a.’ To me, for example, start with new team and just do Kanban, rather than say, Scrum and say, “We’re just going to put up a Kanban board here to reflect the system that we have and the way that we just want to reflect where we currently are.”

We don’t need to do all of the agile practices but let’s just start to think of what is our purpose, where we’re trying to go and how can we improve as we go. To me, that would might be the distinction between ‘little a’ agile and ‘big a’ agile. Is that what you’ve noticed, Coraline? Something like that?

CORALINE: Yeah and Kanban is a great example of that because in my experience, when you do Kanban, you’re not doing sprints anymore. I just remember this one company I worked for that I think was treating agile methodologies as it was a scar that it grown over in an organizational wound. They had development practices in place that were actually harmful. Their remedy for it was, “We’ll adapt agile and all of our organizational problems will go away,” and they were so rigid about it and they did all of the recommended practices for agile methodology and they didn’t try to adapt their practices to the organizational culture or more importantly, the organizational culture to their practices. That made a really awful working environment because all these things that we were doing, just felt like an unnecessary process.

DECLAN: I’ve seen that too. I think people draw a big equal sign between agile and Scrum. They think, “We’re doing agile and that’s because we’re doing all the scrums stuff.” I like to point out people, “Go look at the manifesto. What specific practices are recommended from the agile manifesto?” I don’t think that there are any other than statements like business and developers should work together daily and things like that but there’s no specific dogma, if you will around practice.

Then if you go look at, say Scrum, then you can ask people, “What the Scrum say about our engineering practices?” Well, it says nothing. If you actually want to go down the dogma route and you go to the original material around that, you find that there’s very little around specific practice and that’s more around the principles and the values in how we work. But I think that’s hard for people to potentially see in the larger context because they’ve installed the agile. They have their plan and their training program and I think that’s a problem.

CORALINE: Where did that even come from? How do these practices get associated with agile when as you pointed, the agile manifesto doesn’t dictate practices?

DECLAN: I think it’s very natural because Day 1, you guys are going to be — you folks, I’ll try to get some more gender diverse terms in here — you folks are now at agile team and you could ask them, “Start to think and behave and act in a collaborative way,” and people would look at you, probably with glazed eyes and you say, “I wish you’d have a stand up every morning for 15 minutes. We’re going ask these questions.” Oh, that’s sounds a lot simpler. Let’s do that.

I think in terms of starting down the agile road, I think practices are good because at least, it gets people starting to interact and behave. I think it’s important that they expose to values and principles but when they actually start, I think people need to start to do. Having guidance around good practice, I think is helpful. I’m an agile coach. I think maybe the difference might be, if you have good coaching and those coaches don’t need to be people that have that title, but people who’ve been there before and are able to guide and so on, if you have those people on your team, then I think your fine just to start with the road practices because in between those practices is where the real agility is going to bear, which you are giving people a frame to work in.

The danger is when people start with those frames but they haven’t had the experience or the insights to really make it work within those teams, then it becomes cargo cults. Especially, if that’s [inaudible], like all the teams need to behave in the same way, now you are really constraining behavior. I’m just trying to say, a lot of the road practices can be good to, at least start the teams working in a certain way, hopefully as a stepping stone to something better. The danger is people get trapped into that step one.

CORALINE: I really think what you said there about adopting a practice across teams being a warning sign. That’s what I heard you say, at least. It’s a very important point because every team develops its own culture, every team has its own challenges and how you respond to this challenges, in a way that makes you productive is going to necessarily be different.

DECLAN: Yeah, and people really love consistency. If you have 12 teams, it would just be awesome if they all had the same leg sprints and they all measure progress in the same way so people will feel that there’s a lot of benefit from being consistent. I think there can be and then I say, “If that’s true, what are those benefits? Let’s talk about those,” and then, if you can move people away from the practice that you want to be consistent and shift the conversation to the outcomes that you want to be consistent, then you can have sort of consistent outcomes. You’ll say, “Let’s try for that,” and then ask each team, how are they going to achieve those common set of outcomes that we want. For example, reduce time to market or quality or whatever it is. But simply saying, “We’re all going to use Jira for tracking our work and that consistency will lead to something,” then explore that something. I find that that’s a good way to attempt to cut through that fallacy about common practice.

CORALINE: I love that. I have to do the obligatory reference quote. Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The important word there is foolish consistency. I love what you said about consistency being centered on the outcomes, rather than the process. I think that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if lots of failure on the part of agile proponents of selling agile to management, are they setting unrealistic expectations or are they not going far enough to explain the focus on the outcome, rather than on the process?

DECLAN: I think you’re probably right. I don’t have a lot of experience at the executive level or with large agile rollouts, if you will. I don’t have a lot of experience to understand how to do that better. I worked with a consultancy called ‘LeanIntuit’ and Chris Chapman, one of my cohorts there keep saying, “Management goes first,” which I love, “Leadership goes first,” so if you want these teams to be agile, then we are going to start as a leadership team to work in an agile way. Let’s make our work visible. Let’s have daily stand ups, etcetera.

I think, there’s dangers on these agile rollouts where, “Oh, we’ll fix up those teams and those people will do the agile and we’ll just see faster time to market.” Getting their leadership much more engaged of the purpose and the outcomes and having them demonstrate the behaviors that they want, I think that’s what is undervalued or missed in some of the larger agile rollouts that I’ve experienced myself.

JESSICA: I love this drive for common outcomes, not common practices. I’m so going to tweet that. What you said about locality about each team having its own culture, that’s also important. If you had 12 teams and you took the one that you personally find the most productive and want the other teams to be liked and you take their practices and impose them on other teams, then you’ve just magnified the disparity because those practices work for that team. If you force the other teams to use those practices, it’s actually a disadvantage for those teams, compared to being able to develop the practices that work for them personally. To me, it works.

DECLAN: Yeah, my brother is an architect, not a software architect but a real architect and they had —

CORALINE: Nice.

DECLAN: — A bricks and mortar kind of a guy and they were doing an exercise around teamwork and they basically had a large group broken up into small teams. Each team had this puzzle. Their instructions were to get everyone back safely and they had to build this lunar thing with Lego and then bring an astronaut who was a little Lego stick figure back and they couldn’t move their ship until it was completely assembled according to some specifications. There’s some complexity in this.

Interesting thing was, his group turned out to be the only group that ever successfully completed the mission. The reason was when they divided people up into teams, people just focused on their team and they said, “We won,” but the instructions was everyone gets back safely so the exercise was not around trying to complete the task. It was about how you are going to share your information with the other teams so that everyone in the room wins.

I think maybe that’s what I would think about with agile at the team level, rather than saying this team is working really well, you guys should be doing that. It’s about how do you promote cross-learning across these teams so they can learn from each other. In the same way that we promote pair programming is make sure that luncheon learns or maybe guest pairing or things like that to promote cross-team learning, would be the direction that I would go. I guess it’s sharing the learning, rather than the practice.

JESSICA: That’s cool. I love that everyone gets back safely of this is not a competition and that gets back to where we started with communication and empathy. There’s a falsehood that comes up sometimes in some groups, where I’m talking and four people understand me but two people don’t or maybe just one person doesn’t. I’m like, “They understood so clearly, it’s not me,” but that’s wrong. As a person trying to share learning, if one person doesn’t understand, that’s still on me. Just because those other four happen to be able to read between the lines, maybe we share a lot of our contexts. I’m the one who has the ability to slow down and add new ones to whatever it takes, like the people with the Legos who had to proactively go and share information.

DECLAN: I agree.

JESSICA: Declan, was there anything else you’d like to bring up and talk about?

DECLAN: To take a completely orthogonal tack is this idea that technical health. I’ve been thinking a lot and working a lot around technical debt. I’ve found it to be a very powerful metaphor but a metaphor that I think has somewhat trapped us into a way of thinking and that thinking sounds something like, “I’m carrying around this big bag of technical debt. We really ought to go and fix up that crap that we built last month or last year and it’s this albatross or this ball and chain thing that we’re dragging around with us.”

I do want to make one slight distinction. I know people will always ask me and it’s always good to go into tech. There are definitely context where technical debt is good and I agree with that. I’m really talking about technical debt that’s really hampering value delivering where it’s really crushing the teams. What I’ve started to do is starts to change the conversation to technical health so how do we build an infrastructure and a way of coding and set of practices that enable us to have a technically healthy organization where we conserve and deliver on well and then technical health becomes the ability to deliver value and technical debt becomes the things in the code that are stopping you from doing that.

This is relatively recent for me. I’ve been thinking about it for a while but I’ve only been talking about it more recently. I think it’s a lot more powerful just to have a conversation. for example, rather than talking about going to a CEO and say, “We really ought to clean up that crap,” it’s more like, “If we really want to be competitive in the future, there’s some things that we can do to improve how quickly and effectively a software comes out. We should probably invest in that, just like you would invest in making sure that your assembly line is working really well,” as a as an analogy.

I think just switching the term from debt to health sort of taps into positive psychology, where if you look at intervening with mental health issues, we all have them either ourselves or within our families, it turns out that when you focus on making the things that are problematic go away be it anxiety or depression and you’re able to get people through traditional techniques to spot where, “I’m okay now. I’m okay.” But if you can actually shift to a positive psychology stance where you really trying to dial up what makes people happy, the people come up with far better clinical outcomes. I think something similar can happen within our teams. Rather than focusing on removing this bad stuff, get people thinking about how do we amplify what we want, which is in an agile context, you’re affecting value delivery.

Then it shifts the whole tone of the conversation and we don’t have to talk about past things or these other people wrote this crappy code or whatever it is. Let’s look forward and how do we build a healthy code base and a healthy deployment pipeline, etcetera. I think that sort of the level one of the difference. I’m finding that even simply just having conversations is being enabled by just using the term technical health, rather than technical debt. I think it’s leading to better conversations about what’s really going on.

JANELLE: I’m really fascinated by this pivot that you’ve pointed out of when you focus on problems going away, your psychology shifts to this kind of avoidance pattern, this ball and chain of the technical debt that is dragging us back, versus when you focus on technical health and you shifted this positive psychology of how do we dial up what makes us happy, how do we amplify what it is we want. I love the correlation with the underlying psychological shift and how the semantics we choose in perfecting that.

Looking at the world through this lens, how do we amplify what we want? I love that question. It’s a really powerful question. If you were to answer that question yourself, looking back across all of your experiences, what are the things that you found to be core to amplifying what you want. Can you even define what it is you want? At one level, value delivery but what is it that we want in organization? What is it that we want in a culture? How do we amplify what we want?

DECLAN: I think it would be a start with identifying what we want and just being clear about what that is. Having a clear sense of purpose and that purpose can be and it should be, a variety of things. It could be what do our customers expect of us, who are internal stakeholders? But what is just as important to me is what do I want and what do you want as individuals from this work that we’re going to do together. To some extent, I think step one is sort of having a clear understanding in open dialogue around what it is that we want.

I think the conversation gets a little bit easier than if you got clarity around that, you can ask things like how can we measure that? What I really like to put into place with teams is team happiness. How happy are we working here and where would we like to be and talk about that? Then when you see things like our happiness is at a three and we really prefer to be at a four out of five, then what can we do next week to dial up that happiness. I don’t know if there’s any prescriptive thing but I guess I would say, just be clear about what you want and retrospect regularly on how you’re doing.

JESSICA: I like that technical health, instead technical debt. You can think of it as debt when you’re choosing whether to take it on but after that, don’t feel bad about that sloppy code. Then you don’t have to fix it just because it’s ugly. Fix only what’s getting in your way because it’s not about measuring the debt. It’s about moving forward.

DECLAN: Exactly.

CORALINE: That brings to mind one of the tools that a lot of companies uses, at least in the Ruby world is something called Code Climate, which assigns a letter grade code and somethings end up being an F. I think they automatically cross [inaudible] technical debt like Jessica said, it’s not in your way if it’s not code that gets executed much or gets touch much, leave it alone. That’s not really what standing in the way of progress and that’s really not withstanding the way productivity.

DECLAN: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. The reason why I like the health metaphor to some extent is it gets our brain thinking about it in a different way. Back to the Cold Climate example, if you’re not all A’s, then you sucked. That’s in a very superficial that some could take of those metrics. But then if you think about health and think about people, like my father who is 83, his definition of good health is going to look far different than a world-class marathon runner. They both care about health but in their context, being healthy means very different things.

Rather than having an absolute number, you start to think what’s health for us and the fact that we have an F on this code module, who cares if we haven’t changed it for 18 months. It’s not slowing us down. It doesn’t mean that you have to be all A’s. Maybe where your team is are because you got some legacy code. Maybe that code metrics sort of sucked. But that’s where and how do we get healthier. It’s more about the progression to health as a continuum, rather than some absolute number which is an ABCD implies.

SAM: I really like this focus on what are the outcomes that we want and what do we need to do to get there. For me the thing that’s coming up is the idea of the campsite role, which is this practice that whenever you touch a bit of code, you leave it at least a little bit better than it was when you found it and that’s a nice incremental way of dealing with the technical debt that’s actually in your way, on your way to technical health, without really stopping and focusing on every single thing that’s wrong with it, right?

DECLAN: Yeah, definitely, as a technical coach, that’s my number one mantra, is the Boy Scout role or the Cub Scout role. The other level that I’ve been thinking about with technical health is when I first thought of it, I am working with an issue that the Agile Alliance, by the way so this idea of technical health came out from really a group discussion. I happened to be the one that talks most about it on my group. When I first thought about it, we thought it was just being this positive psychology switch like, “Let’s just make technical health be the inverse of technical debt.” I, now think of it more nuanced. I think of it as technical debt is something that we can measure in terms of looking at the code but technical health is probably something more of our capacity to deliver value and meet our purpose.

When you start to look at things from a technical health perspective and then you’re able to look at technical debt as an artifact, you can start to say, “We have this measure and I have things in my team or my organizations that are either increasing or decreasing that technical debt and now I can apply for the systems thinking to the dynamics that’s happening in my organization.” I’ll give you a concrete example. I think that one of the biggest contributors to technical debt that I’ve seen has been project planning horizons, where you’re bringing in teams to work on code for, say three months and then they’re off and they’re no longer accountable for the code after they’ve delivered their three month deadline. but the best to the organization has to live with that code for years down the road but nothing in their system is actually taking that into account because all of the budgeting and resourcing, which is the word I hate but assigning people to work is all done with a very short horizon timeline.

The technical debt problem is not those damn coders who just keep writing crap. It’s actually a systemic issue with the way the organization plans and budgets and organizes people around the work. That’s the root cause. You can have the clean-up of the code as a go as a great practice but if the systemic issue is this project-driven mentality for building products, then you’ll never really get what you want. Unlike in the technical health, it really allows us to bring the systems thinking view to our organizations and using technical debt as a measure of the effectiveness of that system.

CORALINE: We’re doing something pretty interesting [inaudible] right now. This is a new thing we’re trying out. We put together what’s called the sustainability and stability team and that team, every larger team within your organization devotes 20% of its people [inaudible] team and their charge is to increase the stability of systems and to make the code more sustainable. It’s not really a matter of addressing technical debt but rather, looking at what the pain points are, like one of the pet projects we’re undertaking is getting off the list-shared database.

That’s not something you can really do incrementally and it’s not something that stop the world but fix all of these things practice either. But it’s a way of addressing system health that I think is a pretty interesting approach to solving that problem. The people who are on that team rotate out. You’re on a six-week rotation so there are goals that the team sets but the people are implementing it rotates in and out. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about an approach like that or if you’ve seen that before or if you have alternate approaches to how dev organizations could take on that kind of work.

DECLAN: I’m going to write that down because that has not come up in my experience the way we talked about. Actually, I would expect that that would work really well. It sounds like a really powerful way to work to me from how you describe it. How this actually work, Coraline?

CORALINE: It’s a fairly new practice so it’s too early to say whether it’s successful or not. But I think it’s a really interesting idea and I’m really hopeful that it does work out. One of my teammates [inaudible] actually pitched a proposal to RubyConf to talk about this particular approach and I’m really hoping that her talk gets accepted because I like to see some conversations around that. I’ve seen a different way of handling in the past where a team will say, “We’ll spend 15% of our sprint on fixing technical debt,” and that seems a terrible way to solve that problem.

SAM: That just never happened.

CORALINE: No, it really doesn’t.

DECLAN: Yeah, I have seen things like that or we take one ticket per week or the other practice I’ve seen is we’ll take these hardening sprints or something like that. We’ll have a sprint at the end devoted to technical debt. I think each of those work. I’ve worked with a lot of smaller companies so they don’t have this issue of having multiple teams and dealing with, perhaps some common challenges but what I like about what you’re saying is whatever you’re bringing the knowledge of the real pain into that support team and then bringing it back out again. My prediction would be that you would see a lot of value from that because it’s explicit knowledge movement across those team boundaries by swapping people in and out.

SAM: One thing I’m curious about with everybody doing six weeks stints and presumably, people rotating in and out on different timelines, I’ll be really curious to hear about how continuity gets maintained on that team. I would have imagine that there’s going to be a lot more focus on providing or building and maintaining artifacts like a ReadMe or a document of principles or some sort of project plan. I’m curious to see how that shakes itself out.

CORALINE: There are some overarching goals that the team has in place. Getting off the shared database is a very long process and no one team of people in the six weeks stint is going to accomplish that. The team has the overarching goals but I think the interesting thing is with rotating people in and out, they’re addressing different areas of the codebase that maybe have been raised to a certain level of awareness or attention within the greater engineering organization. They’re bringing their local knowledge of particular aspects of the codebase to bear and saying, “Fixing this issue here, fixing this code here or assigning the system here,” is going to contribute to the overall health of the greater codebase.

I think that ties in to what Declan what saying about big management first. Someone in a situation like that does have to set the goals and someone does have to create the project plan and someone does have to commit to 20% of the people on the team doing an endeavor like this. That’s not going to happen from the bottom up.

DECLAN: Yeah, I would have agree. Technical debt in larger organizations is such a huge impediment. I look for simple measures with teams like how happy are you working with the code? That’s a good measure. And how much is the code slowing down now? Then you can optimize on that. I also have other questions, how much of your time do you spend building new value versus dealing with troubleshooting or defect tickets?

I’m sometimes shocked when I hear it. I worked at one team where I calculate effectively their value delivery was 4% of what their capacity was because they were spending so much time fighting production fires and they asked me if they could go five times faster if the code was well-factored. Now those are somewhat not scientific measures but it certainly it gives you a sense. If the team says the capacity basically is 4% to deliver any value, that’s a serious problem and it warrants a strong response from the organization.

CORALINE: There is one way to measure that and I’ve done this at a company before, where you look at pull requests and if the pull request is referencing an issue, assuming you’re doing good issue tracking, you can actually say, “We got five pull requests in the sprints and three of them were no fixes for issues and measure value delivery that way.” I think that’s a really good measure as developer productivity and happiness in health and codebase health is how much value is being delivered within X period of time because probably, if your developers are frustrated, if the codebase is resisting efforts to change, that’s going to impact that metric and it’s not a developer problem. You can’t say, our developers are not being productive enough. That points to a larger system issue.

JESSICA: Also, a few minutes ago, Janelle was asking what do we want to achieve and what will make us happy? You can look at it that way. What technical changes could I make that would make me more excited to come to work in the morning?

DECLAN: Exactly.

SAM: At the end of every call, we like to wrap up with reflections, which can be something that stood out to us as particularly interesting, something that we’re going to take and carry forward or it can be a call-to-action for our listeners. Anything along those lines. Since I haven’t thought of mine yet, how about Jessica, you go first.

JESSICA: Sweet. The biggest thing for me is strive for common outcomes, not common practices. That’s so healthy. Instead of, “Use this framework,” it’s, “Support this API.”

CORALINE: I was really struck by a side comment that you made, Declan about how some situations whether be a user story or something that someone says and stand out should be taken as a promise for a conversation. I will be thinking about how we can be more explicit about that. I often hear corporate speak of, “We’ll take that offline,” and I think that it’s just a way of deferring a conversation that maybe will never actually happen. But if we can be explicit about making a promise to have a conversation that impacts so much productivity in terms of not developing the wrong thing or developing the wrong context, as well as happiness because you get the sense that your concern is being addressed and you’re being heard. I’m going to think about how to be more explicit in promises like that.

JANELLE: I’ve been thinking back on this conversation we had about this power imbalance and with culture and leadership through modeling. One thing that really stood out to me was this idea of asking permission. because of this power imbalance that it’s there in leadership, I’m thinking about some mistakes that I made when I probably should have ask for permission and I didn’t and I ended up causing all kind of problems and relationships blowing up because I didn’t ask those questions. That’s like dissonant blowing up in my brain right now is those regretful decisions that you wish you could go back and do things differently, if you’d do all over again.

One of the things that I’ve learned as a leader is being a leader in a way makes you blind in a way that you don’t think you’re going to be blind until you go and you make mistakes because you don’t realize that you have power in this relationship dynamic. one of the things that happens because that relationship dynamic is often disrespect on the other side of the wall, on the ‘us versus them,’ and one of the ways that you can correct that if you’re on the side of power is to ask permission and what that does is it elevates the people that you’re talking to position of respect.

SAM: I talked earlier about the difference between attributes and behaviors and I think that’s an important one. Certainly, it’s important for me to remember in my personal life as well as development. But at the risk of copying Jessica, I do think that that focus on identifying and clarifying what are the outcomes that we want is really possibly the most important thing we’ve talked about today, at least for me. I noticed as well that this works for team practices and that’s what we were talking about. that’s the context we were talking about it in. but it’s also really one of the fundamental things that makes agile development work and be worth pursuing as well because you’re focusing on what are the outcomes that you want for your users and the value that they’re getting out of the system. I always like finding those principles that work in multiple contexts. That seems like a new one for me so thank you.

DECLAN: Reflecting on this conversation was for me, really was because the first thing I came to mind is like my mind was expanded. I really try to listen and really understand where you were coming from. I think you’ve really enrich as a group so my understanding or help me clarify my thinking around some things and particularly around empathy and behavior. Maybe what I’m getting at is a call-to-action for teams that are out there, how could you have conversations similar to the ones that we’re having with your teams? Whether it’s around empathy or diversity or common outcomes, how can you have more effective conversations with your teams? Could you plan a retrospective to talk about common outcomes or technical health or diversity on your team? That’s really what I would like to say. How do you take these conversations and translate them into actions on your team?

SAM: So your call to action is figure out how to do that?

DECLAN: Yes. Can you plan a retrospective that could cover some topic that may have resonated with you on this podcast and bring that conversation back to your team and organization?

JESSICA: Now is the time when we remind you that Greater Than Code is a listener supported podcast. We like to do a Patreon shout out. Our newest patron this month is Declan Whelan. Thank you, Declan for contributing at a $10 level. The important thing though is if you contribute to our Patreon at any level, then you get access to our Slack team. It’s my favorite Slack team. Everybody is super nice. I highly recommend. While listeners support, let us do more shows. Currently we’re doing three episodes a month. We would love to do four.

CORALINE: Jessica, if someone wants to be a patron, how can they do that? Is there a site on the internet they can go to?

JESSICA: Yes, it is ‘IRolledANatural20OnMyAgilityCheck.com.’

CORALINE: I think it’s Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode but I appreciate your enthusiasm all the same. Declan, thank you so much for joining us today. We’ve had a lot of fun in what it means to be agile and I learned a lot from the conversation. Thank you so much and I look forward to continuing the conversation on Slack.

DECLAN: Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed learning from all of you and I felt really welcome. Thank you.

To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

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046: Specialization vs Collaboration with Aria Stewart

Mandy Moore — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 05:00:16 +0000

Panelists:

Coraline Ada Ehmke | Astrid Countee | Janelle Klein

Guest Starring:

Aria Stewart: @aredridel

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps save us?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:07 – Background and Superpowers

09:22 – Diagnostic Troubleshooting: “Expert Intuition Effect”

14:23 – Understanding Entire Systems vs Specializing in One Area

17:15 – Isolation Leading to Contempt

28:42 – The DevOps Movement and Culture Change

34:45 – Contempt Towards Processes

Janelle Klein: A Programmer’s Guide to Humans @ SeleniumConf UK

Reflections:

Astrid: Having a holistic approach towards Software Development.

Coraline: Why specialization leads to contemptuous behavior between teams and how to solve it for early career developers.

Janelle: Inside of us, we all have a soul.

Aria: Start telling new stories about the people who build fantastic products and tools.

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and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

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Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

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Transcript:

CORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 46 of the ‘The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps Save Us?’ I’m here with the lovely and talented, Astrid Countee.

ASTRID: Thank you, Coraline but I think I should remind you that our show is actually called Greater Than Code.

CORALINE: You think I would know that by now after 46 episodes?

ASTRID: We all working on it. I have empathy for your struggle, Coraline.

CORALINE: Thank you.

ASTRID: I’m also here today with my great friend, Janelle Klein.

JANELLE: Hi and I’m here to introduce Aria Stewart. Aria is an unschooler, performer, queer activist, avid cyclist and theater nerd, originally from the mountains of Colorado. Now, living in Somerville, Massachusetts with her husband and two cats. They started their own internet service provider, worked in web development for companies large and small and consult on diversity and development process. Welcome, Aria.

ARIA: Hi, thank you. It’s nice to be here.

JANELLE: We normally start the show asking a few questions about just your background, your story and where you came from and how you turned into the person you are today.

ARIA: Awesome. That’s kind of tough to trace because I’ve been around this industry a long time and how I got here is a lot of little details.

ASTRID: Don’t be shy. Tell us everything.

ARIA: I was born in Denver. I grew up in the suburbs for the first 13 years of my life. I had access to computers and at school, computer labs occasionally. I was unschooled after fourth grade. I didn’t actually go to school at all but until that point, I was in and out the public school system. My parents want to fight for me to get access to things so I could access the computer labs before and after school. I had computers at home. I had a lot of interest and I was kind of the quintessential 80s nerd kid in a lot of ways.

CORALINE: Right there with you?

ARIA: Which is interesting in the way that played out later on in my life but as part of my unschooling, I ended up taking a part time class of high school on computer programming and the teacher sent a few of us to a computer programming contest sponsored by HP and they gave some sort of coding challenge for four hours to complete, that kind of a thing. We didn’t placed. Turns out that we were all stymied by the fact that none of us had a calendar for reference and the task involves date math so we could not check our work and this was in the days before computers had calendars built in so we literally could had no way to check our work with the stuff available and we weren’t allowed to leave the room or use outside references. We ended up not placing because we can’t check our work but we got a participation t-shirt, which turned out to be one of the most important objects in my life.

When I was 13, we moved to this little town up in the mountains of Colorado called Ridgway and the same month that we moved there, an internet service provider opened up. This was 1995. We were just getting settled in there. I’d had internet access through local libraries and things in the Denver area but when I moved out west, there wasn’t much in the way the internet service or anything like that so an internet service provider putting up was a big deal.

I marched over there one of the first days, asking if I could sign up for an internet service and I happened to be wearing the t-shirt from the computer programming contest and I got offered a job on the spot. I’m this 13-year old boy walking into a little tech company in the mountains of Colorado and I get offered a job. I’m a non-schooler so I actually have afternoons free. I don’t actually have classes and things that I have to be attending so I start working nearly full time when I’m 13 years old. Some of the weeks, it was 20. Sometimes it was 30 hours a week and sometimes it was a full 40-hour week, doing tech support like, “How do I get my email? How do I set up Netscape Navigator? What is the Trumpet Winsock thing and do I need it? I was cleaning up my desktop and threw it away and now my internet doesn’t work.”

This was in the days when getting on the internet at all was kind of a miracle. Computers are cantankerous, modems were unpleasant and when I started, the entire town was connected to the internet via a single 56kbps leased line. The entire town was sharing 56k, not too long after we accreted to T-1 but even so, by today’s standards, you have faster data service on any given cellphone in the middle of nowhere. T-1 is no longer fast internet and we’ve seen interesting experiments. That company was kind of unique in a unique place so we played by doing internet service by wireless. We end up going up on the side of the mountain and placing wireless internet down into town and I’m facing down into this service provider and people out in the valley know the town would get these expensive devices and antenna pointed at the side of the mountain. We ended up getting high speed internet people in 1995 or 1996. A town of a thousand people in the mountains of Colorado, about six hours from Denver.

I had high speed internet in my home a full five years before [inaudible] Denver to get it. It was a really an interesting place and time to grow up and I had a lot of opportunities being in this weirdly small place. But the way it started into my web career was, a couple of years later, my boss put one of those O’Reilly’s books with the animal on the cover and [inaudible] in my desk and says, “Can you learn this?” and I flip through a little bit and the book is CGI with Perl and flip through the book a little bit —

CORALINE: I had that book.

ARIA: Right. It’s a little quintessential books of the era, that and the HTML Guide and a couple of other standard references that every web programmer ended up with on the desk. The part of O’Reilly gotten popular as they did was they were the ones producing these books at all.

He slaps it down on my desk and says, “Can you learn these?” Yeah, I think I can figure this out, and there was my career built as a web programmer and I’ve been doing it ever since. I actually hit 21 years in the industry this summer, which is absurdly long time for someone who’s in their 30s but it’s because I got started at age of 13. When I got into the internet service business and web programming, I was 15.

CORALINE: Aria, I have a very similar background as you by the way. Out of that experience, did you developed any super powers and if so, what are they?

ARIA: I think the biggest thing I learned in all of that was diagnostics. Back in those days, there was no such thing as a frontend developer. There was no such thing, even as a web developer. You were just a software developer. I had to figure out Netscape Enterprise Server at the same time I was figuring out JavaScript, at the same time I was figuring out how to use vi on this old Solaris server so there’s no part of the stack that is unfamiliar anymore.

Web programming has gotten so complicated and so large and we use this incredible stack of tools and yet, I was there through the development of all of these. Even so, you come back to the server today and it’s like, “This is familiar. I’ve used things like this. I’ve used a dozen things like this.” The first time I came across server-side JavaScript was not when Node.js came out in 2010. I’d use server-side JavaScript in 1997.

CORALINE: They had a special name. It was Rhino or something like that.

ARIA: This was back in the days of Netscape Enterprise Server. This was actually the SpiderMonkey engine was embedded in their server, which is the same JavaScript engine that Firefox used for a bit long time, which is the original JavaScript engine. That’s what Brendan Eich wrote originally. They didn’t just stuff it in their web browser. They stuffed it in the server, they stuffed it everywhere so this JavaScript kept popping up in all these weird little places, even back in the 90s. I went to some server-side JavaScript programming all the way back then and it was terrible.

Error messages just didn’t work when things didn’t work. Syntax error, you might get the words ‘syntax error,’ and that was the only clue you had. You had no idea where and what file and what’s going on. But we figured out a lot and I developed some kind of super power debugging skills now so when something goes wrong, I can tell where in the stack it is and what kind of bug it is. It’s like, “I’ve seen that before like 15 years ago,” and we just now come around again to the same kinds of bugs because now we’re doing things that way again. Only computers are faster now and then software are better so it make sense to do it that way and it didn’t at that time.

CORALINE: I have a feeling that people who do have the kind of level experience of 15 or 20 years of experience, who basically started their careers before there were specialization, I think we have a different approach to problem solving because we’re able to visualize the entire ecosystem for a given app, in a way that people who have focused on backend or focus on devops or focused on frontend. They haven’t fully developed yet.

ARIA: Yeah, I think that’s something that’s interesting as we start teaching and as we start passing knowledge on to other, to newer generations is that keeping in mind that the context we operate it in is so very, very different. Despite a lot of the same skills applying, we really have to work hard to listen to what people’s actual experiences are and listen to where they are placed and give them advice that makes sense in that context and not from high orthodox-y sort of mindset that so many older programmers have had, where they grew up with the one true way, on the one true system and now, we’re just replicating that. We operate in fundamentally different ways. We’re doing a lot of the same work but in very, very new ways with different team structures and the way the knowledge have spread across our teams and through our ecosystem is very, very different.

JANELLE: I have a question for you there. I’ve been thinking about as I’m listening to you, in terms of diagnostic troubleshooting, you mentioned this expert intuition effect where a system becomes really intimately familiar and then it’s this ideas that you see an error and you have that intuition about the system that’s broken. But at the same time, you learn the art of diagnostic troubleshooting itself. You seemed very self-aware. I would love to hear you describe your meta thinking process as you go through troubleshooting a problem. I know that’s kind of an abstract question —

ARIA: Yeah. Most of it ends up being in eliminating possibility because you’re starting off with anything could be wrong here and we don’t know what it is and you need to hone in on what the actual problem is. Sometimes, that involves things like a binary search of the code. What happens if you just delete the last half of the code? Do you still have the bug? And so, you can reduce your search space by mechanical like try this part and this part works, then the bug is at that part. If the code doesn’t work, there you go, you’ve narrowed it down a little bit.

You also get this idea of trying to eliminate systems. Can you replicate the problem without one of the pieces at all? If it’s a frontend bug in a piece of JavaScript, can you eliminate the server? Can you run the test case down? Can you shrink it down so that the other part of the system is never involved? Or can you dig under the hood and make the same [inaudible] the JavaScript is and break it down that way? But then at the same time, there’s this holistic mindset you can do.

One of my favorite tools to reach for is actually TCP or [inaudible]. Type a word into a web form and have [inaudible] set up to see if it can even spot that on the network. If I hit submit, did the thing even leave the browser? Looking at the system as a whole, did the data make it from end to end before it eliminate parts based on what you see there? I tend to alternate from this like trying to hone me in sort of actions to the whole system, “Can I observe it the whole way through?” sort of things. Alternating those two mindsets and talking about them has been really good.

It feels like sizing things both horizontally and vertically and being able to hone in on a right direction and it’s an interesting process because they teach you a little bit more information that lets you make those intuitive leaps and also explain those intuitive leaps of, “Well, hold on just a sec. Here’s a very simple but powerful tool.” If we look for this one specific thing, we know is going to be true but the hypothesis for testing is true, let’s just check out real quick and we can eliminate these hypotheses very, very quickly by alternating those two mindsets.

CORALINE: How do you even begin to teach that? I have a lot of trouble with early career developers that I mentor and I can’t even teach me to read a stack trace.

ARIA: You have to have the desire to do your job well and you have to have the feeling that you’re connected. Doing those things actually does your job well. Quite often, people get pushed into parts of their job that they don’t love, don’t enjoy or don’t find valuable. In particular, women get shoved into all kinds of these side roles, project management and all of these things and a lot of developer culture being built on contempt of other roles, contempt for other specializations, has led people to really not want to seek what’s outside the box of their current experience. It really isolates and separates us.

Getting people to want to learn things is getting them the psychological safety to explore outside their box and reward them for doing so because while specialization has let get far, far, far more productive, it has also had some really interesting other effects that it has isolated us. One is to try to enforce strict boundaries between jobs. No, that’s the designer’s job to decide whether or not that should be 10 pixels or 12. No, that’s the frontend engineer’s job to validate that form. Never mind that the backend engineer also has to validate the form because networks are not to be trusted.

We really have to work on it. We should have an overlap in our skill sets and overlap in our communication. We have to work with people on the next layer in the stack down so our frontend engineers have to sit with designers, not just receive orders from but sit with designers and work on things. The frontend engineers need to sit with the backend engineers and talk through the problem and say, “We just got this large request,” or, “We found this bug and we were thinking of solving it this way,” and they’ll write five pages of code and the backend engineers says, “We just didn’t see that in first place. How could that happen?”

A lot of these things would end up with a lot more cohesive development culture. It would let people find and learn those skills a lot more easily. We have a frontend engineer here at work and she’s quite brilliant but doesn’t particularly like backend work. But also, keeps getting handed tickets that isolate her from the backend work. We need to start dividing the work better in a way that will let her dive in just a little bit and be successful in that backend work.

ASTRID: This whole conversation is really fascinating to me because as somebody who is newer to development, I think that would tends to happen is you hear the opposite that you need to not think more broadly. You needs to be very focused on something so that you can build up your expertise. But I have found that that’s a struggle for me because of the same things that you’re talking about, Aria of like wanting to understand how the system works, wanting to do my job well so that I’m not just only good at one thing. What would be your advice to people who are trying to get good at their job but also want to be able to understand more about the entire system and not just one particular specialization?

ARIA: They’re not separate but you have to realize that nobody can know everything about everything. Our world is too large and too complicated so it’s okay to seek things out in relevance first order. If you’re a frontend developer, learning about the parts that are relevant to a frontend developer, how HTTP works, what latency and bandwidth are and how they relate to each other, those aren’t important.

Learning the details of TCP/IP and what [inaudible] is aren’t going to be as interesting or as relevant so it’s completely okay to start digging down and understand how the next layers down relate to yours and figure out that the other layer exists, that it is distinct and then what the interface and boundary between your layer and their layer is. Then know a bit about the other side of the fence but you don’t have to know over the other fence, on the other side of their field.

A web developer is very rarely going to have to know the details about CPU architectures or things down into the machine. Our world is isolated from them. We work on phones and tablets and computers with the details of CPUs are so completely abstract and distant that we don’t care. We really don’t care.

CORALINE: I have a friend who takes exception to that actually and she talks about having empathy for the machine for actually thinking about the impact that the code that we write has on the hardware. Are we making people’s laptops spin up and overheat? Are we putting undue pressure on servers such that devops has to keep adding hardware because of inefficiencies in our code? She posits that it’s, of course important to focus on end users but it’s also worth considering the impact that our code has on the middle.

ARIA: Yeah, I think there’s a tension there. While web developers don’t need to know the details of CPU architectures, we do need to know what is spending time on the CPU and what is spending time drawing and what isn’t. We phrase it differently. We’re thinking about frames per second quite often or smoothness of animations but it turns out that those are the same thing so we do care about some part of it but we don’t have to care about what the instructions set is. We have to care about how much memory we’re allocating but we don’t have to care about pointer sizes.

JANELLE: I got this question that’s been burning on my mind. Something you say about how isolation ends up leading to this cultural effect of content. That’s a pretty strong statement and I’ve certainly seen that happening all around me within the context of the organization but also very much in this context of this tribal splitting that we’re seeing happening all around us right now. What you see is a rise in contempt and shaming and things that are really disturbing in our culture. I’m wondering what kind of things that if you were to think about systems that are driving that kind of behavior, where do you see this connection with isolation leading to contempt. I’d love to hear your answer to that.

ARIA: I think there’s a particular kind of isolation, where we abstract humans into roles. Often in development and in our jobs, we’re busy so we efficiently try to divide task up so that we can do as much as we can at once, so each person will be using their full output. The system of extraction, that is our modern business world, is trying to get the most out of things and those things are good for people. We put an abstraction there. This person is the project manager, you make requests to them by filing a ticket in JIRA and they will tell the developers what to do. The developers can take tickets from JIRA but they have to do it in priority order and talking to the PM directly is an exception.

In a healthy team, that’s probably a frequent exception but even so, the structure is that we want to reduce the unneeded communication. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve created an abstraction. The project manager as a person is now operating as the project manager role and in trying to be as efficient as possible, we lose a little bit of the humanity. Sometimes that’s needed because getting a task done isn’t being full human in the moment. We have the rest of our lives.

We can’t be all things all times so we can’t wear many hats but there’s a place where it become pathological where somebody is seen only as the role. We see it in companies of 60s, 70s, 80s and this is one of the failures of corporate. The corporate world is that people who are not in the same room more often get reduced to their role: the finance person, the marketing guy. We reduce people to just roles and I think this plays out in our broader culture too.

The people nearest us, our family [inaudible] people hopefully, if our families are functional. We see their opportunities and trajectories of growth. We see their fears and things but the waiter at the restaurant or the waitress or the barista at a coffee shop, we might see a little bit of their attitude or their style but we don’t see their hopes, their dreams, their fears and we don’t see how they want to grow and change as people and the people even further from us, the ones we don’t interact with on any kind of day to day schedule. Our society is super segregated.

I live in one of the most segregated cities in the United States. I don’t see people who aren’t white nearly often enough. I see non-queer people on a relatively frequent basis but a lot of non-queer people in my life, I’m quite often the only queer person that they see in any kind of regularity so I am always unknown. I am, in a lot of ways, play a role. I play a role of clown or weird outsider. If weird outsider is a role, I’m always been very comfortable but even so, it’s a role and it’s easy to get hidden behind that role. It’s not far stretch from there to go from relatively benign roles to ones where there are fear and contempt. We ended up with stereotypes and some really negative labels and people says really hateful things because they de-personalize those people into their roles, the roles that they play in the world around them.

It can be very terrible and one of the ways to fight that is to work together. One of the longest studied ways to reduce the amount of hate in the community is to get people to work together, where you have a shared goal and a common task, sitting down and working on it together. It brings people together, unless you have something driving the contempt at that point of, “This work is stupid,” or, “I don’t want to be working on this.” There are other factors there but people who actually want to work on the same things or who work to want to achieve the same goal working together, they very often become friends. It’s one of those things that is almost inevitable given that setup.

CORALINE: I feel like corporations are trying to address that by adopting corporate values or setting like, “Our quarterly goal is X,” but it feels to me like in my experience at GitHub, plays into this brother companies too. There’s a disconnect between stated goals of an organization and the actual goals of the individuals doing the work. As a software developer, I may not care about a 5% uptick in revenue. Of course, it affects me but that’s not really tied to my goals in that role. I have an impact on it through the software I create but my goal might be to get this application out the door or develop skills in swift or I have so many varied goals. It feels like corporate goals, in an attempt to get people to work together and breakdown this barriers but they fall short for some reason.

ARIA: There’s a bunch of factors there. Corporate goals are quite often too broad. They’re not tangible or if they are, they are not meaningful to the people. They are abstract. They are far off. They are quite often capitalist. We live in a culture where that’s how we fund businesses. We live in a way where you have to make money as a business. That is the goal, that is the purpose and you care about revenues but if they don’t have material effect to people, they’re not their goals.

But on the upside, humans can have multiple goals. It’s okay to be working toward increased revenue for the company, even if you won’t feel that goal deeply. But if you’re going to align people’s personal goals and their team’s goals with the company’s overall goal, that’s when you end up being successful. Sometimes, it can be very oppressive when we try to force people’s personal goals into a narrow shape. You get a lot of corporate mentorship programs, a lot of things like that. You end up erasing people and trying to force their goals to be aligned with the corporate world. I think this is where a lot of discrimination are coming from. This is where people start feeling like they can bring their whole selves to work because if they admit that they have goals separate from the corporations, they are pushed aside.

But then also, a more mindful company, a more humane company may find more clever ways to align those goals because there are a lot of places where it’s a win-win, where to stage in development of our culture, where a lot of the easy wins have been found. Finding win-win scenarios where everybody wins instead of somebody winning at the cost of somebody else, they’re getting harder to find. Competition is fierce and quite often that means then that if you do want something, you’re actually going to be taking away from another company, that’s where competition is or maybe you’re just extracting it from your employees. Maybe you’re winning at the cost of your employee’s health or happiness.

Pushing for extreme efficiency is really dangerous but it’s also where we’re at in our culture right now. It’s a joke among some people but also serious that that’s what late stage capitalism is. The easy wins have been made and now it’s eating ourselves.

CORALINE: Aria, you’ve talked about the walls that we built between each other and how people start being perceived by the role that they played instead of as whole human beings. I remember when devops was new. It seemed like one of the founding principles was that there should not be this barrier between a developer and a sysadmin that the responsibility should be spread or smeared across. What had been really strong organizational divisions before that?

ARIA: Part of this comes from the transition into cloud computing too. It used to be that system administrator, they had a culture of keeping things up all of the time. You buy expensive computers that last forever, very durable, very reliable and you protect them like you worked very, very hard to control access. You don’t want to rebuild and they’re not replaceable. The servers, like the ones I grew up with the ISP, these little servers by today’s standards, a cellphone is more powerful. They cost $20,000 apiece. These were the entire capital investment in a system for the year while they replace servers. They were incredibly expensive. Replacing hard disks was in the thousands of dollars. It was an absolutely gargantuan expenditure so the way we ran systems was very, very protective. We form an entire team to protect them from the developers, to protect them from the users. Then that grew into our modern system administrators and security professionals.

The sharp division of that role comes from the expensive hardware. If you have this $20,000 piece of hardware, you share it with all of the other users. Then if you break a $20,000 piece of hardware, not only have you broken the hardware, you’ve also caused an inconvenience for those other users. You set up a lot of mutual distrust and that created the old guard of our culture.

Then with cloud computing, that changed. Computers are now infinitely replaceable. The hardware is virtualized and abstracted. It’s sitting in a server room somewhere in Northern Virginia or Oregon or San Jose and when you want a new server, you just type a command into an API and it builds a new one and you can throw away the old and it will be recycled for somebody else’s use. Multiple tenancy, sharing the system is done at a very high and abstract way. As far as you’re concerned, you’re operating on a computer that nobody else uses and you’re in complete control of. That capability changed our culture.

But even so, we had a culture setup previously of protecting servers. Sysadmin is a separate role and developers and sys administrator had been pitted against each other in any organizations. The [inaudible] the system administrators and they were very, very stingy about handing them out to developers. You have to prove you are worthy to use this machine in an unrestricted capacity because when we don’t, somebody breaks it and it causes an outage for everybody.

Devops came along and the devops mindset was really trying to spread that out because the old reasons for being, have no longer existed. This is the thing we see time and time again in the industry, the old recently did a thing, no longer applies because technology has changed, because our culture has changed, because the economics have changed quite often.

Servers are cheap, even the hardware is cheap but we are in a period of increasing cultural change in a lot of places. But actually, development culture is not one of those, I don’t think. This is a case where development culture piled up on itself but as one of the only ones. The other one, we have this massive continuity back to, at least the dawn of the UNIX era. We have a huge cultural continuity all the way back there. Other parts of our field aren’t quite so continuous. The web was a bump but development itself has a very long continuity.

ASTRID: But I thought that the devops movement was supposed to be like a catalyst in culture change.

ARIA: When it works, right it is and actually, we betray ourselves whenever we talk of devops as a role. A frontend person, a backend person and a devop person, that’s not the way it was originally conceived. There’s a reason for that. They came out of the same shops that extreme programming was coming out of, where whole teams would work together on a project, blending roles pretty seamlessly and these were small companies and mostly consultancies. I think Pivotal Labs is working in teams of eight, at most. They would roll it out on the server. There would be some developers that do that, that they didn’t have a separate system administrator type of role and they really encouraged blending that together.

But then you try to apply some of these practices to a larger company that has an existing and entrenched systems infrastructure. It’s a lot easier to take your system administrator and say, “Instead of being on the system admin team, we’re going to take two of you and put you on to this development team and the other two of you on this other development team, we’re going to draw a line to the new place,” and you still end up with this ops skill set separate from the developer skills set. We betray ourselves whenever we think of devops as a role and not a practice that a lot of us can participate in.

Frontend developers participate as well. We push our changes live. We learn git. We learn version control. We learn a lot of the systems architecture stuff. We may not be [inaudible] but we are using this infrastructure in a way that it is our infrastructure. It’s not separate from us. Devops has always been about breaking down, not just barriers between teams but barriers between goals. Good devops culture doesn’t just about getting things to [inaudible] servers. It’s about getting people to work together through the whole stack and think about the operations all the way from beginning to end as a whole team.

That means that developers have to be involved in the planning and the designers have to talk to the developers. Some of this comes out of agile process too. We don’t need to write a full specification in advance, when we could just talk to each other. That has worked for better or for worse. Sometimes that also mean that therefore, we can skip on the prep work, which is deeply unfortunate but —

CORALINE: The side effect of agile is that we threw the baby out with the bath water when we [inaudible], I think.

ARIA: Yes to some degree. As much as those are things that we ever did purely. It’s much more a spectrum and not a strict division between the two. Waterfall has always been a strong mandate of agile practitioners have held up as, while we don’t do it this way. Nobody, except maybe NASA has ever done an all-design upfront. Just implement the details afterward. Even in places that try to do that, it never actually happened. You always have the circles and loops in the process, where the developers come back and say, “That’s not possible. Not with the constraints we’ve got. Let’s rework this.”

CORALINE: I remember my consulting days where we did [inaudible] front design and had requirements. We realized that something wouldn’t work or we have an idea how to do differently or if the stakeholders change their mind about something. There was this whole process in place called change requests. It was a formal document that you wrote up to say, “The specification says X but actually, we need to do Y and here’s the impact of that and here’s the impact on the timeline and here’s the new set of requirements and is very high friction.”

But the upside of that, of course change was really difficult to affect in a waterfall process but developers did documentation and requirements were relatively well understood. I don’t see that happening really with agile methodologies, where we’re at now we have this idea of architecture decision records, which I think is a step in the right direction and it takes the conversations the people have and the collaboration that we do outside of a documentation process and says, “Here are the things we discussed. Here are the things we considered and here’s the decision we made about how to address this and why,” and that provide some context for the people who come after when they’re trying to wrap their heads around how system comes together and they asked the inevitable question of like, “Why is X there? Why did they do X in this particular way?” I think having some kind of record of those conversations, a record of the context where much decisions were made, it can be very, very valuable.

ARIA: Absolutely. I think that actually come back to contempt. A lot of agile methods have contempt for documentation, have contempt for planning, have contempt for anything done upfront or anything that is more durable than necessary, which may be from a marketing organization, where you have the ability to throw away, that’s great.

Maybe if you’re building a prototype, where you’re just exploring a space as quickly as you can, sure. A lot of us are working on software that last years. I’m working on a system that was built in 2011 and right now is being rebuilt. I’ve worked on systems that were built in the 90s and are just now being rebuilt. Having contempt for planning documents has left us with no planning documents to refer to, when they go to do this rebuild. We don’t know what the feature set of our system is. Nobody knows it and it’s sad watching that play out. It’s really easy to get caught in those contempt things because it’s one of the easiest tools we’ve got for shaping culture.

CORALINE: I think it happened a lot too with MVPs and that process gets thrown out the window when you’re building an MVP. But if you’re MVP is successful, it is now the heart of your system. No one ever says that an MVP is throwaway. It becomes the core. Those rash decisions or those undocumented decisions or the edge cases that lead to certain decisions are all lost and the people who come after, just sort of mop up the MVP, are living with the consequences of things that they have no understanding for.

ARIA: Yeah, very much so.

JANELLE: You mentioned before that contempt could get assigned to a process like documentation or planning, something that was just like this, “Oh, that thing. Don’t do that.” Then you’ve got this emotional attribution to this thing. Then if a person, a human is in a certain role and that role carries out that process, they’re carrying out that thing that we carry contempt for and then if that role gets assigned contempt, then the human essentially gets assigned contempt and the same distancing effect that you’ve been talking about before, where we reduce people to an object and this contempt toward process can kind of come together and it seems like to just cause this isolation contempt effect in our culture, in business.

ARIA: Yeah, absolutely. I think that we are now reaping the result of that, having been contemptuous of a lot of these things in the past. We’re now seeing agile processes that fall apart and people who don’t feel that they fit in and alienation in developers and then documenters and testers, are one that we have widely hope contempt for agile processes. We don’t need testers. We write automated tests.

JANELLE: I fairly recently did a keynote at SeleniumConf and it was the first time ever I’ve been immersed in a culture that was just all the tester people. What I realized being coming from the world of the engineers or the developers and then you walk in to the tester world and it’s almost like a group therapy session for all of these people that are just been stomped on a horrible way. It was mind-blowing and sad and made me feel awful for the way that because of this role and how people are seen as less than human.

Then we have this reduction of, “What is your output level and your cost as a resource. Oh, you’re not as important as these developer people because we don’t have to pay you as much,” kind of thing. That association, as well as manual testing contempt to the process, all gets attributed to the people and then you see more and more of this distancing effect going on and I just saw these people hurting. I was like, “I had no idea what it was like on the other side of the wall.”

ARIA: Yep. Contempt management and contempt strategy at conferences have that group therapy aspect. Project management conferences have that, management conferences have that. Developer conferences don’t have that.

CORALINE: I think the other place that’s missing is in InfoSec but ironically, I have a friend who does InfoSec recruiting and InfoSec has this very elitist attitude and they’re [inaudible] and lead us in contempt but I learned surprisingly that InfoSec people don’t get paid. I assume they would get paid more than developers but they actually get paid significantly less.

ARIA: Very much so.

CORALINE: I love to see the same kind of thing happen with security that happened with devops.

ARIA: Absolutely. I think devops mindsets can lead that way but we need to identify why we push that away and how to integrate those skills into our teams. One of the things that we run into now is that we’re running into teams scaling limits. Teams can be no bigger than 12 people. Generally speaking, functional teams are smaller than that. It takes immensely more organization to build teams bigger that than. It’s not linear growth as teams has scale.

Past four or five people, you are starting to have communication dominate the team size and as you scale up to the ten or twelve people on the team, communication has to be formalized or else, it will completely override any ability to do work. You’re in meetings all the time. What we need to do is get better and having consultants, whether paid consultants or not, whether they’re just employees that flip between teams and consults and have a consulting relationship that way.

We need to get better at that because it means that we can actually have these people who are experts in these things available to us, rather than having to be the all-singing, all-dancing developer-documenter-commenter-tester-devops person and deployment engineer. I think that’s going to be hard because that means that we have to eliminate contempt and restructure how we think about teams and that means that a lot of people have to change their attitudes and their practices and that’s going to be very difficult.

Developers are an interesting bunch because being put on this pedestal, being the cream of the industry, the ones that everybody are seeking after are in a place where if we started acknowledge those places where we’re contemptuous, we started acknowledging the problems in our culture. It feels like it puts us in precarious position. It doesn’t. It makes us better at what we do but it feels like we’re undermining ourselves. There’s techniques to fight that — framing things in terms of uplifting others, instead of in terms of knocking down yourself — various things like that help a bunch. But what we do to fix these things is going to take some work and takes some cleverness too to make that happen.

ASTRID: At this point in the show, we start out talking about our reflections and some of the things that struck us or stood out during the conversation. I can start. In the beginning, in your origin story, Aria you talked about how you found opportunities in a really small place when your family moved to the more rural part in Colorado. Throughout that conversation, I kept thinking about what you said because you were describing your introduction to the industry and how you started to really love software development as a whole.

You said that you had a holistic approach to it. In what we just discussed, it seems like that might be a solution to some of the issues that we are talking about or some of the culture problems that we see. A lot of times when we are describing ways that we might be able to make a difference, we’re thinking about these big macro problems and how to solve them. But there might be actually a better plan to start in a really, really small place and use that opportunity to try to think a little bit differently and think outside of our boxes and make an impact there so that that can be spread.

ARIA: Absolutely.

CORALINE: I was struck by the part of the conversation where we talk about specialization. Now, specialization can create boundaries between people in teams and lead to the contemptuous attitude toward other people in other teams, I actually think about this a lot, as a journalist, I know I have a different set of skills and a different way of approaching problems and a different way of working with other people. I do worry about over specialization and I think how we teach new developers to your point, Astrid we do encourage specialization because you have to rapidly develop skills that make you marketable. I’m going to be thinking about how we can solve that problem, especially for early career developers.

JANELLE: I think I just had my head in the clouds this whole time. Software seems so small now compared to just what is going on around us. Humanity right now is frightening. I think we all feel that and it’s so easy to label people as criminals or label people with these negative words that allow us to turn people into objects, into roles, into clowns. It’s the same kind of thing. It creates this context of interaction that allows us to disable empathy in our brains and to push people as distanced away from us as possible to feel disgust and contempt for other people.

But the other thing that happens is developers are blind to their contempt. Developers don’t feel it. Developers are the ones that are sitting on top and if you take that same metaphor and look what’s happening, it’s interesting because you see these people that are in pain. You see these people that see themselves as victims that are afraid and lost in that and their solution to their pain is to see other people with contempt because it gives them an outlet for all that pain inside them to have some way for that to go. It’s so easy when people commit atrocities to forget that there is humanity inside them. As problems raised around us, I think the thing that we all have to remember is that inside of us, there is a soul. Inside of us, we all have a soul and it would be good for us to remember that.

ARIA: Yeah, very much so.

CORALINE: Aria, what are your thoughts out of our conversation?

ARIA: I was kind of struck by just how solidly contempt connects to everything, how much it has driven so much of our culture and how little we talk about the things that worked well. It kind of caught me off guard that that’s where things stayed so much. Many developers who are actually joyful in what they do and they love teaching and there’s a whole new model that we don’t talked about nearly enough. We talked about the failures of the old model a little bit but there are some people who are very, very successful in building successful products and build fantastic tools for the people and really love what they do and makes me want to seek them out and start telling new stories, start telling stories of the people who are doing it wonderfully.

CORALINE: Thank you very much for being on the show today, Aria. It was a great conversation. We really enjoyed having you.

ARIA: Thank you.

CORALINE: I want to remind people that if you like the kinds of conversations that we have on Greater Than Code, you can support us materially by going to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. All patrons, regardless of their pledge level, get access to our patron-only Slack community, where you can have conversations with other members of the community and panelists and guests to continue talking about the topics that we talked about on the show. Please consider giving to us through Patreon.

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Special Edition: Innovation Amidst a Disaster with Jeff Reichman

Mandy Moore — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 20:19:49 +0000

Panelists:

Jamey Hampton | Coraline Ada Ehmke | Astrid Countee | Janelle Klein

Guest Starring:

Jeff Reichman: @fileunderjeff | January Advisors | Sketch City

Show Notes:

In this special edition of Greater Than Code, we talk to Jeff Reichman, a technologist living in the Houston area who co-founded Sketch City, a non-profit community of 2,500+ people who apply technology and data to public problems.

This episode talks about how the Houston tech community came together to help people through Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath, the technology opportunities in disaster response, the harvey-api that they developed, and how tech devs need to be side-by-side with relief efforts, while responding to tech needs right away.

Resources:

Sketch City Slack Channel

harvey-api

Report Your Hours

Code for America

How Houston is using open data to handle Hurricane Harvey

The Best Way to Find Out Which Hurricane Harvey Shelters Near You Need Help and What They Need

Harvey Needs

Reflections:

Astrid: Using temporary projects as a means for helping people during emergency situations.

Jamey: People showing up, wanting to help, and being motivated to help others.

Janelle: There is light in the world even when we are drowning in darkness.

Coraline: Creating cultures of respect where you have respect and empathy for everyone doing their jobs in a way that allows everyone to contribute fully.

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and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

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Transcript:

JAMEY: Hello everyone and welcome to Greater Than Code. I’m Jamey Hampton and I’m here with Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hello everyone. I’m also really happy to welcome Astrid Countee to the panel today.

ASTRID: Thank you, Coraline and I would like to also introduce my friend, Janelle Klein.

JANELLE: And I’d like to introduce Jeff Reichman. Jeff Reichman is a technologist living in the Houston area. He graduated from Temple University with the BA in English and an MA in creative writing. He’s a principal at January Advisors and in 2016, he co-founded Sketch City, a nonprofit community of 2500 hundred people who apply technology and data to public problems. It’s very awesome. Welcome, Jeff.

JEFF: Thank you all very much. Appreciate to being here.

JANELLE: One of the ways we like to start off this show is by getting a little background on your origin story. Could you tell us a little bit about your special power and how you acquired it?

JEFF: I have moved across the country for most of my adult life. I grew up in Philadelphia, I lived in Santa Barbara, California for a while, Washington DC for a little bit. I moved to Houston about eight years ago and I love it here. This is my adopted hometown. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Over the last eight years, I’ve gone from introvert to extrovert and started going to meetups and meeting people in my neighborhood and in my community, just gotten to know folks. If I have a superpower, it might be just meeting lots of people and understanding the power that happens when you unite them.

JANELLE: How can you go into from introvert to extrovert and making that shift because I’m sure like a whole lot of the listeners are very far on the introvert camp? What was the process of making that transition?

JEFF: I love reading books. I got two degrees in English and I love spending time alone and what I realized is it’s more about how long I can be around people. I have a particularly high threshold where I can really be on, so to speak for about five hours a day. Then I need the rest of my work time to think and reflect and respond and strategize and whatnot by myself so protecting that balance in my work life has been really helpful.

I also decided back in 2011 that I was going to go to meetups. I was going to go meet people. I don’t care who I was going to meet up. I was going to shake people’s hands and hear about their stories and learn about them. What ended up happening, especially in a place like Houston, is you meet the most amazing people and you get really into their stories and where they come from. You learned to really love people in a particularly human level. I’ve been doing that now for about seven years and it’s just taken on a life of its own, especially with these relief efforts.

CORALINE: I used to be really, really shy. Especially when I go to a conference, I would just feel overwhelmed by the press of people. I start to play a little game with myself, where I would say, “I’m going to walk through the room and talk to the person with the most interesting shoes.” I’m going to find the person with a red shirt and I’m going to talk to two people with red shirts and that really helped me to come out of my shyness. Eventually, become a lot more gregarious.

JAMEY: That’s a great game. I actually did something a little bit similar when I was nervous at a conference recently. I took a selfie of myself and posted on Twitter and tag it with the conference and I was like, “If you can find me, come talk to me and give me a sticker,” or something like that. Dozens of people are like, “I saw you on Twitter. Here’s a sticker.”

CORALINE: That’s really cool. Jeff, how did you make the transition from being an English major — I was an English major too but I didn’t finish — to being a technologist?

JEFF: I was really fortunate that I grew up with the computer. I’m enough to earn years now and I had a computer in home as a very little kid. I’ve always been familiar with technology, my brother and I would take it apart and put it back together. I love books and I was an English major but when I needed to get a job, I got a job with a technology startup in California because I could write proposals and we did business with governments. I had just started picking up and doing what was necessary. I got interested in coding. I realized that it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be and I could get a lot done with some very basic skills.

Any time I have the block of time to dedicate to it, I try and get my skills a little bit better and it just was a natural transition a couple of years ago. Because I’m able to work for myself, when I decided what kind of projects do I want to work on, I really made a conscious decision that I never want to lose those tech skills. I always want to be refining them and that’s been awesome.

CORALINE: I looked at the ReadMe for one of the projects which we’re going to be talking about today and I think for the Harvey API, we really demonstrates the value of being able to write and being able to communicate clearly and how important that is in a software product.

JEFF: I wish there were more writers involved in tech teams who can help document and market and communicate so that developers and designers can be left to their job and left alone by people who are constantly knocking on their door saying, “I got to get this to this person. I’m talking to the press. What’s this?” English majors are the glue that holds it all together.

CORALINE: Totally agree.

ASTRID: Jeff, you mentioned that the job you have, the startup had something to do with the government. Can you talk a little bit more about how you got started working on projects related to government issues?

JEFF: We were a small startup that provided parking software: parking permits, parking enforcement, parking tickets and that kind of thing. I was a sales rep for part of my time there so I would sell to local governments. I respond to RFPs, I get to know how the purchasing process works, understand how to verify vendors and things like that and I got really interested in how local government works because they do a lot. If you work in parking, parking is an auxiliary service. It makes money. It’s something that people pay for and then that money goes somewhere else. It doesn’t go back into parking. It’s vitally important. If parking fails, everything else fails. If you can’t park your car, your experience is ruined so it’s a critical front line customer service function of the city and it gets very little respect. Yet, it processes tons and tons of money.

I really got insight into the types of people who work in positions like that, these really good people who take their jobs really seriously. That kind of spidered from there a few years ago as I started to work with the City of Houston and really started to take that mindset of understanding the types of people who work in government and how hard they work and respect for them. That’s helped me worked with teams to uncover new things that we can all work on as a community.

CORALINE: It seems like elected officials get all the attention but like you said, there are a lot of hardworking and very dedicated people who are actually doing the work of government and it’s really interesting in that, you got to spend time with them and empathize with the jobs that they’re doing too.

JEFF: Thank you. They work really, really hard. Elected officials deserve a lot of credit. It’s an impossible job, you have to shake hands with everybody all the time, you have to be nice to everybody all the time, even on your trolls. You have to watch everything you say and do and be really careful. Win a popularity contest every once in a while. Those people are really important and powerful for spreading a message and setting of the tone, of values and agenda but they’d be nowhere without the thousands and thousands of other people who fill the potholes and answer the 311 calls and do the daily work of government. At least for the City of Houston, it does so much that we just take for granted. The fact that our garbage is getting picked up after the largest rainfall in American history a week later is amazing.

JAMEY: Jeff, I’m curious about how your experience working with these government people affected when Harvey first hit and your reaction and how you wanted to step in and do something about that? How was that related in a way?

JEFF: In any working relationship, you have to build trust and trust comes with time and with successful delivery of projects. I think that our community, the Sketch City community has built up a lot of trust with government. We have a lot of people who are collaborating with government officials on projects. We have City of Houston, taking some of our projects and embedding them into their own infrastructure. We have a really good working relationship with them and that’s helpful because what we want are ideas for things that are going to make an impact.

Right now, the people who know what’s going to make an immediate impact to the people working for the city and working for all the relief agencies and the relief efforts so having that trust existing for several years, it makes it a lot easier to simply sit down at the table next to them, watch what’s going on and start coming up with ideas for how we can help. Then we’ve got this huge tech community, both Houston and the globe but especially Houston, that put everything aside, their power stayed on, no water gotten their house and they said, “I’m fine. What can I do to help?” And I’m sure the rest of the world is seeing these stories. It’s true for the tech community too, where the fourth largest city in the country got a ton of people and it just came together beautifully.

CORALINE: What is Sketch City, Jeff?

JEFF: Sketch City is a local Houston nonprofit community of technology and data people, who believe that tech and data play a role in public decision making. All too often, elected officials, department directors, agency heads aren’t necessarily thinking through the data end of things or they don’t have the data or they’re not trained on real time data or modern data methods for analysis and we seek to advance that and educate them and do work alongside them to help give them the best information they have to make a good decision.

JANELLE: I’ve been listening to you talk about this kind of theme that’s emerging about what it means to respect for you. I’ve recently been emerged in this kind of CEO investor club culture, which is very different from hanging out with engineers. It’s like the world looks like on the other side. I can’t help but think about all these parallels between the community and government and respecting the people that do all the things and the same kind of dissonance of us versus them that we have in our organizations with our business leadership versus engineering culture in that same us versus them clash. I’m curious what kind of parallels do you see because you’re so involved on both sides. I’d really love to hear your perspective.

JEFF: I think that parallel definitely exists in government. You have lots of silos, you have people who say, “That’s not my job. I’m not curious about this technology thing. The tech people handle that.” Those same silos exist but I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and I talk to a lot of new entrepreneurs who want to start a software company and they said, “I just need a coder. I just need to get some money and hire a coder.” I kind of look at them and say, “One, if you’re doing this full time, just teach yourself to code. Figure out a way, give yourself a budget of $100 and get yourself to a prototype. How would that work?”

There really is this ability for some people who have an inner disciplinary background, even just very basic technical skills like I’ve built a website before so I know the process of thinking about what I want and then learning how to do it or adapting a theme or a template. Just going through the very basics of building those tech muscles gives you respect for that intricacies of the job and how detail oriented it is. I think what’s great about the City of Houston is that we have a mayor who is a worker. He’s a lawyer. He’s a legislator. Now, he’s an executive and he has deep respect for all of his employees and has a genuine interest in how the job gets done and how to make it better.

I think that type of intellectual curiosity, it naturally leads to respect. You can sit there and say, “Their job is just to be a garbage man and pick up the garbage.” When you start thinking about, “How are they doing that? What’s their process look like? How physically taxing on the body is it to do a route? How do you route the trucks? What is dispatch look like? How do you keep them safe?” All the things that go into that, you start to realize that this is a pretty well-oiled machine and there’s a lot of those machines. Just to get back to your question, I think those silos exist because of ignorance around how hard a particular job is and once you just pick up a shuttle and start shoveling for a little while and your shoulder start to burn, that gives you a respect for people who do that all day long.

CORALINE: It kind of reminds me of what the onboarding process at my current job is. I’m on a team that supports warehouse associates and for the first entire week of my job, we actually went to the warehouse and did various jobs in the warehouse so that we would understand their needs and understand what their working life was like and be able to create solutions that would make life easier for them. I think that comes down to the theme that’s emerging here of respect for people who do the work and how important that respect is. Do you think executives don’t have respect for people who write code or do you think that it’s just this mysterious black box for them? Does that lack of respect go both ways?

JEFF: I think it can. In government especially, respect is one component of it but just the way the bureaucracy is set up, you have to have elected officials say, “I want my bureaucratic people — the people who are going to work here when I’m gone — to take risks and to be rewarded for taking risks. If they fail, that’s okay.” Ultimately, it comes down to the leader setting the tone to say figure out a better way to do this. Otherwise, people who work in government are risk averse and they’re not going to try something new if something already works.

What we’re seeing now in Houston is unprecedented scale of disaster and needs and things that these people who already have full time day jobs, now have full time night jobs too. It has gotten really complicated and in times of crisis, that forces a type of innovation like it. If it fails, that’s fine. At least we got it out there and we’re trying and we’re supporting and we’re getting better. Because in emergency situations, you fail. You fail constantly and it’s terrible, awful feeling to know that you can’t hit home runs every time you come to the plate because there’s real stakes.

I think when you’re in an environment like that, it gives you some freedom to innovate technologically that you otherwise might not have. Those innovations do two things: number one, they prove that tech innovation exists and that it can be done and that it can be done quickly and cheaply in a way that highlights new solutions, and number two, it proves that technology should have a seat at the table, that if you’re thinking about citywide housing relief, there’s ways in which low tech temporary solutions can really help. What the City of Houston in its wisdom does is it make sure that they pull in people from all of this different areas and there is a seat for technology at the table.

JAMEY: I really like this talk about innovation and I’d like to dig into that a little bit deeper. Can you tell us about some of the innovations that you’ve been seeing and that you’ve been working on in the wake of Harvey?

JEFF: Sure. We have been working with a lot of different organizations that have been coordinating crowdsource dispatch and crowdsource verification of information. When you’re displaced, when your house floods, you go to a shelter and that shelter is going to feed you, it’s going to give you some fresh clothes, maybe, it’s going to give you medical supplies and the shelters are ad hoc. It’s a church basement. It’s an elementary school gymnasium. These are places that are run by volunteers that don’t have experience handling hundreds of people coming through their door so everybody kind of makes do.

People generally will start organizing through Google Forms and Google Spreadsheets but there’s limitations to that, especially when you’re at the scale of a disaster like Harvey. What we ended up doing was linking with all of those teams that were coordinating the dispatch in the Google Sheets and we built an API. It’s called the Harvey API and it covers the full gamut from rescue to shelter to the needs of the shelters to ordering the products on Amazon to routing them to particular organizations.

You can pull from different components of that API as necessary. If you wanted to launch a real time shelter map because the shelter map of the city isn’t very good, you could build one that’s 10 times better drawing from the same data. The biggest concern in an emergency situation is that wherever you get your data from, it’s up to date and it’s accurate. That’s why we’ve honed in on that API and we’re already starting to put it to use for the preparatory efforts for Hurricane Irma.

ASTRID: Jeff, one of the things that you said was that emergency situations showed that technology does need to have a seat at the table. Can you talk a little more about some ways in which technologists can be helpful because it may not occur to some people that during an emergency, we might want to tap into your local technologists as well?

JEFF: Totally. There’s a couple of ways. I’ll give you a simple and easy example and then kind of a crowdsource example. Forgive me for getting wonky. This happens when we talk about governments stuff but the city of Houston is engaged in a bunch of different ways to get FEMA reimbursement. One of those things is volunteer hours. If you log your hours for volunteering for Harvey relief efforts, the city can verify that and submitted for reimbursement. It’s done all on paper so we created a digital form in a website called ReportYourHours.com. It’s a prototype but that was a need that was brought up in a meeting and we were able to turn it around in a couple of hours, send it through the approval channels and get it out there to people who have been volunteering all through the holiday weekend. It’s Wednesday now. This past weekend was Labor Day weekend. We wanted to capture that as soon as possible, especially for people who maybe weren’t part of a coordinated relief effort at one of our shelters or with one of our NGOs that’s running those things.

Just by being at the table and hearing this is a big need, it could mean millions upon millions of dollars in reimbursement for the city. It’s hugely impactful. Here’s a paper form, figure out the logic, get a site out there. You draw a little bit from backend database development, a little bit from frontend form management and a little bit from marketing and you get something turned around quickly. I think the tech having a seat at the table enables that to happen.

But beyond that, the second example I would give is called the Texas Muck Map and that was a team of developers that built a map that as soon as the water recedes, you have to pull out the carpet, you have to cut out the drywall as fast as possible so that mold doesn’t grow and what not and that’s called mucking. There’s a lot of people who are in their 70s. There’s a lot of people who are disabled or have disabilities that don’t allow them to do that work right away so we created a map basically, “I need you to muck me out,” or, “I here to muck,” that worked really well over the course of the weekend. It was a need that the community had, the government platform really wasn’t mobilized yet, it was just getting started so we were able to get something out of the community that they could use and then the platform absorbed that data and we merged with them. Being able to have tons of people talking about solutions together and not duplicating efforts and then coming up with things that can serve as interim solutions, I think is really, really helpful.

CORALINE: I’m curious how you organize a group of 2500 technologists without running into problems with egos or with bikeshedding or with platform arguments.

JEFF: It’s tough. We have those things. There’s room for everybody. We’re open. The leadership team of Sketch City are the best people in the world. These are people that I think so highly of and you attract flies with honey, so to speak when you set a tone as particular way, then I think you attract the right people.

We’re platform independent. We don’t make recommendations about particular technologies. We just want to connect technologists with real public problems and policy people who can explain the nuances of it. I think policy people and tech people have a lot in common, that they live in the details and if you don’t work in policy or if you don’t work in tech, no one wants to hear about those details but the two can share details with one another.

The community management is a little chaotic but the teams know how to self-assemble. The people in our community are incredibly capable, they’re project managers, they’re CEOs and they’re senior developers in real life and they come in and they flex their muscles and execute. We’re lucky in the sense that the people in our community are so capable that they don’t really require a ton of management. We just play traffic cop and connect them to people and resources.

CORALINE: I’m really interested in one of the things you said that struck me as counterintuitive and that is that disaster opens opportunities for innovation. I would think that in a disaster situation, people would want to fall back onto the familiar, even if that’s less efficient. What do you think that is that those sorts of situations open the door for innovation that otherwise, maybe wouldn’t happen?

JEFF: I think having lived through a disaster now, it changes you. It’s only been a couple of days, I’m still in the middle of the adrenaline field, sleepless night, 24/7 work but there’s too much to do. There’s just too much to do. There’s too much for people to handle. The infrastructure set up to handle this kind of volume of need is not there. Even as much as we try, it’s not there. We have hundreds of organizations coming together and that gets into a process and the government is really good at organizing that process but there’s inefficiencies across the board.

When you have trust with your friends and neighbors and government officials, those things that they can’t get to, where there’s a potential technical solution, they’re willing to give it a try. They’re willing to cut through bureaucracy to get it out there because time is essential. There’s too many people in need. I don’t quite know how to describe it other than there’s too much to do and too few resources to do then. Naturally, people are going to look towards technology to make it more efficient. Even if it’s imperfect. Even if it doesn’t quite work right. We want to support it but it doesn’t have to be a perfect solution. It just has to be out there in helping people.

JAMEY: As someone who’s pouring their heart and soul into this right now, how do you keep yourself from just feeling overwhelmed? I kind of almost hear that in your voice. How do you get past that and focus on doing something really meaningful, which is what you’re doing?

JEFF: It’s overwhelming. You’re in a constant state of being overwhelmed but I think that there’s a certain zen that comes along with that. I watched incredible leaders, people who are leading efforts far larger and more important than anything that I’m doing and I see how efficient they are. I see how they’re thinking things through. I see their flaws too. You can tell in my flaws are magnified as well in situations like this but it goes through phases. You have an emergency phase, where it’s completely overwhelming. You have a relief phase, where the volume and the scope becomes clear and then you have a rebuilding phase.

I was really lucky that people from Occupy Sandy, people who work for the city for Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, they jumped into the Slack and they pulled me aside and they’re like, “Hey, man. Take some time, try and get some sleep. Here’s how it’s going to go. In a week, it’s going to be like this. In a month, it’s going to be like that.” That kind of guidance is invaluable. Too many people to name that offered that kind of guidance and it’s really helpful and it keeps you from being overwhelmed because this is a marathon now.

ASTRID: Jeff, one of the things that you mentioned early on was if you start working with local government, how you can make a huge impact, which I think is something that doesn’t occur to a lot of people. What would be your advice for somebody who is looking to make that impact for them to get started working with their own local government?

JEFF: I would definitely join your local Code for America brigade. If you don’t have a Code for America brigade, start one. If you don’t have an idea where to get started, reach out to Code for America. It’s CodeForAmerica.org and they’ll help you. It’s helpful to have a person in government who also believes in what you’re doing and wants to help that you can partner with and they can run the internal circles of legitimizing what you’re doing and you can run the external community building stuff. Together, if you are able to start a long term relationship, it’s magical.

I watched from the very beginning a gentleman named Seth Etter, who’s a community leader in Wichita, Kansas. I used to up to Wichita to facilitate Startup Weekends. I watched him make a decision to take his development community organizations skills and apply it to civic tech. He started Open Wichita, which is their civic hacking group. He got a job with the OpenGov Foundation and his leveraging best practices from across the world to his group and from scratch, created a thriving civic tech community in Wichita, Kansas. If he can do that there, you can do that anywhere.

JANELLE: It’s so inspiring. The community just really stepping up and seeing problems that are like, “All right. How can we solve this?” You’ve got this community filled with all these fantastic engineers. They can see problems and come up with solutions and then with tragedy happening all around you, it seems like one of the consequences of that is you’ve got this well of energy of wanting to help and you just need someone to direct all that energy and people are willing to jump in and code and help chip in and make a difference with the skills they have. There are so many different things we can do with tech, you know?

JEFF: Yes. When we start pollinating the government with people with a community tech background or when somebody studied computer science and then got a master’s in public policy and it’s now an innovation analyst at a city or something like that, that’s where this is going to take root. I’m a consultant by trade and that’s how I make my money but this should be a core government function. This should be within government. Forward looking cities and forward looking states are starting to do this. I’m thrilled that the City of Houston is taking huge leaps forward to be in the top flight class of cities innovating.

ASTRID: Do you think that every city should have a chief technology officer?

JEFF: They do but the chief technology officer function is really to oversee the hundreds of applications that the city supports. They have permitting systems. They have routing systems. They have GIS infrastructure. They have a zillion things. That’s a huge organizational lift and that’s hard to do. The city has an innovation office that they just created, directed by Jesse Bounds and Jesse’s amazing and his staff: [inaudible] and Steven David and Myja Lark. They’re amazing. They’re able to fill that role, consultant plus technology product manager and as that team grows, I think the city will begin to transform even more.

JANELLE: One of the things that really struck me is this idea of the knowledge being coupled with how to make things better and what the problems are, being coupled with the people that do the work. From one perspective, we talked about the importance of the leaders respecting those that do the work. It also sets a precedent in disaster situations and what we need to innovate in really all the time, we had to find ways to push decision making toward the people with the knowledge, the people who are doing the work. I’m curious as to what kind of ideas you might have in terms of how we ought to run things differently to facilitate that?

JEFF: Everything I learn, I learned it from Hackathons. This is like a real, big, long hackathon. I think that being involved in your civic hackathon as a participant is really helpful. Being involved as a government official is really helpful in getting to know one another and coming out of city hall and meeting tech people, where they live and where they are, I think is really helpful. Then knowing how to scope out a project, scope out a need, build a prototype, test it, stay up all night and get something done, I think hackathons are the best training you can get. That’s a superlative. It’s probably not the best training you can get but if you’re a tech person and casually, you just want to prepare for something like this, your civic hackathon is the place to do it.

CORALINE: I’m curious, Jeff. I think that when the disaster strikes, a lot of people are motivated to help in any way they can. Through organizations like Sketch City, there’s a structure in place to allow them to help but how do you maintain that enthusiasm for helping local governments be more efficient when the disaster is not present? How do you motivate people to help in the communities when it’s a regular day?

JEFF: It was really great. If you’re a sales person, you want to sell something that people want to buy. What’s great about this is that people want to help. The community that we’ve grown is this community of people who opted in and raised their hand and said, “I got these tech skills. I’m curious about local government.” They’re usually not the people who are protesting every day. But they are the people who say, “You know what? I can make a difference in this particular way.”

I’m particularly passionate about environmental issues and criminal justice issues and education issues. My passions grow more than I do work in those fields but I would gladly volunteer my weekends every weekend, all weekends for the foreseeable future, when environmental data causes like that, that just is so necessary. I think about that instinct and I know that thousands of other people have that same instinct. It just needs to be given a channel to be expressed in some way.

To your point, I don’t think we have to keep people motivated so much as we do keeping people delivering stuff that can be helpful. With each win, more people come in and more people see what’s possible from their volunteer time and the winds just keep coming as people motivate themselves.

JAMEY: We’ve been talking a lot about what’s been done reactively, as a reaction to a disaster but what do you hope maybe could be done in the future proactively, maybe in Houston or even something that could be passed on to other cities, to kind of get things set up in case something like this happens again. Hurricane Irma potentially heading again right away, which is just terrible and scary. What are your thoughts on putting things into place to be more ready in the future?

JEFF: Our team is already working with Code for America brigades in Florida and all the volunteers over there. We’ve put together a document of best practices from our own experience so far and help set things up over there so it didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. From a technical perspective, I think the Harvey API is pretty powerful. Oftentimes, people want to build the frontend. They want to build a website, a central source of information and that’s good and we need that. But my passion is really around a central source of data truth. There’s so much data that’s collected. It needs to be real time. Sometimes, it’s official data. Sometimes, it’s crowdsource data.

If we can provide a backbone for that, in an API that can serve it up into whatever front facing website you want to build — you want to build the map with leaflet, you want to build a map with Esri, I don’t care — as long as it shows the right data. That’s really where our efforts are concentrated and that API is open source. It’s on the Sketch City GitHub organization.

Now, Jesse Wolgamott is the primary architect along with [inaudible] and about 11 other contributors. Those folks are tired. They’re exhausted from this. What I’m really hopeful that we can do, just hand over our best practices on organizations so far and have them build on it but also let them leverage our technology as much as they want to. My hope is that people develop on Harvey API and that becomes either that or some future iteration of that becomes a central way of managing multiple data sources.

JANELLE: Jeff, earlier you were talking about handling the overwhelming stress that comes with an event like this. The thing that you said was that the calmness in the storm comes from clarity and understanding the storm, as opposed to conquering it. When you get people together and they have a plan and they’re executing, the relief comes from that clarity instead. I see that same thing happen in technology too, where you’ve got chaos happening because essentially, not clarity in the plan so it’s always like hyper-stress. I’m wondering if some of these skills and ideas that you’ve learned in the context of the community have potentially helped you in consulting.

JEFF: Maybe. I think that it’s just so overwhelming the amount of adrenaline that goes through your body for days and days on end — I’m not a scientist and I don’t really know. I’m guessing it’s adrenaline — that I don’t quite know how to articulate it but you kind of have to adapt and get to a new level of normal and know that you can’t operate in this frenetic pace and this feeling like things are out of control at all times. I guess, it’s kind of yoga in the sense that you have to find your inner peace and people respond to how you respond to things.

If you’re frantic, you can agitate them. Have you ever been in a meeting where people are cutting one another off? I’m not into meetings like that. I don’t like meetings like that. I don’t operate that way and I don’t like being dragged into meetings like that. I like structured and efficient. I guess the point is that I don’t stress out that easily to begin with. I’ve got some good mental tools for distressing and not getting stressed out. But in a situation that’s completely and totally overwhelming, you have to trust that people around you are working as best as they can and everybody tries to dial down the amount of stress.

You have to take breaks for mental relief. You have to cry. You have to release physically the agitation that you feel so that you can get back to work because we’re ahead of schedule in getting people out of shelters. The needs are not as overwhelming just yet and we’re preparing for that next phase but there’s just a lot going on so you can’t waste time getting stressed about that stuff anymore than you’re naturally going to be stressed. I don’t know if that answers your question or not but I’d like to think that practice back in my regular life and feel stress-free all the time.

ASTRID: It sounds like what you said, which is what I heard you say is that when everything is crazy but you can know something and you can actually do something about what you know, that gives you something to focus on, as opposed to being focused on everything being crazy.

JEFF: Yeah. It gives you some control. It helps you control what you’re doing. Something that I know a lot of us felt immediately after Harvey stopped raining was we felt out of control. We wanted to do something we didn’t know what to do. We felt powerless and helpless as we watched our neighbors and our friends drown and that’s terrible. I think that getting some control over the situation in whatever small way you can, whether you’re helping the Cajun Navy with dispatch or you’re organizing food relief or you’re building a website or you’re just hanging out with your friends, brainstorming ideas, that’s a really good way of dealing with what’s going on and finding your direction as fast as possible and figure out where you can best help. It’s incumbent upon you. There’s lots of volunteers who show up and say, “I’m ready for something. Give me something to do,” you’ve got to figure it out yourself.

CORALINE: We like to end each show with a reflection on the conversation that we’ve had and calls to action.

ASTRID: One of the things that came out the conversation that I thought was really interesting was the idea of using temporary projects as a means of helping. A lot of times when we talk about technology, especially if you’re trying to do some tech for good, we’re thinking in a much bigger longer term way. What I thought was a good thing to takeaway is that it may become actually more important to have the ability to very quickly come up with something temporarily to get you to the next week or to the next month so that you can make it to those long term projects. That’s just as important and maybe, possibly even more important, especially when it comes to some sort of emergency situation or disaster situation because that’s usually where a lot of things are falling apart and it would be great to be able to have a community that is ready to do something.

JAMEY: For me, this whole conversation was very emotional and kind of an emotional roller coaster in a lot of ways because seeing all of the destruction and everything bad that’s happening on the news has been really tough during this disaster and in general. I think that it’s very easy for the news to focus on these bad things and have them feel overwhelming.

To talk to Jeff today and hear, particularly what he was saying about people coming and showing up and wanting to help and Coraline’s question about how to motivate people, when he was talking about where people are already motivated because they want to help, they want to be able to do something for their community and give back and it’s important to people and the fact that he has met and worked with all of these people who all feel similarly to him about that and knowing that there’s a lot of people like that out there, is a really good thing to hear and a healthy thing for community and also for everyone to be aware of our community, I think when things seem very grim. The emotional roller coaster for me that there’s a very hopeful lining with all of these people working to help so I felt really good about that.

I think that after disasters like this, we get an outpouring of support that’s really impressive and I’ve seen a lot of sentiment from people about how in a way it’s kind of sad that we have to wait for some disaster to happen in order to bring people together like this. I can see where they’re coming from in that way but to me, I see it more as now that we have these people together working on things, we have to take that blessing and continue running with it in order to make it not sad and a really worthwhile thing that just happened to [inaudible] out of a tragedy.

ASTRID: It’s sad that people think that people don’t do this. I think there are people who are doing this and don’t get attention. With the disaster and then [inaudible], I think it’s actually hopeful that you’re not alone, that there’s a lot of people who are like you who want to do something good.

JAMEY: I think you are totally on point about people who want to do something just needing a way to channel it. It’s situations like this that provide the catalyst for that channel, not the catalyst for people wanting to help.

JANELLE: I think my reflection is as listening to this conversation, I’ve just been so inspired by just seeing how much light there is in the world. Even when we seem to be drowning in darkness, there’s all this beautiful light in the world around us of people coming together and people pitching in to help. The thing that ends up holding people back is the simple stuff of like, “I didn’t realize that this was a place I could channel my energy,” and if this minimal amount of structure is set up to tie people together, to partner people with the right people, we can channel all that energy that is already out there in the world and start solving these problems.

We’ve got all these engineers with all these amazing problem solving skills. If we set up a channel to say, “Let’s sit down at the table and talk about how we can solve these problems,” things just start happening. Maybe, if we started knocking down some of those barriers and just making that first step to get involved and connect it with the right people, maybe that’s all it take to shift direction.

CORALINE: I was really struck by the underlying theme of today’s conversation and creating cultures of respect and how creating a culture like that where you have respect and empathy for everyone doing their jobs and for the system that’s doing its job can lead to real solutions and can lead to bringing people together in a way that makes everyone able to contribute fully and open opportunities for innovation.

I think that’s something that each of us can take with us into our work life and our home life and hopefully, also channel into doing some greater good in our communities. I’m curious, Jeff if people want to donate your effort, either time or money, how would they go about helping Sketch City?

JEFF: They can just go to SketchCity.org. There’s a Slack, a Meetup, a GitHub. We appreciate all of our contributors from all around the world but first and foremost, check out Code for America and get connected with them so that you can bring civic hacking to your community.

CORALINE: I hope that our listeners are also inspired to take what they learned from this conversation and apply it and do some good in the world and volunteer and give money, if you can’t volunteer. I think the conversation that we had today is really, really important, especially not just thinking in terms of disaster relief but in terms of how each of us can contribute to making our communities better and safer and healthier. We feel very privileged to be able to have the guests that we have on the show and to be able to share these conversations with you.

If you would like to ensure that conversations like this continue happening, you can support us on our Patreon at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. We’re also looking for per show and long term sponsorships that companies and individuals and conferences can take advantage of. If you are interested in a sponsorship opportunity, go to GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors. Thank you so much Jeff. This has been great.

JEFF: Appreciate it.

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045: Sexual Assault and Project Callisto with Lynn Cyrin

Mandy Moore — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 05:00:28 +0000

This episode is sponsored by Upside!

Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.

Content/Trigger Warning: This episode discusses sexual assault.

Panelists:

Astrid Countee | Jamey Hampton | Coraline Ada Ehmke | Sam Livingston-Gray

Guest Starring:

Lynn Cyrin: @lynncyrin | lynncyrin.me

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “Fullstack Activism” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:22 – Lynn’s Background Story and Superpowers

FIRST LEGO League

11:34 – Project Callisto: Reporting Sexual Assault and Dealing with The System

17:57 – Institutional Betrayal and Keeping Information Private

20:49 – The Chain of Command: How Project Callisto Works

22:17 – Reticence When it Comes to Talking About Sexual Assault

26:04 – “Staying in Your Lane”

27:56 – Matching Reports

29:33 – The Technology Behind the App

34:14 – Evaluating Features

38:16 – Contributing to Project Callisto

Fund Club

Donate to Project Callisto

41:54 – Open Sourcing the Project

44:00 – Code Sharing

Reflections:

Coraline: Empathy and developers putting the psychological safety of their users first.

Brené Brown on Empathy

Astrid: Building technology for the greater good.

Jamey: If you don’t like what someone else is doing, you can do your own thing and make it happen.

Sam: Believe survivors.

Ashe Dryden: The Risk In Speaking Up

Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

[This episode is brought to you by Upside, one of the DC’s fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers wanting to disrupt the norm, and they’re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team for more.]

ASTRID: Welcome everyone to Episode 45 of ‘Full Stack Activism’. I’m here with my great friend, Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Hi, Astrid. Just a reminder, we’re still Greater Than Code here, even though that is what we’re talking about today. I’m here with my great friend, Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hi, everybody. It’s wonderful to be with you today. I do want to give our content warning for more sensitive listeners. We will be discussing sexual assault today. If this is a topic that you might find triggering, you might want to skip this episode. I’m happy to introduce my friend, Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Hello, thank you and it’s my great honor to introduce today our guest. Lynn ‘Cyrin’ Conway is a full stack developer, project manager and activist. She’s also a black poly translesbian. She does most of her work with connections and community, the queer trans community in particular. Lynn, welcome to the show.

LYNN: Hi. It’s good to be here.

SAM: We always like to start our show with superhero origin stories. What is your superpower and what freak accident caused you to acquire it?

LYNN: The very, very slow motion of freak accident that caused my superpower was just my parents making me do way too much stuff when I was little all the time, like [inaudible] and also [inaudible] every day and also makes you clean the whole house and [inaudible] four brother and sisters who need their help with homework too. By that time, I hit college and stuff. It was nothing. I could just write Python [inaudible] I was straight and it was like a cake walk as opposed to trying to take care of the whole house. I like to say that I’m just phenomenally driven, which sounds like one of those things like, “What is your greatest weakness?” It’s actually the strengths but no, I just kind of work through everything all of the time.

SAM: No, that is totally a superpower. I’m glad you were able to pull that from that experience.

CORALINE: Lynn, you talked about going to college. Where did you go to school and what did you study and did you finish?

LYNN: I did this thing which is probably fairly standard for web developers, at least. I went to college for one year each in mechanical engineering, material science and then astronomical engineering and the last one is why I got to work at NASA for a bit which I did for six months. In astronomical engineering, I have to say that work at NASA for the rest of my life, kind of work but as of the NASA thing, I think I was working on some Python code for something, like some Python simulation of some bots that’s planning and the Python was actually more interesting than the works that NASA planning [inaudible], which is weird because satellites but truly, Python was more interesting.

I stopped [inaudible] there. It wasn’t obvious to me at a time like, “I was going to go and learn Python on my free time,” instead but it just sort of slowly happened over the next year or so.

CORALINE: And do you still write primarily in Python?

LYNN: I was just posting about how much I want to improve it like 20 minutes ago —

CORALINE: That’s the Python package manager?

LYNN: Yeah, it’s kind of my whole life.

CORALINE: How long you’ve been doing open source work?

LYNN: I have this thing about… I don’t know, I’m just naturally take into radical openness. I have this thing where if someone can’t see that I wrote code, I don’t feel like I wrote it. Actually, I first started coding while I was homeless coincidentally and all of that is still on GitHub. If I deleted it because it’s trash. It’s been six years and I try to post all of my stuff in GitHub and GitLab because politics and stuff like that.

CORALINE: I’ve heard from some early career developers that it’s really helpful for them to see more established developers have their beginner projects so their learning projects and their toy projects on GitHub for a couple of reasons. It demonstrates that there is a learning path that even more experience developers have followed to get to where they are and they can see themselves in that learning path. Have you ever gotten feedback from anyone about some of your early projects or your toy projects or your learning projects like that?

LYNN: Not specifically interestingly. I tend to present myself so strongly. Even just now, I’m being attacked and I did that, where people take me at my individual point that I’m at right now and just kind of marvel of it. I don’t get a lot of people being like, “How did you get here? You’re so hardworking. You’ve been doing this for years.” I don’t get that. I never really thought about it, you know?

CORALINE: Fair.

ASTRID: Lynn, when did you first actually start writing code because I know that you mentioned that you did it in college but were you doing it before?

LYNN: I did the very standard, basic college student thing like this little league robot thing, which is really cute. Much of like really basic UI programming. I try to take APCS for a little bit but got bored because it’s C and Java, which is so dramatically different from the Python and it was a bit of ease now. In college, I had a bit of some Python and some Perl and some Java and some MATLAB because it was mildly relevant to the real subject matter. I didn’t really start writing code on my own accord until I’ve got to San Francisco and was homeless. I was like, “What do I do? So I just go and write code? I guess so.”

ASTRID: Can you tell us more about how did you got to San Francisco?

LYNN: At the same time, I was about in my 3rd year college and I was doing all of this really cool stuff, I’ve started realizing that I was weird and trans, as cool as the whole Python to NASA satellites being was. I would rather have just been really gay and a girl. I was doing that [inaudible], which is not terrible but it wasn’t great and I was kind of like, “I’m a prisoner of [inaudible].” I just kind of Google and search online the good places to be gay and San Francisco is usually near the top of that list so I ended up there.

I told my parents, I was like, “I’m going to college in San Francisco,” but really, I was going to San Francisco and be gay and live life and then I’m in a homeless shelter and not knowing what the hell I’m going to do. I think I bump into someone who is doing a homeless queer youth thing. I bump into [inaudible] and I haven’t thought about coding for [inaudible] but I’ve written Python before and I was there and I had nothing to do so I started getting into it. I’ve been writing code a little bit in my whole life but it didn’t really lead into it until I was in San Francisco.

CORALINE: Was there a program that you’re in to get your career started or was it just the individual efforts of the people that you mentioned?

LYNN: [inaudible] it was my activist-y mindset so I leaned myself to that direction. That plus as I want to work all the time, combined with I really like putting everything open source. I would do the thing where other people at Mozilla in particular in San Francisco and when I was at [inaudible], there was a lot of that, where people will just kind of let themselves be available for new coders. I would talk to them and the thing that I notice to the people I meet nowadays that I am really receptive to. I’m really aware of when I’m talking to a new coder or someone just getting started, whether in [inaudible] I talk to them I see them doing a lot of work but [inaudible] was homeless and I really love GitHub and open source so I would like to talk like an engineer at Mozilla about blah-blah-blah code and then after the conversation, I would just push some random beginner level Python code every hour for the next four days.

I think that sort of helps with this visibility [inaudible] where I was talking to people who like code, but also kind of activism and I just kept doing things all of the time. It wasn’t very formal but it was very structured on my part. I had meetings with people who did PR stuff and I was like, “What things have you been tweeting about because I have a Twitter account and I post my GitHub to my Twitter.” If that’s too spammy, how should I be connecting with people and I did a lot of that.

JAMEY: That’s really amazing. I really respect your ‘let’s just do this’ attitude that I’m getting from listening when you talk. While you’re kind of in that zone talking to people and getting the kind of advice is there any particular piece of advice that really stuck out to you and really affected how you did things that you remember that you might want to share with other people?

LYNN: I can’t think of anything specifically. This wasn’t an advice per se as something I was just really inspired by. In my very early days of hangout at [inaudible], I forget who I ran into first, is it Ashe or Shanley. Oh, Ashe then Shanley came and it was when they were starting up UltraConf and Model View Culture respectively and that was the first time I’d run into someone like being in an existing industry with a lot of existing infrastructure and just being like, “You know what? I don’t like all of the rest of your stuff. I was going to start my own from zero. I don’t like your thing. My thing is better and I’m going to do it myself,” sort of that mindset, I hadn’t encountered before personally as I was like, “I can just do whatever?” Like I do look at the thing, say it you don’t like it and then do something else and then people respect me. As I get this thing nowadays of people like, “How do you plan all your path?” And you do a lot of programs and what was the structure and really, it was just having a lot of energy and being shown that I can just do whatever and I’m proceeding to do that.

SAM: That’s interesting. I’ve run across this idea in writing that you have some million words of crap inside you and you need to just get them out as part of the process of getting better at what you do. It sounds like you’re already set up to do that but you’re also in this environment where you’ve got access to a lot of feedback so you’re able to make the most of that phase of your development as well. Does that sounds about right?

LYNN: Yeah. I had a really interesting time when I was first starting out. I had a lot of people who were very like, “This is a new coder. I’m going to criticize them on Python syntax arbitrarily every 30 minutes or a week,” and then a lot of people who is talking to me about culture and visibility and how to get myself out there at that time when I was really driven to self-improve.

JAMEY: I really appreciate what you’re saying about seeing other people stuff that you don’t like and making your own. I think that’s a really good segue to bring us into this project that you’ve been working on. I really to hear more about — Project Callisto. Can you start to give us the background on that?

LYNN: The way I like to describe it to other people is it’s Google Docs for sexual assault reporting. The main hook there is that in the absence of Callisto, the usual thing that you have to deal at a school to report sexual assault is that you have to go to a physical office in person and usually recount the story one to three times verbally, which as a millennial, I just kind of die inside every time I have to convey that information as opposed to just filling out a form online.

CORALINE: On the Project Callisto website, there are some really chilling statistics. It says that survivors of sexual assault wait an average of 11 months to report their assaults to authorities, less than 10% of survivors will even report their assault at all and that up to 90% of assaults are committed by repeat perpetrators. The thing that I find really striking is that the project website says that an estimated of 20% of women, 7% of men and 25% of trans and gender nonconforming students are sexually assaulted during their college career. I definitely understand how difficult it would be for a survivor of a sexual assault to go to a physical office and make that report and have to relive it multiple times through the retelling. What this project was set to differently to address that difficulty?

LYNN: It’s really basic to say that just putting up a form online is such a dramatic difference from having to say it in person. There are some other things that we do that are very specific to the impact that we have. We’re very much about the survivor. I’m having a very clear idea of what the system is doing and how the information that they are providing to the system is impacting the surrounding, news being communicated to. Think about that in sharp contrast like you tweet something on Twitter and you had no idea about who is going to or you’re posting on Facebook but actually Walmart is reading it. Like the radical opposite of your information isn’t encrypted at best and only you can see it until you explicitly say that you want to send it to your school reporting source.

ASTRID: Lynn, how does that process of keeping your information private while you’re recording it change what happened for the survivor and how they navigate to the system as opposed to going and having to say it verbally and then not knowing what happens with that information?

LYNN: It’s almost like a large psychological shift in how you think about the information that I’m not even sure I could describe it. There are differences one to one. I talk to a lot of psychologists and psychologists are mandated to report it. I have had some issues that we need to be mandated to report in my life and I am talking to psychologists but the psychologists help me but I know they’re mandated to report it and I have events on my life that would need to be managed to report and I couldn’t say that that hasn’t happened to me. I really honestly could not say.

I almost can’t even conceptualize with a contrast the idea of I’m on a website like Twitter, Google, Facebook, which you say something and the whole internet knows it and they want to sell you something with it. Going to a website, that is so explicitly not that. It’s almost like my private journal but on the internet with a password. I think we get that with our physical private journal. I never own a journal with lock on it and that’s kind of essentially what this is.

It’s something that I feel very comfortable with what I’m working on. I’m working on it and whenever I’m just passing variables around and I’m like, “This variable is actually literally what verbatim happened to you during your assault,” but I can’t access it. I couldn’t pull it out unless we’re in that little middle bit right before the encryption sets in. I’m going ask someone’s data by having a typo somewhere.

For me as a developer, whatever I’m going and do the form writing, I sort of have a very [inaudible] make it. I have a very strong understanding of how does the security pattern comes to play and so the psychological issues that we consider for the flow of the site and the structure. I don’t feel like I’m going to suddenly have carpet swept from under me and have a [inaudible] as I exit a room, which I feel like when I’m talking to psychologist because I’m just at my computer. It could be 2AM and I could be in Canada.

SAM: My partner has done a lot of domestic violence and sexual assault work for a long as we’ve been together so I have a second hand education in this and my understanding is that if you’ve just been sexually assaulted, you’ve experienced this massive violation, not only of your physical person but of your autonomy.

Everybody experiences this differently. I’m not telling my own story because I don’t have a story of this but my understanding is that for many survivors, the experience of going and dealing with the system can be re-traumatizing because like I said, you’ve just experienced this violation of your person and your autonomy and then you go and you give your story to somebody else and then they have their own rules about what they’re going to do with it, how they’re going to react and you lose a lot of control once you give your story to the official system.

We’re talking about a lot of on-campus survivors so if you go to tell the story, there’s a risk of them expelling the person who assaulted you. It’s a small risk, unfortunately, statistically speaking but that could have consequences that you don’t want. There’s also the possibility that no one will believe you and that could be a consequence that you don’t want. I feel like giving the survivors the control over their own information, literally gives them control which is something that they desperately need at that point in their lives.

LYNN: Yeah. There’s an entire set of design considerations within Callisto about addressing institutional betrayal, then you have a lot of bits in a design, not necessarily to have dramatic implications but sort of inform how the backend communication information of other people, where there’s this idea that if my [inaudible] and you never send it to someone unless explicitly say so, it’s also quirky like frontend bits, where there is an absolute minimum of institutional granting on the Callisto site. Your school logo is in the bottom left so you can know you’re on the right website but aside from that, it’s all Callisto branding. It’s all Callisto servers. We are very clearly a third party who was not your school.

ASTRID: Can you explain more about the institutional betrayal because I’m not aware what that is and what happens?

LYNN: I subjectively describe it as the idea that if I, as a fucking black trans polyamorous, kinky, mostly lesbian kind of bi, I have a whole lot of axes on which, if I report a sexual assault to any person, for any reason, there’s a variety of ways that the institution that I’m reporting to can handle that in a way that is actively harmful to either to me, the person who did the assault and the way that [inaudible]. That’s sort of one of the example that illustrates the core concept of institutional betrayal.

CORALINE: Do you have agreements with the schools and universities that Project Callisto is wired up to address that kind of issue?

LYNN: The idea behind the Callisto is that we are providing a service usually to schools, to have the very beginning of the reporting process, be more effective for a survivor, for the most part. This is something I talk to people out in the interviews I was doing recently for another backend engineer where there was more imperative inabilities to great impact in the second the report hits the reporting school or like the [inaudible] usually. At that point, all of the standard methods, institutional betrayal that you would experience in any institution of any size or just start kicking in, there are days where I think about how I wish that there was a sub-bit in Callisto contract that you can’t make schools explicitly ask if they are going to report sexual assaults to authorities if someone with an endangered immigration status is involved. But there’s nothing like that. We provide them a website and then from there, we help them get the report and everything else is up to the institution to fix their own impact.

JAMEY: I’m really curious about the chain of command like how the app works. Can you walk me through who would suggests to someone that they use this website and then what would happen to their information after they’ve put it? I’m just trying to understand the whole flow.

LYNN: Step 0 is that we have — I don’t do it personally because web developer — a lot of [inaudible] is advertising like bathroom leaflets and little tear-out stickers and tiny presentations that we let schools give during sexual assault events, then all of those sorts of things. Ideally, if someone goes into assault, they have this idea of a website that they can report it on in their head prior. Then it happens and then they can go to the website.

The website itself has a few steps to make sure that the people who are reporting are from the school that their reporting to. From there, you fill out your report and at the very end of the reporting process, which is the whole Google form, you’re just filling up and immediately after that, there’s a page that is like, “If you would like to report your assault, we’re going to encrypt it with GPG and we’re going to send it to these [inaudible] officers and their email addresses,” right after you double confirm that this is what you want to do.

ASTRID: I wonder why we still don’t know enough about sexual assault, what’s happening to victims because it’s something that it feels like it’s getting talked about a lot that this is happening. Coraline read those statistics that are on your site about it but it also feels like that the people in general know very, very little about.

SAM: There are strong organizational self-preservation instinct that kick in for people who work for colleges because they want to minimize those sexual assault stats because they make the school look bad. They might result in reduced funding or reduced interest in students coming to their school. They don’t want to be perceived that there’s a sexual assault problem at their school so they want to pretend that it doesn’t happen.

Then for individuals who are privileged enough not to have experienced sexual assault, those people don’t want to think about it. It’s not a pleasant thing to grapple with and if you’re not directly motivated, if it hasn’t affected you or somebody that you know, it’s not like most people are going to go out and just research this on their own so it has to be outreach but there’s not a lot of funding for outreach. Frankly, there’s not a lot of funding for any of it.

ASTRID: So it’s like a self-perpetuating silence, essentially?

SAM: Yeah.

LYNN: This isn’t necessarily an institutional problem. It’s something that I dealt with a lot personally. I have to say that I spent a lot more time digging in Python than I do in [inaudible] because I have [inaudible] the subject matter where I work on day-to-day. For example, the stats that Coraline read earlier, I know the developer who put those on the site but I’m going to put those on other site in the next few weeks and I promise you that I won’t read them, as I’m actually doing it because it’s so hard to parse when I am trying to like, “I’m trying to write Python and the Python I’m writing says that 30% of people who are sexually assaulted do blah-blah-blah,” and I’m like, “Nope. I’m not reading it.”

JAMEY: It’s a weird feeling reading the statistics, I think for a lot of people, whenever I read statistics for about anything bad really, I feel like I’m at risk group that I’m in. I get this feeling, especially recently I have an experience like, “This percentage of the trans community has experienced this terrible thing,” and I’m like, “Wow, that’s a lot of my friends,” and it feels like I’m waiting for a shoe to drop. This hasn’t happened to me so when is this going to happen to me. Looking at numbers can feel very weirdly personally over-alarming that way, I think.

LYNN: I have a very informal band on anyone reporting about balance numbers on transwomen of color if the person themselves is not a transwoman of color. I have personally chewed out many, many white transwoman for conveying the black transwoman of color like the black sex worker transwoman of color at assault and balance rates with [inaudible] depression. That’s not you. Stop it. I can’t deal with this. It’s weird like they’re in love with empathy, but first empathy is when someone say something bad, you want to help them. But I’m several steps removed from that where this is bad, it doesn’t affect you, it affects me more than it affects you and also talking about it, it doesn’t really help me so please stop. It’s a very hard. It’s something that I had to personally parse when I’m working on the frontend with a lot of specific content that I personally parse on daily basis.

CORALINE: Lynn, that ties into something I’ve learned through my own activism — this concept of staying in your lane. There are issues that I feel very strongly about but there are people who are doing work to address those issues and I see my role as someone who’s maybe not directly affected and I’m thinking here maybe reproductive rights or definitely is what you said, the violence that transwomen of color that sex workers face so I try very hard to amplify those voices and support the people doing that work without getting in a way. Do you think that Project Callisto could have been created as well or be successful if it was created by someone who is not themselves a survivor of sexual assault?

LYNN: No, not even vaguely. There are competitors at Callisto that… I don’t know. I don’t look at them in depth because I’m not a CEO. I know that our organization is coincidentally 100% women right now because who’s going to have good information on the effects of sexual assault and a lot of us had PTSD from various kinds of trauma and this is the organization that I want to be solving the problem.

SAM: We don’t want to minimize the experience of male sexual assault survivors. They are a small but definitely present minority.

LYNN: Yes, there’s a very specific thing that we do on the website on various places where there’s certain things that women just do culturally that necessarily don’t make women a lot more comfortable but they all push away men really aggressively. It’s not something that they think about on daily basis because [inaudible] women, I can’t. But every once in a while, we’ll do a content appraisal of like, “Will male survivors will have a really hard problem with this?” I don’t know. I’m not the designer so I just assume it is basic things like too much pink. It’s a consideration that we yield through.

SAM: There’s another stat on the site that I found interesting, which is that you match reports and you allow people to report only if another survivor names the same perpetrator. You say this is because up to 90% of assaults are committed by repeat perpetrators. I’m curious, is this something that helps survivors report because they feel like if they are not the only one, there’s a much better chance they’ll be believed?

LYNN: It’s about cultural reasons and psychological reasons why we do that. I think the way I describe it subjectively and referencing my own experiences are there are certain things that I only feel talking about if I know that they happened more than once or to more than one person. We have a technical set up that reflects that emotional feeling of, “This can happen to me as bad, but I don’t really care and talk about it but it happen to other people,” and we have code that does essentially that.

CORALINE: The Project Callisto website says that during the 2015 to 2016 pilot program, the reporting rate quadrupled on partner campuses. Why do you think it had that kind of impact?

LYNN: Me, personally as someone who’s 25, I would also be three or four times more compelled to report a sexual assault if I can do it on my laptop, in my room as opposed to in a physical office with someone who I’ve never spoken to before. I think that speaks to the core fundamental impact of Callisto as a website where you can report a sexual assault. It itself being very impactful.

JAMEY: I want to talk about the level of technology involved. My perspective on this is that I used to work on an Android app for an NGO in Africa that was doing a similar thing actually, where it was taking data from sexual assault survivors. In their case, the idea was people would go to doctors and get medically checked but then not feel comfortable going to law enforcement and there was a disconnect with people who felt comfortable with medical and people who comfortable with law enforcement so the idea was if the doctor that they’re already seeing can take this information in a format that they can just pass on to law enforcement with consent, rather than making them go through a traumatic experience again, as we were saying earlier like getting checked out.

But one of our big things that was a huge focus in the Third World, which is where this app is doing was keeping it as low tech as possible. Even though it was at an app, we train the doctors to use it and the survivors never had to do anything on a computer or a phone and they could just let someone else do it for them, then not have to go through that technological stress.

I’m listening to you talk about this with college students and talk about the exact opposite. I love that. It’s really interesting with this idea like I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t trust anyone to do it for me. I want to do it all in technology. I guess I don’t really have a specific question but I want to sink my teeth into that concept that people who are comfortable with technology or not, doing things in a way that is most comfortable to them. Does that make sense?

LYNN: Yeah. The other day, actually my [inaudible] call on me and have a conversations with them about whether of good formal definitions of cutting-edge in high tech because I think a few days ago, I was tweeting about how I’m using beta versions of npm, Travis and some GitHub features. This feature was released in the last two or three months and usually I personally noted those and I’m watching their commit logs and I’m doing this for the sake of pushing Callisto to sexual assault survivors better. I haven’t done this yet but I have a bunch of patches to [inaudible] and to Django and Python, that I could trace all the way back to if this patch gets in, it’s going to serve special assault survivors in this way. Also, it’s changing a thing for a millions of people because I would be patching the Django.

I like to drill down on that very specifically. I think it’s something that helps my personal impression of my impact. Because we’re a big organization, there’s a larger conversation to happen in respect to like, “Lynn, you spending a month adding Angular.js in record form so async really help a lot of people.” I don’t know but I love Angular.js and I could use npm when I’m doing it and also, people who use async forms will think it’s really nice. Those are the things that I think about with respect to Callisto’s tech.

SAM: When I found out we were going to be talking about this, it was really excited and one of the things that occurred to me was that looking at it seems this should be a fairly bog standard webapp but were there any other aspects of the technical implementation that were particularly interesting?

LYNN: For the most part, it’s a very basic Django app. It has a few views that have a few forms on it, basic Django forms. It could be better but in ways that would be better for all of the Django had once. The only thing I feel that is very specific to Callisto and implementation is the fact that we have integration with Python’s GPG library, which I’m not super used to describing this in depth but it’s the same tech that underpins TLS and [inaudible] and SSH and all those other sort of things.

We have the Google form thing and there’s that repo and right above that repo, there sits another repo that takes all the data that are going to Google form process with and GPG encrypts it before we send it to the client school. We have another process where we actually take all of [inaudible] officers doing GPG key setup process, which if you’re a web developer, it’s something you’ve already done a few times already but [inaudible] officer is totally new and it’s a whole new type of password. Public-private key encryption is a concept that you have to introduce them to but it’s fundamental to how the tech of Callisto works.

CORALINE: Lynn, you talked about looking at beta versions of various tools and evaluating or seeing like this features going to really help us with Project Callisto and therefore, help survivors. Is that information in context that you tend to share with open source maintainers? If so, what kind of reaction do you get from them?

LYNN: I share in [inaudible]. I love it. It’s one of my favorite things. I’m going to someone’s repo and I’ll have a thing that I think the most recent time I did it was there’s a Django migration test case library that runs migrations forward and backwards in a test context so you can see if the migration is failing. One day, that repo was only really set up for minor migrations forward and I want them to run the migrations backwards. I laid on in layers, where I have an initial issue and I was like, “It’d be cool if you could run migration backwards.” It has this open source thing that the developer was like, “Oh, it’s cool.” I don’t even need to work on it and then a few weeks later, I was like, “I’m working on a sexual assault record form. I think that if a survivor has a specific data and then I remove that field, I need to be able to write a test to explicitly say that data is remove because it contains sexual assault data.” That had a really good end user impact on survivor and that feature was in three days. That’s usually how it goes but sometimes, when I don’t even have to do that, I just say Callisto and they Google it and things happen around me. It’s really nice.

SAM: I think that speaks well of their Django community for an app like yours has that kind of credibility and clout.

LYNN: I had all totally positive experience with Django community. Amazingly I had this thing where the way I like to submit patches to open source projects really creates against the Django itself, just me versus Django. I had this thing. Since I started working on Callisto, either something about how I totally shift myself for the content that we working on Callisto, when I make issues the Django people don’t yell at me anymore and that’s nice. Because I’m kind of shit-head about it and it help sexual assault survivor so they deal with it.

JAMEY: That’s a good reason.

LYNN: Yeah. It’s basically always been the case that when I’m talking about things, I don’t know how the whole [inaudible] core team has it to shoot me out because I talked so much shit about [inaudible] on Twitter. But I feel like if they were to start, they would see Callisto in my [inaudible] and be like, “Okay, never mind.” That sort of how it goes usually.

CORALINE: I think actually that kind of great because not only you are getting a positive reaction from project maintainers but I think that as software developer, we tend to not think about the impact necessarily of technical decisions that we make or the tools that we create and we don’t think about the fact that there are real people doing important work on the other side. Our users are doing really critical work.

I think too often we might think, “In the enterprise, this will have this effect,” or an organization of a certain size will make a developer spend 5% less time running test when in reality, there’s very important work like the work that you’re doing that relies on stability and performance and flexibility of the tooling that we’re creating.

LYNN: Yeah, it’s nice to remind people of that every once in a while. I can almost see it between comments and a GitHub issue, when they realize that the GitHub issue that I just made isn’t for making take out gets in my house two minutes faster. It’s for helping someone reports sexual assault and you can just feel how much more serious and driven they get in between two comments when they realize that.

SAM: Out of curiosity, is it feasible for newcomers to contribute to Project Callisto?

LYNN: To a degree of feasible that I work every day to make it more feasible. I come from a context where previously the Callisto, I was working on Bundler and Ruby Gems, which the projects themselves like to be very accessible but the actual code for Bundler and Ruby Gems are almost comically inaccessible. I focus a lot on using the standard Django pattern on things and our resource repos so that is if someone is coming from another Django project, they don’t have to deal a lot of Callisto quirks.

I have a bunch of really aggressive mentors. I’m always on a search for if I can add a new linter and it doesn’t take me an hour to fix my current [inaudible], I will. I love it. It’s so much fun. Those are the things that I like to think that help new project contributors. I think it could be good. It’d be amazing at some point when we’re much larger to have someone who is on your core job competencies as helping Callisto open source profiles so that more people can be using it to solve sexual assault and more nuance ways.

ASTRID: Lynn, is there any way for people who are not programmers to help contribute to Project Callisto?

LYNN: I might be corrected on this later but as far as I know, the only portion of Callisto as an organization is it’s entirely significantly open to general public feedback is few of Django repos so it’s very programmer-y in that sense. Even then, there’s not a lot of translations or documentation in the open source repos. It’s mostly Python. Presently coming from a context of open source everything and Bundler and all that stuff, I really want that to get better but in the meantime, how Callisto be a Python developed or get your foundation to donate a million dollars so we can figure out what’s [inaudible].

CORALINE: Have you worked with Fund Club?

LYNN: Not in the context of my individual organization but I know five or six organizations that have been founded by Fund Club and I’ve watched their impact before and after.

CORALINE: We had a very positive experience with Fund Club. It’s definitely worthwhile.

LYNN: I could see a thing where I could get money for Fund Club not necessarily in the same nonprofit way that Callisto usually gets money. It’s a very operations-y but I use it any more specifics technical contracts of like I get Fund Club money for open source at different part of Callisto and I have a junior programmer working on it for a little bit and I pay them with the Fund Club money. I could see that being a thing. I think it’s an interesting avenue to explore, simply because Callisto as an organization is very standard nonprofit. We have a very standard nonprofit fundraising and I never thought about the wide network of tech in front of me that I’m also connected with.

CORALINE: I think that ties into something that Sam was saying in chat. A lot of people don’t have the time or the energy or don’t want to get in the way of the project would be very, very happy to contribute money knowing that it was being put to good use.

LYNN: Yeah, I don’t interact very much because web developer. There are campaigns we do about individual giving. What I’m hearing about it is like operations talking about individual giving but subjectively for the person hearing about that, it’s like giving $5 to help support a sexual assault survivors. That’s nice.

SAM: For our listeners who may now be inspired to donate, we’re going to drop a link to the Project Callisto donation page in the show notes.

JAMEY: I’m curious about the decision to have Callisto as an open source project. I know that you were talking earlier about how you really to be open and transparent and I really respect that and I wonder what went into that decision to have this as an open source project and if there are any worry in security and how you mitigated that.

LYNN: I’m not sure I can really give an answer to that that isn’t very focused on how open source does it better, particularly the security thing. If I think about any system that could possibly think of and I subject it to open source scrutiny, for a certain level of scrutiny like if you get five people looking at it, the security is getting better because five people will have five opinions about how to make it more secure, that they wouldn’t be able to give if that would be close source.

That’s one of the fundamental tenets of open source and security that I like to spit off whenever I need to. The fact that Callisto is open source is very chicken and egg for me because I like to, recreationally license a lot of my personal projects as AGPL. Then the person who is hiring for Callisto at the time was like, “Would you like to work here?” And I was like, “Let me look at it. Oh, my god. You license AGPL on sexual assault platform?” I love it. I love it.

It’s already here. This is amazing. I did this personally myself too and it was really funny actually because I had a personal conversation with the hiring manager at that time and he had the same like, “We know that lots of close source developers hate AGPL so I like to license it explicitly and put it out twice, just so you know, we had this here. We don’t care that you are annoyed that you can’t use our code in [inaudible] because we don’t want you to.” Callisto itself is only for US schools so we have a lot of plans with places where Callisto itself couldn’t really be effectively deployed for those who’d like user open source repo. They have their own impact. I don’t know the extent to which those plans are public yet but that’s another thing that being open source helps that.

SAM: Lynn, is there anything particularly exciting about how you have done this that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to?

LYNN: I had a call recently [inaudible] non-school client but I am not certain [inaudible] who it is. They asked me very poignantly about to extend Callisto and share on all of sites and the code is the same and blah-blah-blah. That’s my favorite topic because I’ve spent the last six months going from a really standard basic copy and paste [inaudible] process. This thing, where we have 13 clients schools but one Heroku app and we have Heroku pipeline setup. We try to build stages and smoke test and all those kind of automated deploy that kick off every hour. It’s hard to conceptualize that impact on survivors but when we’re talking to clients and they’re like, “How often do you update your code? Is our code the same as everyone else’s?” and I’m like, “Yes and every three hours minimum, probably. I think that’s really cool.

CORALINE: At the end of every show, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on the conversation that we’ve had. I want to share a couple of things. I do a lot of thinking about empathy. I’m writing a book on empathy in software development. I think this is an excellent example of developers putting the psychological safety of their users first and thinking about the way the tools that is going to be used and how that impacts the real people on the other side of the screen.

Lynn, I think you’ve done an amazing job in really bringing that empathy to bear in every step of the development process and the deployment in how you are presenting it to the world and how you’re working with partner campuses. I think that’s absolutely amazing. I also wanted to share a video that I came across recently. Someone did an animation for a talk by Brené Brown on the difference between empathy and sympathy. I think everyone should watch it but one of the really poignant things that stood out to me is that when you were listening empathetically, you never used the words ‘at least’ and that’s a big difference between sympathizing with someone and empathizing with someone. I’ll put a link to the video in show notes.

ASTRID: When we were talking about your process, Lynn for how you get new features added by talking with open source community, explaining how if this was here and be much better for the users, it was really inspiring to me because I know that there’s a lot of discussions the people have about how to use technology for good or how to be more involved with things that people really need and not just build technology for technology sake. I feel like that is a great example of when you are thinking about people and you are really focused on what the outcome of what you’re using or what you’re building is going to be.

There are a lot of great developers who are ready and hoping that what they do can make an impact. I think it’s nice to hear that there are people out there who are thinking in that way and who are willing to put an extra time to get that done so that you can have a future available within a few days, especially, since a lot of what we hear is about how many developers are very selfish and very obsessed with their own technological growth. It’s nice to know that there’s a bigger community out there that doesn’t get talked about as much that is working on behalf of trying to help other people too.

LYNN: On the day to day, I almost wish I had more really small apps of the open source libraries that we use. Whenever I realize that I haven’t issuing Callisto that can make it really good, GitHub issue that someone to fix in a day and I am like, “Oh, yeah. I can do this thing again.”

JAMEY: To me, this whole conversation has been really inspiring to me and I think it’s all coming back to thing that was said at the beginning about if you don’t like what someone else is doing, you can do your own thing and you can make it happen. I’m feeling very inspired by that right now. I’ve been thinking about this already a little bit lately. I saw a thread on Twitter earlier this week kind of in the wake of the Google memos and stuff and all of this that’s been going on in our industry. Someone was like, “You know, you can start your own company. You don’t have to work for a company that’s going to treat you badly. You can start your own company and you can make the rules and you can hire people and you can treat them well and there’s nothing stopping you from doing that, in theory. Hopefully, you could really be making a difference if you decided to do that,” and that was very inspiring for me to read and I think that ties into what we’re talking about here too, like you don’t have to tag along on someone else’s making a difference. You can make your own and I’m really inspired by you, Lynn in everything that you’ve been working on but I also love the idea that other people could go on and do other great things that are inspired by it, that are touching other parts of our community.

LYNN: I had a sort of natural reaction to, I think you specifically referencing the really misogynist Google memo and I had a very naturally dismissive reaction because my dev team is entirely female and it’s me and I’m great.

JAMEY: I’m really happy that that’s how you felt about it. I feel really good about that.

CORALINE: I was actually contacted by a young woman that I used to mentor. My initial reaction was this is just typical of Silicon Valley bro-grammers but she reached out to me and said that she was actually very emotionally affected by it because it made her question how her peers that companies that she’s worked at or working at currently think about her and the biased and unspoken sexism and how that’s affecting her career and her career choices. I did tweet about this but just as a call to action, if you know people who are early career, if you know people who are feeling very vulnerable, don’t assume that they react in the same nonchalant way or the same sort of, “Yes, we’ve seen this before,” kind of way to things like Google memo. Reach out to them and see how they’re actually being affected.

SAM: All right. I have a call to action for our listeners today and some of you may be inspired to go and try to contribute to Lynn’s repository and that’s great but there’s something that every single one of you can do and that is fucking believe survivors. Astrid wrote a really great piece probably four years ago now called the risk in speaking up and I’ll drop a link to that in the show notes, which she talks about all of the various forces that might keep somebody from disclosing that they were a survivor or that they survived an attempted sexual assault.

The tl;dr is there’s a lot of reasons not to say anything so if somebody does disclose that to you, the very least you can do is believe them. Of course, for that to happen, you also have to be the person that somebody feels safe disclosing to. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the listener. That’s it, really — fucking believe survivors.

CORALINE: Lynn, thank you so much for coming on our show and talking about your work and thank you, more importantly for the work that you are doing and the impact that you’re having on a very, very vulnerable part of our population. Thank you so much for that.

This has been a difficult conversation for a lot of us on the panel and it’s probably a difficult conversation for some of our listeners to hear but we feel like it’s a very important and it’s important to talk publicly about these kinds of issues and about how people in our community can make a difference.

[This episode is brought to you by Upside, one of DC’s fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers wanting to disrupt the norm and they’re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team for more.]

CORALINE: Upside is our first corporate sponsor but we’re looking for more so that we can continue bringing you great episodes like what you’ve heard today. If your company values diversity, inclusively and the kinds of in-depth conversations that we have here in Greater Than Code, please talk to them about sponsoring the show. A prospectus is available at GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors. Thank you.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

044: Lazy Perfectionism and Performative Diversity and Inclusion with Shanise Barona

Mandy Moore — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 05:00:40 +0000

Panelists:

Jessica Kerr | Mandy Moore | Jamey Hampton | Janelle Klein | Sam Livingston-Gray

Come to Catskills Conf and meet Mandy & Jamey! Stay for the experience.

Guest Starring:

Shanise Barona: @shanisebarona | shanisebarona.com

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “Plant Parenthood!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

02:19 – Shanise’s Background Story and Superpower

Girl Develop It

03:08 – “Lazy Perfectionism”, “The Explosion of Dissonance”, and “The Moment of Click”

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero

12:49 – Improving Self-Directed Learning

100 Days of Code

15:35 – Having Tunnel Vision Past the Point of Where You Should and Moving Beyond a Comfort Zone

“I understood lazy perfectionism differently, more as the tendency to refactor, polish, and improve the various “-ilities” of your code long past the point when you should have moved on to something else. It’s like . . . tunnel vision on things that are important but not all-important. Finding the right balance there is super hard for me.” – Nathaniel Knight

Thank you to our latest $50 Patron, Josh Schmelzle!
Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

21:50 – “Performative Diversity” and Community Building

Ela Conf

28:33 – Words and Actions: Influencing Diversity and Inclusion (D&I)

34:25 – Being Angry on Social Media But Feeling the Need to be Perceived as Positive (All the Time)

Reflections:

Sam: Lazy perfection is a thing with a label and something to pay attention to.

Janelle: How shallow efforts can be to create change (i.e. conference diversity).

Mandy: Stop giving lip service! Step up and prove that you care about diversity and inclusion by supporting groups and missions like Greater Than Code.

Jamey: Having connections with people to prove to yourself you’re not alone.

Jessica: If you want to have diverse attendees, get a diverse leadership team.

Shanise: 1. Seeking a balance between wanting and not wanting explosions of dissonance.

2. Find opportunities to highlight people that wouldn’t normally get opportunities to be highlighted.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

JESSICA: Hello and welcome to Episode 44 of ‘Plant Parenthood.’ I am glad to be here today with Mandy Moore.

MANDY: Hi, Jessica. I’m a little bit confused, though. I thought this is Greater Than Code but I could be wrong. Anyway, I am happy to be here with my friend, Jamey Hampton and I am super excited to announce that the two of us will be at Catskills Conf in October so you should definitely look that up and see how awesome it’s going to be: camping and lodging and hiking and mountaineering and get your tickets because we’ll have swag. Wooh!

JAMEY: I’m really excited about that too, Mandy and I’m happy to be here today with all of you and also my friend, Janelle Klein.

JANELLE: Hi, I’m excited to be here, too joining the party. I want to introduce my co-host Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Hey, it is indeed quite the party today. As our special guest, we have Shanise Barona. Shanise is a web developer based in Philly, who’s passionate about the place where technology and social good intersect. She wants to live in a world where emails are short, empathy is a forethought and Netflix doesn’t ask if you want to keep watching because the answer is always yes. When her eyes aren’t glued to a computer screen, you can find her doing yoga, reading and plant parenting. Welcome to the show, Shanise.

SHANISE: Thanks, Sam for such a nice intro. Hi everyone and I’m super excited to be here as well.

MANDY: Can I just say that I actually get happy when Netflix ask me if I’m still watching because sometimes I’m like, “Oh, my gosh. It actually cares about me.”

SHANISE: [inaudible] looking at it.

SAM: I’m just like, “Why are you starting the next one already? Go! Go! Go!”

SHANISE: Exactly. I saw thing once where they were like, Netflix should be like a dating app. It should be like, “Other singles in your area who just binge-watch the entire season of Supernatural.”

SAM: Shanise, we like to start the show with our superhero origin stories. What got you into tech and what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

SHANISE: When I was six years old, I wanted to be an astronaut and that obviously, didn’t work out. I had a series of different moments in life that I was messing around with HTML and CSS and AP Calculus is my favorite class in high school. I was experimenting with STEM, in science and math classes but I didn’t realize that this could be something for me. Fast forward to now, I discovered ‘Girl Develop It’ and started attending Girl Develop It classes and that’s how I got involved, not only in tech and learning web development but also in community building.

JESSICA: Oh, so that means Girl Develop It is basically a superhero training?

SHANISE: Yes, exactly.

MANDY: When I reached out to you because I think you’re super cool and you have a lot of amazing discussions on Twitter, you came back at me with a pretty lengthy list that we put in our Slack community to see what we wanted you to talk about today. An interesting conversation started about the term ‘Lazy Perfectionism.’ Now, I interpret it as, I have this problem and it’s called ‘buying books that I really want to read.’ But then when I buy the books, it just kind of sit here.

JESSICA: Do you want to read the books or do you want to have read them?

MANDY: I want to read the book and I wanted to get something out of the book. But these nonfiction books like ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’ and ‘You Are a Badass,’ once I’m done working, I just don’t frickin’ feel like. I want to either sit down on my couch and drink a glass of wine and watch mindless TV like The Bachelorette — shout out — or I want to skip into more of a fiction novel. Then I’m like beating myself up because I really want to read this book but I’m just too lazy to do it. I know that if I do it, it’s going to improve my life. That’s my definition of lazy perfectionism. What do you think about that?

SHANISE: I think that’s spot on. That’s very similar to my definition as well. I can totally relate to buying books that I don’t end up reading, especially when they’re more technical. I just bought a bunch of web development books. They came in a pack and it was pretty penny so I convinced myself maybe I’ll read this because I spent a lot of money on these books. I did start reading one but I can relate to what you said like I want to just have already read it. I don’t really want to go through the process of reading it, if that makes sense.

SAM: I feel like that’s extra hard with tech books because so many of them are not written to be engaging.

SHANISE: Exactly.

JAMEY: I have a similar problem that I’ve experienced where the act of reading the book is very stressful for me because logically I know I’m reading this because it has information that I don’t know and I’m going to learn something. At the end of it, I’m going to know something else. But as I’m reading it, it gives me a sense of failure, like I don’t know any of this stuff, like I’m so stupid. I’m not doing as well as these other people and not quite impostor syndrome but almost like fear of missing out kind of thing. There’s all these people doing all the stuff that I’m not doing but the process of getting there, like reading it and learning it, it becomes very stressful. Doesn’t that resonate with anybody else?

SHANISE: I think, the book I started reading was the history of HTML or something and I was feeling that stress for sure. I’m sure a ton of people don’t walk around knowing the history of HTML but I was like, “Ugh! I don’t know this. How am I going to retain this information?” I was very stressed.

JANELLE: Question for you then what made you pick up a book like the history of HTML? What inspired you to take that book?

SHANISE: I think the perfectionism side of my lazy perfectionism is I want to know all of the things and I want to know right now so I don’t just want to learn how to use HTML. I want to know everything about it and how it came to be in the different versions of it. But again I don’t really want to go do that process. I just want to know these things.

JESSICA: So we want to have learned it?

SHANISE: Exactly.

SAM: To know kung fu.

JANELLE: One thing for me about learning is I do enjoy the process, especially when it makes my head hurt. Piano is the best for this. It’s fair liable and that can be like take this particular headache, it is like I know my neurons are rearranging themselves in my head and I enjoyed that feeling so it’s not about ever being perfect. It’s about continuing to have that feeling because I know that means improvement.

I think I have a similar experience where I get obsessed with the explosion of dissonance in my brain of all these new ideas that I didn’t have before of mixing ideas from a new book I hadn’t read before, a new perspective, a new way of thinking with all these other ideas I had before. It’s like all this synergy of ideas start spinning around in my head and I love that feeling of just like productive thinking. I think that’s why the panel is really fun too, just listening to all of these different perspectives kind of coming together that make you think about things in a way that you haven’t before.

JESSICA: And if history of HTML is not clicking and being relevant to anything and making you think about things that you haven’t before, maybe it’s the wrong book.

SHANISE: Right. I really like the term that you use, ‘explosion of dissonance.’ I feel like I experience that quite often.

SAM: Yeah, I really enjoy that when I have the energy for it, which I guess brings it back to the laziness part, like sometimes I’m done at the end of the day and I don’t want to deal with that. But when I’m in the right frame of mind, that’s absolutely wonderful. The other thing I like is being able to mentor other people so I can sort of experience that vicariously.

SHANISE: I really enjoying listening to the way that you’re all describing how much you love learning but the explosion of dissonance feeling is a little bit overwhelming for me. That’s like a feeling that I feel like I’m waiting through a little bit until I get to the other side and then there’s a moment of click. That moment of click is the feeling that I really love. It’s like I read all these things and I think I understood them but I’m not 100% sure and suddenly, it all comes together in one second and that’s very exciting.

SAM: You’ve been staring and staring and staring at all the blobs and suddenly they turn into the 3D image?

SHANISE: Yes.

JANELLE: And you have to push through long enough to get to that point. First, it’s painful and uncomfortable and you have to stick with the problem long enough and let the thoughts spin long enough that you can get to the other side of being able to organize thoughts back in your brain.

SAM: I’ve been struggling with this a little bit recently because on my last visit to the office, my coworkers finally managed to get me into building and flying drones so I have a kit that I’m slowly putting together right now. They also gave me the wonderful advice that I should learn to fly in a flight simulator so I get all of my crashes out where they don’t cost me anything. That’s a really hard to try and learn to fly and really suck at it. But the thing that I’ve been trying to remind myself of is one of the previous times that I’ve learned a skill that I had no previous reference for, was trying to learn to juggle.

After I remind myself that it took a week of solid practice like 40 hours or so, just not dropping the ball every single damn time. Then after that, it was months or maybe even years before I got to not dropping the ball as much to it being anything like smooth. Just having that self-awareness of it’s going to take some time, my brain is going to have to do its thing that it does, that sort of helps a little bit.

SHANISE: That’s a good point. I think something that I’m still learning to work through is that part of the lazy perfectionism, just having patience with yourself and just struggling through like you said. I do have moments that I think it click and I say to myself, “So I suffered through this but I got out on the other side,” so I just need to keep at it. But then the lazy side says, “If I can’t get this in three tries, I’m just going to give up. I don’t want to keep working on this right now.”

It’s helpful for me, at least to combat that aspect. It’s just like jumping around to different things so that I’m doing something different each time when I feel like I’m at that point where I want to give up. But I feel like when I’m learning, I also have an obsessive personality so it feels like a… What’s the phrase? Jack of all trades, master of none?

JESSICA: Compared to calculus, is it frustrating that HTML and CSS and all these things that they’re not quite perfect?

SHANISE: Yes, it is very frustrating, especially because there are so many different ways to get to one result and there are standards but a lot of the time, especially with fun and things, that’s very relative as well and what people think is the best course of action and the best practice. I don’t love calculus itself. I just love that class and my teacher and the way that I was learning and feeling like, “Oh, wow. I’m grasping this really difficult concept.”

JESSICA: That was cool, though because we’re back to loving the learning process.

SHANISE: Yes. I guess it also depends to what that process looks like. Maybe the lazy perfectionism is that I’m not excellent at self-directed learning. Maybe that’s what I’m learning about myself is that I enjoy that class because I had a really great teacher and the material and the format was really conducive to our learning for a concept that was really difficult that I would say most high schoolers don’t particularly enjoy. But now it’s like adding in the relativeness of web development and doing something like an online bootcamp, which I’m enrolled in. It’s hard to keep that focus when you’re self-directed.

JESSICA: I wonder if a lot of people have that problem when they get past that beginner courses, that are really restructured and then it’s like, “Here. Make some things.”

SHANISE: Yes, and you’re like, “What do I make? Where do I start? I don’t know.”

JANELLE: What kind of things have you found that help with that? I’m assuming you’ve learned a lot of things about how to improve at self-directed learning through this process

SHANISE: Yes. Definitely, this is where the community aspect was really big for me. I’m kind of an independent worker and that’s how I like to function and I’m very introverted so I do like going to events and networking with other people but it can be very exhausting. Going over code with other people, like I had something on my website that was really stumping me and I just wanted to give up. I was discussing it with a friend and she made me sit down and say, “No, we’re going to figure this out.” She didn’t necessarily tell me the answer but she sat there with me and basically forced me to do it. Something that maybe a teacher would do. That community aspect is that peer mentorship that happens organically that has really helped me.

SAM: Yeah. I have ADHD and one of the tools that a lot of people who talk about that recommend is using some form of external accountability because you’re much more likely to do something if you’re on the hook for somebody else socially to actually do it.

SHANISE: Yes. Sometimes that doesn’t work, like 100 days of code, I don’t know if you all have heard of that challenge but I was very loud and vocal about it on Twitter like, “I’m going to do 100 days of code,” and then I got to the point where I was skipping certain days and then it was like Days 13 through 30, then I got to the point around Day 70 that I just stop, I just gave up and didn’t have time to do. The external accountability definitely helps someone like me with my personality but I also don’t care about what people think so if I just needed to stop the challenge, I was just like, “All right, I’m tagging out.”

JESSICA: That’s great. There’s also the thing where sometimes if you picture in your head a goal, you’ll not achieve it because your brain has already experienced it. Sometimes I avoid telling people I am going to do something to avoid that effect.

SHANISE: Yes, that’s such a good point. I try to work on that. I just get really excited about things and I want to tell people but then, I’m working on perhaps just keeping things to myself and plugging away at them, slowly but surely.

MANDY: It’s like when I work out and I tell everybody on Facebook that I worked out and then I don’t work out the next day or the next day or the next day and then I look like a fool.

JESSICA: But still better than not working out at all.

MANDY: Yeah but I have an end goal in mind and that is to lose 10 or 15 pounds and working out won’t just clearly not going to make me lose 10 or 15 pounds.

JESSICA: We mentioned getting work done and I wanted to relate that back to someone in our Greater Than Code Slack community, when we were talking about lazy perfectionism, he saw that phrase — this is Nathaniel Knight — and he understood it as, “More of the tendency to refactor, polish and improve the various ‘-ilities’ of your code, long past the point where you should have moved on to something else. It’s like tunnel vision on things that are important but not all-important. Finding the right balance there is super hard.” Do you ever suffer from that kind of perfectionism? What’s the lazy in that? I missed the lazy in that.

SHANISE: Perhaps, the lazy is he’s not moving on. He’s being lazy by just working on one thing continuously.

SAM: Oh, I know this one very well.

JESSICA: Do you find it lazy, Sam?

SAM: Absolutely. I’m totally being lazy. I think the first time I really noticed and recognized this as a thing that I do, probably five six years ago when I was working on a new application in a domain that I didn’t know anything about. I found that instead of tackling the areas that I knew the least about first, which is the best way for me to actually make progress on an app. What I was doing was I was starting with one little corner of it that I knew I was going to need. Then just polishing the heck out of it and gold plating it until it was perfect. Still didn’t understand the rest of the application but that one part, I was able to indulge myself in my perfectionism and my in wanting to get that part right and I was using medicine avoidant behavior to not grapple with the uncertainty that I was afraid of.

JANELLE: That’s interesting, I mean, I am listening to that quote. I don’t totally get the meaning of lazy. This seems like obsessive addiction to doing the thing that your mind is in and not being able to move on but I don’t see how this is laziness. Maybe it’s lazy in thinking not in working.

JAMEY: To me it’s like a comfort level. Maybe lazy isn’t the first word I would pick but I understand how it’s related because it’s like, “I’m so comfortable working here on this code that I know that I’m not willing or ready to move on to something else.”

SHANISE: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point.

SAM: Again, bringing it back to ADHD because that’s what I do apparently. When people first hear the name of the diagnosis, attention deficit, they think that somebody with a diagnosis has less attention to go around. That’s not actually the case. What’s actually happening is that I have as much attention as anybody else but the part of my brain that kicks in to regulate it to notice, you’ve moved past the point of utility and that other stimulus that you’ve been ignoring is actually important and you need to go and switch focus on to that. That part is a little weak so sometimes, I realized that I’ve been doing this and I internalize that and I feel like a failure. I feel like I’ve been lazy. But in my case, it’s actually my brain just doesn’t quite work that way.

JANELLE: Discomfort. I like that word, Jamey, that you’re trying to stay in a place that’s comfortable. Shanise, what do you do to help yourself move out of what’s comfortable?

SHANISE: I think that’s something that I’m always still working on. I just start doing the things that make me uncomfortable. I can totally relate to what Sam said earlier about just working on one part of the application because you know that that other part is just going to be challenging and you just don’t want to deal with it. I’m not perfect in that obviously but I just try to kind of get out of that comfort zone as much as possible and some days are better than others.

JANELLE: So just to clarify then, I’m seeing laziness is about the self-control aspects and that we don’t want to exert self-control and that’s what the laziness is applied to so we want to stay in that mode of circle thing with constant perfectionism that’s the thing that we’re comfortable with and the self-control that it takes to move beyond that or lazy in wanting to move on to the next thing or get excited about something else.

SHANISE: I really like your description on that. I think that’s what it is, at least for me is self-control. Whether it’s moving on or trying other things or just sticking with something, it’s not always just moving on. Just sticking with something that is proving to be challenging and not wanting to power through that, I think that’s self-control and self-discipline. I believe you said the comment earlier about being… Or Jessica said it about being laziness as far as lazy thinking because I would say that my thinking is very obsessive when I want to learn something but it’s doesn’t always translate my actions because I sometimes give up sooner than I would like to.

JAMEY: I like the self-control, self-discipline description too because I think it also relates to our first definition of lazy perfectionism from before where you’re talking about learning in the books, like it takes self-discipline to remind ourselves that this is going to make our lives better and we have to get through it. I think it kind of ties them together.

JESSICA: Sometimes I timebox that stuff and I’m like, “I’m going to do this for half an hour,” and then I’m having a glass of wine.

SHANISE: There’s always time for a glass of wine. I think that that’s a valid reason to avoid whatever task it is [inaudible].

JAMEY: Self-care is very important.

JESSICA: We would like to thank our newest $50 a month patron, Josh Schmelzle. Greater Than Code is a listener funded podcast. So far, we are open to the right corporate sponsor and if you sign up to contribute to our Patreon in any amount, then you get an invitation to our community Slack and you get to influence the conversations and also chit chat with all of us. It’s my favorite Slack, personally out of the 15 I’m in. You should join it and tell us what is your definition of lazy perfectionism?

Meanwhile, the second most popular topic that’s Shanise proposed is Performative Diversity. What does that mean?

SHANISE: Right now, tech is having this conversation about diversity and inclusion and I see a lot of companies that are involved in making these statements and its promises but I don’t really see a lot of action behind that. Now, that I’m involved on the community building side and speaking with companies, that is becoming even more so apparent than just being a participant or an attendee at an event. That’s been super frustrating. Just a performance that they’re putting is what I feel.

JAMEY: Can you give us an example of something that made you feel that way or is that too invasive of a question?

SHANISE: I don’t think it’s invasive. Definitely, I’m not going to call out any particular companies but just with interacting with them at different events that I’ve either been a part of organizing or attending and asking certain questions and seeing what their reactions and what their responses are, compared to what they have listed on their site or what’s on there About page and what they say that they’re looking for, it doesn’t really match up.

JAMEY: I had that experience also.

JESSICA: The stuff on their About page, does that sound like they care about diversity more than their actual hiring?

SHANISE: Yeah, it sounds like it’s just a very carefully worded PR statement to say, “Look at us. We do care about diversities,” but that’s a whole other conversation too, like what is diversity if there isn’t any inclusion. Diversity is not going to last there. It’s been something that now, that I’m involved in community building that’s these are the things I’m looking for, as far as companies that I’m partnering with then working with and talking to. It’s been a huge disappointment to be honest.

JESSICA: What are you doing with community building? What is that?

SHANISE: One of the most recent organizations that I just joined is Ela Conf. It’s a community and conference for individuals with marginalized genders in Philadelphia.

JANELLE: It sounds like there’s a lot of companies doing PR stunt wanting to pay lip service to these ideas but when it comes to actually making things different, you’ve got a lot of people that are not including others in the conversation and moving to a place that they’re actually changing anything but are talking about these things like they value them anyway. You said you’ve been disappointed. I’m really curious as to what kind of things you’ve seen, this pattern-wise generalized —

SHANISE: I would say like meetups and groups, not just these companies. It’s even groups and the local community saying, “We want to be diverse. We want to be inclusive. We want to add more people to the space,” but then that whole leadership team is just white people are just cisgender man. There was something that I was volunteering for and it was a very particular event and it’s a well-known organization nationally. They have different chapters in different cities and they were putting on this event and saying that they really wanted it to be diverse and have different representation. But their whole leadership team is just cis people and white people.

Them kind of keeping that core leadership team as just a very specific and privileged group kind of directly goes against the message that they’re sending and inherently, makes people not feel welcome. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying. If people don’t see people that look like them and people that they can relate to, people are not going to want to be involved.

JANELLE: So the first step in making change, you would say is changing your leadership to represent the type of culture and inclusiveness that you want echoed within your organization or community group?

SHANISE: Absolutely. I don’t think it’s enough to just say, as insert privileged or whatever here, I want this to be for everyone. When we use the term ‘allies’ they could really be doing a lot more. You could also say, “I don’t need to be here. I don’t need representation but I don’t need to be this representation. I’m going to step down and give this position to someone else.” I don’t see a lot of that happening either. I’m in Philadelphia. It’s a very small community compared to other bigger cities but that’s just been my experience. I’ve also had a really good experiences.

JAMEY: I totally understand what you are saying in the way that I’ve thought about this in the past is that actions speak louder than words when it comes to diversity inclusion. But I also think that inaction speaks a lot louder than words and when somebody says that they’re going to do something and then they don’t follow up on it, that’s a really clear signifier to me that they’re more worried about how they’re coming across and their PR than actually caring about these people that they want to represent. I think that people don’t think a lot about what their inaction is saying about them and the impression that it’s making about them or their company. I think that it’s really important that I wish more people would think about. You were talking about allies and something I really believe that is like, ally is something you do, not just the word that describes who you are. You have to continually be working at that to retain that status if that makes sense.

SHANISE: Absolutely. Perhaps, some people think that, “Oh, this is just something that I have to do to get to this level and I’m done and the work is over.” But it is absolutely something that you have to continuously be doing.

JANELLE: It seems like there’s this shallow level of identity that people are striving for to be represent this ideal of diversity in inclusion that is really limited but at the same time, a lack of awareness of how it seems from what you’re saying, people are not recognizing the shallowness of it and recognizing what it takes to actually… I don’t know. I’m wondering why people aren’t recognizing that gap of why, and maybe it’s just humans. It’s kind of a sad statement in a way but at the same time, we have to move to a point of giving a damn, you know?

SHANISE: Absolutely.

SAM: Shanise, you said something much earlier about contrasting diversity and inclusion and then Jamey, you said something about action speaking louder than words. But I do want to talk a little bit about the words because I feel like the words reflect how people are thinking, whether or not you believe that our words shape the way we think, I think that they certainly are indicators of what’s going on beneath the surface. I feel like 10 years ago, we just weren’t having this conversation at all. Then five years ago, we started talking about diversity a lot and then, I don’t know maybe I’m slow on the uptake but maybe just in the last year, I’ve started seeing a lot more of DNI as the shorthand for diversity and inclusion.

That’s an interesting reflection to me of where the conversation is going because I think people brought in diversity and inclusion because they realize that you’re not going to get diversity without inclusion. What I’m interested in is whether we can get it to the point where we just talk about inclusion, with the implicit assumption that once we work on that, the diversity will take care of itself.

SHANISE: Right. That would be amazing if we could just have that conversation.

SAM: So get on that, everyone. Listeners, you have your job.

JESSICA: It’s like accessibility, that inclusiveness work helps the people that are on your team now and helps you welcome more people onto your team.

SHANISE: Exactly.

JAMEY: I think maybe something that would be cool to clarify is that when we say diversity and inclusion, what are the difference between those two things? I want to get Shanise’s take on that, if possible.

SHANISE: I’m speaking specifically to tech events. I feel like when people say diversity, they’re thinking amongst attendees, people that look differently and people that have nontraditional backgrounds, people of different gender, etcetera. But I feel like they’re not really thinking about inclusion. I don’t really think that even inclusion is mentioned at most events like this. But in my opinion, I would say inclusion is everyone feels like they have a space and that they feel comfortable and that they’re respected and they’re not just there to be X amount of this diverse group is present here.

JAMEY: If you do diversity without inclusion, I think you’re going to find that it fizzles out. Maybe you can get less attendees this year but if they don’t feel comfortable, they’re not to come back and they’re not going to invite other people.

SHANISE: Yes, exactly.

JANELLE: Or you end up getting very cliquish kind of behavior where you’ve got a diverse group of people there but they don’t talk to each other and they only feel safe in independent groups.

SHANISE: Yes and that happens all the time. When I decided to learn how to code about a year ago, like I said I’m very introverted, I don’t want to network, I don’t want to talk to anyone but I thought if I’m to be in this industry, I have to see if I like it and what these people are like, what these events are like. I kind of forced myself out of my comfort zone and just went to events and spoke to people that look like me, people that were different from me. But not everyone can do that and not everyone should be expected to give.

I’ve had people come up to me and say, “I wasn’t sure about this event. This event brands itself as an inclusive event but I saw that you’re attending,” Or, “I saw that you’re organizing,” Or, “I saw that you are friendly with the organizers and that made me feel comfortable to attend this event now.

JANELLE: It seems like you started this whole discussion, talking about leadership and how leadership basically creates this model or this example, that the entire culture of the event ends up echoing. With speakers who you end up putting on stage and what those people represent, the same kind of thing as leadership is that those people sentiments are echoed throughout the conference or event too. It seems like if you want to influence diversity and inclusion, it has to start with the culture and values of the people that are leading non-stage. I guess the question is from your experience in doing this, what kind of things can people do to start breaking down those walls?

SHANISE: Do you mean the leadership that’s not diverse or do you mean attendees breaking down walls?

JANELLE: Well, I think a little bit of both. You can affect things from both sides and it’s not necessarily an easy problem to solve because going outside of our boundaries is always uncomfortable and as you said, you can push yourself to go outside those boundaries but if the context isn’t really supportive of that, it’s going to be hard for other people to do that.

If you’re leading in events, you’ve obviously got more influence but at the same time, there are specific things that you can do like you talked about being willing to step down and also maybe, going out of your way to find people. What kind of things would you do? You’re writing an event and you’re trying to make a more diverse, more inclusive event, what would you do differently?

SHANISE: I don’t think anyone has that figured out. It would be nice if we did. But I think something that can definitely be done is like I said earlier, if a leadership team is an inclusive, I don’t think it’s lash or harsh to have someone step down and have them add a person that is qualified and is different and can bring a different perspective and make that be a more inclusive just by them being present on a leadership team. We’ll kind of inherently and organically have that begin to happen.

JESSICA: When we started Greater Than Code, one of our specific aims was to have a diverse panel. It’s not as diverse as we would like. Dave and Sam were both like, “I would happily step down to have representation from people of another race because we’re mostly white.” You want to join our panel?

SHANISE: I’m just always afraid of saying the wrong thing and I said this to Mandy, I’m very angry on Twitter so I’m flattered that she thinks that I have hot takes but usually, it’s just a moment of rage, just black out and just upset about something.

JAMEY: That’s where hot takes come from. Twitter is number one source of hot takes.

SHANISE: Raging on Twitter?

JAMEY: Yeah.

JESSICA: And those are meaningful to people.

JAMEY: It’s very meaningful to me because I’m also angry a lot. Sometimes I post about it and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I just don’t want to be perceived as angry. Sometimes I don’t know how to express my anger but seeing other people get angry about some of the things that I’m angry about is very therapeutic for me.

SHANISE: Yes. That is something that I am learning now on Twitter and that’s something that I had on the topic list, the struggling with meaning to be positive. In tech, I kind of toy with, should I just be honest and angry on my Twitter like I just want to be? But that’s unprofessional. That’s going to reflect negatively on me, even more so being a black woman. Everyday, I’m not sure like should I retweet this thing? Should I post this thing that just happened to me at the tech meetup that really pissed me off? I kind of looked to people that I admire in tech and see what their Twitter feed looks like and how angry they are and kind of gauge it by that.

I wasn’t realizing that I was doing this at the time and it took me a couple of months to realize that I’m checking other people to see how angry they are. If these are people that I’m friends with, I would want them to also be angry. There’s a lot to be angry about right now in tech.

JESSICA: It’s my job to be the positive voice on this podcast so I do want to say that in my five years of speaking at conferences, there’s been a tremendous increase in conferences aiming for a diverse speaker lineup and inviting people and seeking that and I’m glad. And, oh, conferences that are canceled because of, “Shit. We published a panel that was all white men.” You know, at least companies are feeling pressure to give lip service to diversity. This is a step. We just have to keep up the pressure and get further. I’m sorry, there’s a fucking lawnmower. I don’t have anything positive to say about the lawnmower.

SHANISE: Does anyone else feel like they struggle to be positive?

JAMEY: I feel incapable of feeling and expressing anything other than the way I feel right at this moment. When I feel positive, I come across as very positive and I feel negative, I come across as very negative. I feel like there’s not much I can do to control it because I’m just emotional. I try to be genuine. It’s not so much that I’m struggling with being positive. It’s just like this is how things are going and this is how I genuinely feel about it and that’s what I want to try to express the people because I think that it’s important to be able to celebrate and commiserate with other people. I like to set the ground for that.

JANELLE: And we all want to be understood and felt. We’re upset and frustrated and angry at the world because it’s not the way we want it to be. We want other people to be there with us and when everyone else isn’t in their bubble world and can’t see us and we feel invisible, it hurts. It’s like being angry and wanting people to be angry with us is a way to feel connected and cared about.

JESSICA: And if we express that anger, then we’re connecting with the other people who are angry, as opposed to the people who are just fine. They don’t really need that connection that badly, anyway.

SHANISE: I know when I post angry stuff on Twitter, a response I get a lot from friends that means a lot to me is, “I see you,” and it’s like I see you feel like you’re invisible, you’re being erased and I see you and also I see your anger and I understand it and validated in a way.

JESSICA: Jamey, I like your point about being positive when you feel positive and angry when you feel angry. One thing I like about Twitter is that it is about expressing this particular moment because you can’t go back and edit it. It’s not something like a blog post that I would go back and refine if I decide that I was wrong. It’s just right now.

JAMEY: Immediacy is an important word to me. That’s how I feel about Twitter.

JESSICA: Shanise, we talked about needing to be positive on Twitter. Is there anywhere else where you feel the pressure to be positive?

SHANISE: I guess, when I’m interacting with people at these tech events, I feel like just my years of being involved with a local tech community, I’ve been involved with different organizations and I’ve met a lot of people. I kind of feel that pressure to be positive, on whatever group that I’m volunteering for or if I’m on some sort of organizer team, I feel like I need to be positive for the people that I’m serving. But at the same time, I feel like Jamey was saying, I’m so going to be genuine and I want to be genuine and I want people to see my anger so that they can know that if they’re feeling the same way, that’s perfectly okay.

JESSICA: Yeah, that’s the thing. When you express your feelings, you’re okay for other people to feel that and that can be powerful.

SAM: I almost feel like as somebody who is in a relative position of privilege, I feel like I have an obligation to be more negative about things because there is stuff that people will only hear from someone like me. That gives me a platform that I can and should be using to promote visibility of some of these things. There’s always going to be some person who is just there to argue and I’m going to wind up blocking them. But I feel like part of my job as somebody with a lot of privilege is to help amplify and signal boost folks when they’re hurt and upset about something that they have every right to be upset about.

SHANISE: Because you’re performing, I said that as a verb and not a noun.

JESSICA: This is the part of the show where we each reflect on what it made us think about or what we might do differently? Sam, do you want to go first?

SAM: There’s a lot that we talked about that’s really interesting as always on this show but the thing that I think I’m going to takeaway today is just that really useful reminder about lazy perfectionism as a thing that I sometimes forget is a thing. I always find that having a name like lazy perfectionism for what’s happening in my brain, that having that name helps me recognize it and spot it and label it. Then choose how I want to engage with that. Thank you for bringing it up and reminding me, yet again that it’s something I need to pay attention to.

JANELLE: This whole conversation, Shanise just made me really think a lot about how shallow a lot of the efforts have been to try and create change and being on a conference tour where I’m the only woman on the tour [inaudible] and I’m in a position to influence a lot of things just because I can go out there and get on stage and lead and make change. There’s a lot that I could do and there’s a big difference between saying that you care about something and actually going out there and making stuff happen.

I very much appreciate that perspective, especially when it comes to the distinction between diversity and inclusion and actually breaking down those walls and bringing people together in a way that they’re just not right now and seeing those people. Thank you for that.

MANDY: I think that’s why we do this show. We do this show because I see these conversations happening on Twitter and I want to hear more opinions about the topics that can only be said in 140 characters. I also think on the line of performative diversity and inclusion. Right now as the producer of the show, it’s pretty frustrating for me because I am reaching out to companies who say that they care about these things and while they expressed interest, it’s lip service.

We are recording these shows every week and are so close to going back to weekly that if just one company steps up, I feel like other companies will as well and sponsor us. If you say you care about diversity and inclusion, sponsor our show. We are probably the most diverse and inclusive tech podcast out there right now and I am proud to be the producer and person that helps to run the show. Again, please reach out to me: Mandy@GreaterThanCode.com and step up.

JAMEY: One thing that I’m taking away from this and thinking about is being kind to yourself and the reason that this kind of popped up in my mind is that we’ve talked a lot about not being alone in what you’re going through, I guess. In the last part of the conversation, I was talking about this in terms of being angry on Twitter and seeing where other people are angry and perhaps, being kind to yourself for wanting to express those emotions. But even as I’m thinking back, the other thing we’ve talked about like when we were discussing lazy perfectionism and being able to say, “I thought it was just me struggling with this,” and hearing other people say, “No, I also have all these books that I haven’t read and I struggle with the same things.”

To me having that kind of connection makes me feel less like I’m failing at something and more like, this is something that we all go through and need to show ourselves those kindness. I think it’s easier to show other people kindness than to show ourselves kindness and that’s what’s on my mind right now.

JESSICA: The point that stood out to me was the one about, if you want to have diverse attendees, get a diverse leadership team. Bring diversity in right next to you or step down and replace yourself with someone more diverse. At work, our whole company is white and our leadership team is all white men. When we start hiring again, we have an opportunity to change that. I’m going to push for hiring someone on the leadership team and you always get the push back of, “Oh, we need the most qualified candidate,” and I think the trick there is I read that white men get hired based on potential and women and people of color based on experience and therefore, they don’t get that experience.

I’m going to push for hiring someone based on potential because I bet, we can find a lot of people with really high potential. It’s an untapped market and that is still under-tapped. It’s the same with conferences that I’m on the board of, or when I’m looking for speakers to suggest. I’m not looking for people who might have seen speak, who are already on the circuit. I’m looking for people with potential to speak and trying to encourage them and offer any help that I can. I’m going to be thinking about bringing diversity in at the highest level, looking past people who are obvious at people who might be fantastic. I’m looking to make myself and my organization better, not safer.

SAM: I know we’re in reflections here but I just have to respond to that. You mentioned that the next time you’re hiring is going to be another opportunity to make your team more diverse and I would point out that it’s certainly your best opportunity and if you leave it alone for long enough, if you missed that one, the next one is going to be a little less valuable and a little less valuable. The longer you leave it, the harder it’s going to be to change the direction of your organization.

SHANISE: I have a two-part reflection. Part one would be the explosive dissonance and recognizing that there are moments where I enjoy that feeling and moments where I avoid that feeling so seeking a balance there and kind of reflecting on that these feelings are okay and that they wax and wane and it’s a normal learning process.

Part two of my reflection would be, when we were discussing diversity in leadership. It led me think of a tweet thread Lara Hogan. She’s a VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and she mentioned that on a dev team or a company, a person can say, they can find opportunities to highlight people that wouldn’t normally get these opportunities, someone that is more underrepresented than this person. If someone is pitching a project, someone like gay cis white men can recommend someone that is different from them and say, “I think that this person would be good for this job,” and kind of promote them in that way because it seems that people like this, especially in the tech community, they have this set credibility that everyone just believes. Using that platform, using that privilege and that credibility to set other people up and promote other people, that wouldn’t otherwise get that opportunity would be a way to shuffle that along, I guess.

JESSICA: That wraps up Episode 44 of Greater Than Code, which is also Greater Than Plants Parenthood, in my opinion, especially if there are lawnmowers involved.

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043: The Accessibility of Board Games with Mischa Lewis-Norelle and James Edward Gray

Mandy Moore — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 05:00:22 +0000

Panelists:

Rein Henrichs | Jamey Hampton | Sam Livingston-Gray | Coraline Ada Ehmke

Guest Starring:

James Edward Gray: @JEG2

Mischa Lewis-Norelle: @mlewisno | mlewisno.com

Show Notes:

Amazon links are affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

00:16 – Welcome to “Paneldome!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:58 – Backgrounds and Superpowers

Hilary Stohs-Krause: We’ve Always Been Here: Women Changemakers in Tech @ RailsConf 2017

04:44 – Examples of Accessibility Challenges in Board Games

07:00 – Games and Challenges

Escape: The Curse of the Temple (Purchase)

Millennium Blades (Purchase)

11:49 – The Power of House Rules

RoboRally (Purchase)

Small World (Purchase)

14:41 – German-style/Eurogames vs American Games

Ticket to Ride (Purchase)

Puerto Rico (Purchase)

Settlers of Catan (Purchase)

Great Western Trail (Purchase)

16:45 – Video Games; Real-time vs Turn Based Games

Master of Orion (Purchase)

Don’t Starve Together (Purchase)

Rogue

19:35 – Tabletop Role-Playing Games (RPGs)

Dungeons and Dragons (D&D)

22:45 – Cooperative Games vs Competitive Games

Space Cadets (Purchase)

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong (Purchase)

22:45 – Bluffing Games, The Autism Spectrum, and Player Elimination

Mascarade (Purchase)

Sheriff of Nottingham (Purchase)

Werewolf (Purchase)

One Night Werewolf (Purchase)

Resistance (Purchase)

Sentinels of the Universe (Purchase)

Goblin Quest (Purchase)

Shut Up & Sit Down: Sean Bean Quest

35:14 – The Cost of Board Games: Time and Money

How to Build an Amazing Board Game Collection for $10!

Pandemic Legacy (Purchase)

Gloomhaven (Purchase)

Cheapass Games

Fiasco (Purchase)

The Open Game License

Spyfall (Purchase)

Mafia (Purchase)

43:02 – The History of Monopoly; Leftist Board Games

Suffragetto

Class Struggle

45:56 – Resources

Favorite Games:

Sam: Repello (Purchase)

Coraline: Tales of the Arabian Nights (Purchase)

Rein: Dungeons and Dragons: Second Edition and Lords of Waterdeep (Purchase)

James: Exalted (Purchase)

Jamey: Betrayal at House on the Hill (Purchase)

Mischa: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (Purchase)

Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

JAMEY: Hi, I’m Jamey Hampton and welcome to ‘Paneldome!’ the show where six panelists enter, have a conversation and then hopefully, six panelists also leave. I’d like to introduce Rein Henrichs, my fellow panelist.

REIN: Oh. Hi, Jamey. I didn’t see you there. Actually, I think the title of the show is Greater Than Code but we’ll let that one slide and I am happy to introduce Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Thank you, Rein. I am pleased to be here and happy to introduce my friend, Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hi, everybody. We have two guest on the show today. First up is James Gray. James plays games and hopes that he’s going to be allowed on the podcast today. He’s been a moderate to heavy role player plus video and board gamer for over 30 years. He plays mostly everything. He also recently won the game of Western Trail, 131 to 84 but he warned us that if we say that on the air, his wife may leave him. Oh, shit. I’m sorry, James. We should have read that in advance.

SAM: No do overs.

JAMES: Right, yeah. No problem. I’m sure Mandy loves me enough to fix it in post.

JAMEY: And I’d like to introduce our other guest, Mischa Lewis-Norelle. Mischa has the compassionate heart of a Midwesterner, the resilient legs of Northwesterner and the parched throats of a Southern Californian. When not hosting board game nights, coding in his job in Santa Barbara or trying to figure this life stuff out, he has hastily showing jokes into bios for podcast introductions, much to the chagrin of everyone listening.

CORALINE: I’m definitely chagrined right now.

MISCHA: I could tell. I could see in your face. It’s okay.

SAM: Oh, the humanity.

CORALINE: We’d like to get to know our panelists before we get into the meat of the discussion. Mischa, what’s your superpower?

MISCHA: That’s a really hard question. Perhaps, appropriately for this conversation, my super power is building community. I really love getting people together around things that they like doing together and then having that continue over time.

CORALINE: James was too humble to point this out but James is a pillar of the development community and one of the kindest people I know. I don’t know if you want to take the easy way out, James and say your superpowers is kindness.

JAMES: Tempting. Actually, I’m on this episode because I’m trying to develop a new superpower. I’ve been working a lot recently on talking about my disability and things like that. When Sam asked me to be on the show to talk about the accessibility of board games, I thought this is a great opportunity to practice.

CORALINE: Awesome.

SAM: For our listeners who don’t know you, what is your disability, James?

JAMES: It’s complicated, Sam. I have one of the muscular dystrophies. It’s called [inaudible] disease or spinal muscular atrophy type 1 but the MDA has changed over time how they referred to diseases. Back when I was diagnosed, it meant something very different than it means today. It’s complex but the general description is that I’m confined to an electric wheelchair, I have a protein deficiency basically that makes the majority of my muscles weaker over time.

CORALINE: And James, you recently built a house that you were lovingly refer to as Castle Grayskull?

JAMES: Yes, that’s right. I did. I made a totally accessible dream house with huge doors and no stairs anywhere, even out of the garage and things like that. You can find me roaming around my castle in most days.

CORALINE: Nice. And Mischa I’m curious, what is your interest in accessibility in board games? Where does that come from?

MISCHA: One of those spur of the moment conversations, I was actually talking to Hilary Stohs-Krause, who after she gave a really excellent talk at RailsConf, we ended up talking about board games and she mentioned that some of the friends in her group had trouble playing some of the board games because of different accessibility issues with the game design. That kind of started me down this rabbit hole over the next couple of months. I just ended up reading a bunch of different blogs about it and looking for different products that are related to it. Sometime soon, I’m hoping to get to be a part of building additions to games to help make it more accessible as well.

JAMES: That’s really awesome. How about a super basic example that first run that pops in your head a way that a game might be challenging for someone?

MISCHA: One of the perhaps most visible to most people because a lot of people are aware of this condition, a decent percentage of the American population has red/green color blindness and yet the basic colors for a lot of pieces are red, green, blue and yellow. It means that two of the sets of pieces are oftentimes indistinctionable because they have the same shape and only differ by that color. That’s a super basic example.

Another example would be a lot of games involved dealing with a lot of small parts and putting them very precisely onto a board so if someone has trouble with that kind of muscular position, as I’m sure you know that sometimes playing those games becomes a lot more challenging, things like rolling die and things like that. If the play space isn’t designed properly, it can end up not being a feasible thing so the game ends up taking a lot longer and being a lot less fun for people that it might otherwise [inaudible].

JAMES: Once upon a time, I didn’t have any trouble rolling dice. Now, I do and have pretty much let go of that. But I have a six-year old which turns out to be the best dice-rolling mechanism you can come by. Yeah, problem solved.

SAM: Yeah, James I was actually wondering, do you use a laser pointer to designate where you want stuff to go?

JAMES: I am embarrassed to admit that that’s a genius idea, Sam. Maybe I’m using that in the future but I have not done that in the past. It’s a great idea.

CORALINE: Normally, your laser pointer activities involve contacting alien civilizations but also has more practical use as we’ve just heard.

REIN: And playing with cats.

JAMES: Playing with my cats which is what I was going to add. Super good idea, yes.

JAMEY: I’m worried that the cats would then want to play the game, which sounds dangerous.

JAMES: Yeah, that would be awful. If you’re pointing to somebody’s [inaudible], and you’re like, “This point is [inaudible],” and the cat flings across the room —

REIN: Oh, no, what happened to your tile?

SAM: Chaos monkey is [inaudible] games.

CORALINE: James, I’m curious about what games you play often and some of the challenges that you face with those games.

JAMES: I played games for, I don’t know like 25 years, without ever realizing that my disability was maybe affecting some of them in certain ways because when it’s just the way you are, you don’t apply a lot of external bot to it or things like that. But then recently, a trending gaming has been, in my experience, some of the ones I’ve been playing, doing with real time elements. Coraline, I think you actually mentioned a game with real time elements before the show.

CORALINE: Yeah, Escape From the Temple, I believe it was.

JAMES: Right, and can you explain the overall flow of the game?

CORALINE: Sure. It is a fast and furious dice-rolling game. There are no turns, everyone is playing simultaneously. You’re rolling as many dice as possible to move from room to room and to collect jewels and eventually to escape the temple. You’re laying down tiles as you go, unlocking tiles to expand the maze and the game actually has a 10-minute time limit enforced by a soundtrack that you play at the same time as the game. Not the friendliest game at all for people with motor difficulties.

SAM: That sounds exhausting and I could probably gave up with that.

JAMES: Everybody is kind of acting on their own there and independently. Am I right about that?

CORALINE: Yeah. The only time that there’s cooperation really is coordinating who’s going to what room and if you get a skull on one of your dice, that locks that die and if you get completely locked out, someone has to come into the same room and see you and roll furiously to unlock your dice.

JAMES: Right. A game like that is pretty much a no-go for me because as I mentioned earlier, if I need to roll dice or something, my solution would just be to ask my six-year old to roll for me because she loves it. But then, I would be stopping her from rolling her own dice at a time-critical scenario or something like that. This seems to be a trending games recently, really popular game last year, I believe was called Millennium Blades and it’s an amazing game.

It’s a card-collecting game about card-collecting games, which is just super. It’s a blast. If you ever play anything like Magic the Gathering or anything, it has so many strategies and you would enjoy. But it has a real-time component to it and trading off the market and stuff like that. Someone may put a card for sale on the market and then you can buy back card off the market. This is a case where me winning on my fellow players will affect a response to someone else like if we’re both trying to get the same card on the market or something like that. I think that’s really have been one of the ones I enjoyed but where [inaudible], I have not found a good way to adapt to and may be possible by changing the rules or adapting obviously but I’m not sure.

MISCHA: James, I have a follow up question. Talking about the game that Coraline mentioned, sounds like it’s fast and furious game. If anyone remember, but there was a game, one of the standard board games from the 90s that had this half dome, the see through plastic dome and all the dice were put inside of the dome and you can press it and it would roll them for you. Something like that could actually help make fast and furious dice-rolling games more feasible.

JAMES: That’s a good question and I do remember seeing that mechanism in commercials. That particular one might not be of much help to me but surely, I could use a dice-rolling program on an iPhone or whatever. There would definitely be ways to get around that. But then you have — [inaudible]. There you go. There’s the name. Good job, Jamey.

I give you the dice-rolling phone or whatever but then you have the issue of rolling and also moving your piece in response to that roll and stuff like that. Some games, I basically like as it is. Is this game close and I could make a little modification here and there? Or is this game the central mechanic of it, probably outside of my Venn diagram of capabilities. I think that’s a bigger hurdle.

SAM: Speaking of modifications, James as we were discussing this over email, you brought up the power of house rules. What are some of the ones that you’ve come up with?

JAMES: Yeah. Some games are very easy to adapt and sometimes, we do it I guess without recognizing we’re doing it. One of my long time games since I was in high school — this is forever ago, dinosaur times — is RoboRally. Has anyone played RoboRally?

CORALINE: No.

MISCHA: I adore RoboRally.

JAMES: Yes, I love this game. In RoboRally, your robots moving around a factory floor, you play cards to program your robots to next five moves and everyone programs first and then it turns on and they all happen at once so pandemonium ensues as robots are pushed around, sharp with razors that they never saw it coming. Its crazy great. I love that game.

RoboRally rules indicate that you should start a timer when people are programming their cards. There’s a little timer included in the box or hourglass timer. We have never done that ever. Never used a timer. Actually, it would be brutal to new players, in my opinion because one of the tricky bits of RoboRally is understanding how the conveyor belt on the factory floor affect you as you’re moving and when you’re new, you care to this adjustment period where you’re getting the hang of it. If you have a timer, that’s really going to put a heavy penalty on you. We’ve just never played with a timer. We’ll politely rip each other a little bit when you’ve been programming for a long time or something but beyond that, we don’t use any kind of time pressure.

That simple house rule has taken that game from something I couldn’t do to something I’ve done for over 20 years. I would just say while there are games like Coraline discussed earlier where I think pretty much the premise of the game is pretty far out of what I’m capable of. Simple rules can make big changes.

SAM: Just out of curiosity, does that adaptation mean that your six-year old can play RoboRally or is that still in her future?

JAMES: We haven’t tried that one specifically yet. I’m not sure if she’s quite there yet. Although I will say just like two weeks ago, I think she played Small World with us for the first time and she thought that was a blast and did quite well. She got second place by a couple of points. She loves Small World so she’s getting it right. She plays the bigger games.

REIN: In addition to house rules to modify games, are there categories of games that you find generally to be more accessible. One of the big categories of games is German-style or Eurogames versus American games. Eurogames often have less luck, more strategy, less conflict, more trade negotiation. They often involve things like building a tile or array of components in front of you like cards or tiles or things like that. Examples would be Ticket to Ride, Puerto Rico, and Settlers of Catan is something most people have played. Anyway, is that a style of game that you find generally more accessible or there are issues with that one as well?

JAMES: I love the Euro-style games. My wife and I, we will sit down and play one for an afternoon. You mentioned when you introduce me that we played Great Western Trail this last weekend, which took us three hours just sitting there, building things up and that is our idea of a great way to spend time together. I play a ton of those and I think you’re right that aspect of everybody working out the ideal strategy for them, it doesn’t bother people if my slowness or something gets in the way a little bit. It fits better in that model, whereas if you have a fast and furious card game where everybody’s throwing a card every few seconds or something, it would be much more distracting to have me tossing cards in that situation.

Also, something that has a large hand of cards, I can’t really hold a large hand of cards anymore or things like that. For sure, there are definitely games that are better than that. But good news is the strategy games have always been my favorite, far and away. I’m a tournament chess player from way back so that’s my cup of tea and I’ve always leaning to that way. It works out but that’s the case.

On the video game side, it’s maybe I’m more pronounced, where often video games require pretty quick reactions for certain things and you have things like the Civilizations or the Masters of Orion. They are much more slower and strategic and I do love those games but they can take days to play literally. I think the one I play right now that on the edge of my capabilities is Don’t Starve Together, which is a rogue-like game where you’re gathering food and trying to keep yourself from getting too cold or hot or all of those things. There are sometimes attacks by big monsters.

I said rogue-like and rogue-like means a very punishing game where you die all the time and that’s just expected and you learn from those experiences and try it again. I have learned to beat monsters in that game but I have a system to it. Deerclops is one of the big scary monster that comes for you in the winter and I will put him to sleep, drop gunpowder in his feet while he’s sleeping, light the gunpowder on fire, back off, you’ll kill him that way. I have a system for how I kill them, even though my reaction times aren’t as good as most people.

CORALINE: I think Rogue, the original and its derivatives, all the other rogue-likes probably represent the kind of video game that people with disabilities can most easily play because all of the actions and all of the movements are triggered by a keystroke. If you’re able to activate a key by whatever means, you normally press keys on your keyboard, you move and then you see more of the dungeon and you might see a monster but nothing’s happening real time. Everything is precipitated on you initiating the next move.

REIN: And there are cases where you might want to spend minutes considering a single key press so it can be a very slow game at times.

SAM: It’s interesting to consider how much of that might have been due to technical limitations. I don’t know when Rogue came about but I can see it being played on a teletype where you got to wait and print the whole screen and then send your input.

JAMES: That category of games we’re discussing now is often called turn-based games, where for each action, you get the monsters or bad guys or whatever, get one action as well. Those are the kinds of games where I do very well because when it’s my turn, I can take as long as I want.

JAMEY: To build on this just slightly more, how would you categorize tabletop role-playing game such as Dungeons and Dragons in this hierarchy of accessibility?

MISCHA: That’s a really interesting one. It probably depends on the role-playing game. It’s interesting because even a tabletop role-playing game, you can spend across the entire spectrum. Some involved moving little models across a giant table, which requires being able to move around the table things like that but others are really focused on the storytelling. In that case, it’s almost exclusively just what you say that drives the narrative forward and drives the game forward. I would imagine that those ones where people who are able to communicate with everyone else in the group pretty easily, are those would be a lot easier to play but that’s just my perception.

CORALINE: I went to a D&D game and I had an interesting situation. I like doing maps in Photoshop and I will spend, literally days crafting a map. What I do is I have a giant monitor that I never put on a stand and I lay that down flat in the middle of the table and everyone has their miniatures. We play 4th edition D&D. There’s a grid that I overlay on the map and then people position themselves because 4th edition is very tactical. There’s a lot of tactics to combat.

I had an interesting situation where one of my players moved away, about halfway through the campaign and we actually allow him to play remotely via Skype so I have a little tripod that I put my iPhone on. That way, he can see the board and then from Skype, he can see the other participants but we really had to work to make it such that he could tell us where he wanted his miniature placed on the board. It’s not certainly the same as a person with disability playing the game but it was one of those similar kind of obstacle that we had to overcome.

JAMEY: It’s interesting to me to hear Coraline talk about her D&D just like, Mischa as you say, it’s very different than my D&D game. We don’t normally have maps and mentors because sometimes we’ll go half a dozen sessions without having any combat. I could do an entire day session without having to roll any dice at all. That’s just talking.

CORALINE: Yeah, I think that’s [inaudible] refer to as ‘Theater of the Mind.’ While the origins of Dungeons and Dragons actually was a miniature large scale war game but the Dungeons and Dragons that many of us grew up with in 80s and 90s was all theater of the mind.

MISCHA: Yeah. Another thing that this conversation kind of highlight is role-playing games traditionally have a dungeon master and that person is essentially helping to build the game. With enough planning, I think role-playing games can give you a lot of freedom to solve for any potential accessibility issues that your group might have, before you even start playing. I think there’s a lot of freedom there that is really cool.

REIN: This actually brings up something I want to talk about, which is cooperative versus competitive games. Don’t Starve Together is a good example of a cooperative game where you’re cooperating as a group against, essentially the environment. Then people think that Dungeons and Dragons is about party competing with a dungeon master but really, you’re cooperating with them to build a good experience for everyone. Can we maybe talk about how that axis of competitive and cooperative plays into disability and other things that we care about?

JAMES: I’m so glad you brought up cooperative games. I want to say that I think being a long time gamer and living in a place where there are gaming communities but they’re not huge and well-known. I think my number one trick for introducing people to games is to show them a cooperative game. They always come in and they say something like, “My husband and I play Risk but we get really competitive and we didn’t enjoy it or whatever,” and I’m like, “Here, let me show you this game. It’s you and me together against the board.” It’s just a mind-blowing experience. From a gaming standpoint, let alone accessibility issues, if you have not played a cooperative game, you need to do so ASAP.

REIN: One of the problems with introducing people to competitive games is that new players usually lose and that’s not a fun experience.

JAMES: Right. One of the great things about cooperative games is the ramp up is much better because you’re all in this together, you’re having this experience, you’re trying to overcome this puzzle or a problem and you’re talking it out. If you’re new, you get to see how the more experienced players like, “If we do this, then we could follow up with that and we’ll have that under control,” and you get exposed to that and you feel like you’re a part of this, at least I do, I should speak for myself. I feel like I’m a part of this thing that’s going on, even when I haven’t got the hang of it yet so yeah, super great about cooperatives.

Then of course, from an accessibility standpoint, they’re quite good. I mentioned I play a ton of Don’t Starve Together. I play that with my wife. She plays the fighter-type character, which she enjoys. The particular weaknesses that I have, I’m the base-builder. That’s my specialty. I sit in the base and build the entire base and she’ll ask me, “What resources do you need?” I need this and that and she’ll run out into the world and go kill a bunch of things and do challenging stuff and then bring the resources back. It works very well for offloading those aspects that are harder for you.

REIN: I like that she is the provider in this situation.

JAMES: Oh, yeah.

JAMEY: It’s kind of romantic in a way.

MISCHA: Beautiful.

JAMEY: This is kind of slightly different accessibility issue but for me, I have anxiety issues and sometimes competitive games can be very stressful for me because I don’t like to get very competitive. You can play competitive games like intensely competitive, in theory but depending on who you’re playing with, sometimes you can’t and that’s really hard for me when I don’t want to be intensely competitive and people that I’m playing with make it into more of the competition than I’m comfortable with. Cooperative games are also really good for that kind of stress levels, in my opinion.

SAM: Yeah. Well, we’re talking about turn-based versus real-time earlier and I don’t have anxiety diagnosis but I don’t like playing the real-time games. I don’t find them relaxing and I’m playing a game because I want to have fun so I generally stick to the turn-based strategy ones as well for similar reasons.

MISCHA: It’s interesting because I noticed something very similar early on. When I was buying a lot of board games, they tended to be German-style and then perhaps slightly more competitive. But I started to notice that I was enjoying the competitive ones less because I was also getting very tense for a long amount of time, which wasn’t pleasant so I’ve almost exclusively been buying cooperative games in the last year or two.

One of the things that I want to mention on the cooperative aspect is there’s a really cool game out there. It’s called Space Cadets. It’s a cooperative game where everyone is playing different members of the… What do you called the command part of the ship? I should know this term.

REIN: The bridge?

MISCHA: Oh, the bridge. There we go, yes. You got your weapons officer and you’ve got your captain and all that and what’s cool about it is each role has a completely different mini-game that they’re playing but they all need to coordinate the outcomes of their mini-games to be able to propel the ship forward. Unfortunately, from accessibility standpoint, that game is in real-time but I think what would be a really cool thing for game designers to explore is how the cooperative games, where there’s different mechanics for each player and some mechanics that might be more accessible for one group of people and some that are more accessible for another group of people. But everyone, regardless of accessibility and even of what they enjoy in the game, can find some part of the game that they can play.

JAMES: I love that idea and just to kind of run with it for a second. There are games that need that definition today. Just off the top of my head, we were talking earlier about role-playing games and how they often involve a dungeon master. The dungeon master has a much higher level of requirements in what they have to do and manipulate and control, than someone who’s just casually playing. That kind of meets your definition there. But also, to get more into a game, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is a social game, where there’s different roles involves in the game. You’d have a forensics scientist who has to manipulate a lot of tiles and place pieces on them to give clues about what’s happened. But the other people in the game do not have to manipulate tiles in that way so their particular role is less physically taxing but I love that as an idea.

SAM: One of the things that I was thinking about as we were talking that there’s a whole genre of games that I don’t find particularly comfortable. They’re bluffing games. One example is Mascarade, which is spelled M-A-S-C-A-R-A-D-E. It’s a fun party game because you can get a dozen people into it but it involves picking up a card and either claiming that you have a particular identity or claiming an identity that you don’t have. Then you can be challenged on it or not.

That one I found like just about at the edge of my comfort zone and there are a whole other games that I’ve looked at and I have to lie the whole time and I’m not good at it. I find those uncomfortable and I wonder what those might be like for people on the autism spectrum as well who might have even more difficulty modeling what states other people are in?

JAMES: I like it as applied. I obviously don’t know what it would be like from the autism spectrum but I do have two things I want to say to that. One, we recently invited someone on the autism spectrum into our D&D group and it was very fascinating to watch them play. The first time when they came, their hand was shaking visibly and I could tell that it was difficult for them. The stimulation was getting to them and stuff but as the game got rolling and they found their place and everything was rolling along smoothly, they seemed to get noticeably more comfortable and fit in well. I was encouraged by that. I think to some extent, what I’m trying to say is maybe some of those difficulties can be overcome.

Also another thing I want to say in regard to bluffing games, I have found the thing to bluffing games is to lie in your teeth about something you could care less about. I’ll use the game Sheriff of Nottingham. You place goods in a bag for inspection, getting into the city and there are legal goods and illegal goods and you end up having to tell the sheriff what you put in the bag and the sheriff has the choice of kicking you at your word or challenging you in opening the bag to see what you’ve actually put in there. I’ll introduce and spin a good yarn about how these apples are for my sick sister and just lie completely but just make it not matter at all.

REIN: With bluffing games, there’s another concept in board games which is player elimination and I find that the bluffing games and other board games that I enjoy the most are ones that don’t have player elimination because it’s never fun to be playing Werewolf and to die the first night and be out of the game for the next hour.

MISCHA: Yeah, that’s really unpleasant. Under those games I have tried to fix it a little bit. Werewolf now has a version called One Night Werewolf, where if you are eliminated, you’re only out for maybe a minute, rather than an hour. You’re still engaged in the actual game and then as soon as you get eliminated, it’s like, “I’ll just sit here until the next game.”

REIN: And there are games like Resistance, which is basically Werewolf without player elimination, where they’ve restructured it so that everyone gets to play for the entire game. I will say that I’ve played so much Avalon, which is a risk and resistance with some of my friends that they bought me a Merlin figurine, which I put on display every time I’m Merlin, which is every game we play, as far as they know.

JAMES: Player elimination is a troubling mechanic, I think through games as a whole. Why is it fun to have somebody knocked out and sit there and watch? I have enjoyed watching games. I try to come to terms with this. In Sentinels of the Multiverse — another good cooperate superhero card game — when you die and you flip your card over and you’re this inspiration to the players that are still going on. On your turn, you can trigger one effect that is basically inspiring other players. It’s a fabulous mechanic and a great way to deal with player elimination.

REIN: And actually, Eurogames generally tend to not feature player elimination.

JAMES: Sure.

SAM: Yeah, there’s Cthulhu Mythos game that tends to eliminate players. As long as you’re not fighting the big nasty at the end. If your player dies, you basically get a new character and start over, which sometimes can be fun. Sometimes at the end of the game, you’re like, “I’m totally underpowered because I have no items,” but it’s another way of addressing that.

REIN: Actually, cooperative games can be the worst sometimes for player elimination because the game designers still feel like someone needs to lose.

JAMES: Right. That’s a good point. I remember a cooperative game that had player elimination and we played it a couple of times and I was like, “There are better cooperative games.” I reminded of Small World. I feel like that’s almost the ideal situation. Small World does not have player elimination. In there, you take a race and ability combo, you run them to the point where they’re utterly worthless and then you just throw that race into the decline and grab a new one. I’d say, it’s just like starting over and it’s great. It plays so well.

MISCHA: On the RPG side, there’s a lesser-known RPG called Goblin Quest. You play much for goblins but it’s cooperative. It’s RPG and it’s all conversation-based but they have a great ultimate rule set called Sean Bean Quest, where instead of playing a bunch of goblins, you played a bunch of Sean Beans. Every time that a Sean Bean dies, one of your Sean Beans dies, that person then inhabits eight different Sean Bean from a different movie so there are ways to solve that.

JAMES: This is the most amazing game description I have ever heard.

MISCHA: I will send you a link to a podcast episode where some of my favorite board game reviewers play Sean Bean quest. It is choice.

JAMEY: I’m in.

REIN: That sounds amazing.

SAM: I’m just sitting here listening to you all talk about various games that you’ve played and we probably brought up two dozen already on this show and I’m thinking how do you afford all these games both financially and taking the time to play them?

MISCHA: That is a really good point. One thing that is not talked about when it comes to accessibility is cost. The fact you brought up both time and money is also really important. A lot of games that are well-reviewed cost $80, $100, $150 in some cases and for a lot of people, that isn’t accessible. They don’t have that disposable income available. There’s a really great piece that just came out by the same people who did the Sean Bean Quest play through actually about a week ago, where they got from their audience a list of games that worth $10 or less and most of them were free. It was a list of 15 games or something like that. There’s a really cool space for expensive games because as a matter of fact, building a comprehensive board game selection is really expensive prior to a certain access to money that a lot of people don’t have.

SAM: I’ve seen pictures, James of your gaming room and it is impressive.

JAMES: Yeah, it’s pretty bad sign if you have to custom build the gaming room to hold your game collection, right?

CORALINE: You say bad sign, I say good sign.

JAMES: It’s a good point and there’s also games like Pandemic Legacy or Gloomhaven, I believe or similar, which are like campaigns. It’s like a board game but more along a role-playing axis where you go through the campaign, play the game through once and at that point, you’ve actually got the experience out of the game and probably would not be likely to play it again. You can draw up big dollars for a game that you’re only going to play through one time. That’s definitely unfortunate, yet at the same time, I have to say that Pandemic Legacy is amazing and has been top on BoardGameGeek for a long time.

SAM: Well, if it takes you a couple of months to play through, maybe that makes it worthwhile. But still, there’s still a financial barrier there.

JAMES: For sure.

CORALINE: And you can’t share the game with other people once you’ve finished it in the case of Pandemic Legacy. If you’re playing it correctly, you’re actually destroying game materials.

JAMES: Right.

JAMEY: Another thing to think about with those type of games is the group of people you’re playing with. This is more like a time issue but in games like Pandemic Legacy, you have to decide who’s going to play, then they have to play every time, which means that the same group of people has always been available, which is the same for tabletop role-playing games, like we’re talking about earlier. We’ve been talking a little bit about money but on the time side, like playing Dungeons and Dragons, it could be very cheap. You can do it cheap or you can do it expensive, depending on what kind of material is you want to buy but it takes an incredible amount of time to plan out and to play, session are very long. I’ve been playing in the same campaign since I was 16. You switch out people —

CORALINE: Wow, a year.

JAMEY: A whole year. It’s like a huge commitment to join a group like that when that’s the dynamic.

JAMES: I do want to say really quickly that overall, the game industry, especially the reviewers have really helped the game industry to an extremely high standard on components and they get dinged heavily if their components are not amazing. I think that is severely driving the cost of games up as now all games have very elaborate wooden pieces or spinners to keep track of life points and things like that and that’s really driving the cost up. But I will say that in my particular group, we’ve played several games but what you would call cheap. I had a real blast with them. Just [inaudible] player, a couple [inaudible]. I see Sam and I are on the same page because I was thinking back to a company called Cheapass Games and they have made some really great games like ‘Before I Kill You, Mr Bond.’ It’s been many years. I [inaudible] remembered but anything cheapass —

SAM: There was one of that zombies on a train.

JAMES: Yes. There are zombies making fast food. I can’t remember what it was called but it was amazing. Anything made by Cheapass Games — role-playing games can be particularly bad with their cost like, “Just buy three books. They’re only $70 each. No problem.” But there are really fun role-playing games that are considerably cheaper. There are free role-playing games. I don’t have a ton of experience with them but Fiasco is a low-cost role-playing game.

CORALINE: Oh, that’s a great game.

JAMES: That’s very fun and you can often download modules for it online. That’s great. Also, don’t forget the value of a deck of cards. Games like Euchre and Pinochle and things like that. They’re timeless and still great. I do think there are good ways to do gaming on a budget. Maybe, you just have to look a little bit but there are resources for that.

JAMEY: I feel like, there’s also a trend recently of some card games that are open sourcing their cards that you can print out your own.

JAMES: Yes. That’s a good point.

REIN: I actually wanted to mention that there are almost open source gaming licenses. Pathfinder is a tabletop role-playing game that has what it calls the Open Gaming License. It makes it possible for you to reproduce parts of their content enough to play your own game without having to buy their materials. Another interesting thing is that game designs are not copyrightable. Now, some games need a bunch of equipment — accoutrements — to play but some don’t. There are games like Spyfall, which is a bluffing game and all Spyfall requires is a list of locations and for each location, a list of occupations. That’s it. Then once you know the game mechanic, you can make up your own and play it.

JAMES: Rein, since I know you’re a Resistance aficionado, didn’t that game come out of like an open scenario and was only boxed later, I believe.

REIN: I think the history is that people are like, “We’re going to steal Werewolf and do our own thing with it.”

JAMES: Got you!

MISCHA: It worth mentioning that Werewolf itself is a branded re-package of Mafia, a popular free-to-play game because you [inaudible] friends and [inaudible].

JAMES: Now, if you have to buy friends, that gets expensive.

CORALINE: Or six-year olds.

JAMES: Or six-year olds, yes.

JAMEY: I grew up on Mafia when I was a camp counselor. That was like the go-to camp game because you didn’t need anything. We would tell these elaborate stories. That was kind of my introduction in a way like Dungeons and Dragons and stuff like that because we would come up with these elaborate stories for like exactly why you’re in this Mafia situation. It was super fun because you’d have all these people coming up with this different set.

REIN: Resistance was a deliberate attempt to make a Mafia without player elimination.

JAMES: Nice.

CORALINE: As a public service announcement, I do want to point out that the Greater Than Code podcast does not officially endorse child trafficking.

JAMES: It’s important.

MISCHA: How about unofficially?

CORALINE: Buying friends is perfectly legitimate. We’re all Americans here.

JAMES: Yeah, that was fine.

REIN: Can I mention something because that’s a segue for a topic I’ve been wanting to bring out but haven’t found a way through yet.

JAMEY: That’s the segue?

SAM: Oh, I got to hear this.

REIN: Did you know the monopoly is a communist game? Monopoly was originally called The Landlord Game and it was a game designed to demonstrate how ridiculous capitalism is. And there are also other interesting games from a leftist tradition. In 1909, there was a game released by the women’s suffrage movement called Suffrage-something. They made a game out of the name ‘suffrage’ and it was a board game where you had two sides with pieces and one side was the suffragettes and you were fighting the other side. There’s an entire tradition of leftist board games. There was a game that came out in the late 70s called Class Struggle.

JAMES: That’s amazing.

SAM: Nice.

REIN: It was actually popular. It actually achieved some mainstream popularity.

SAM: Yeah, I know that I have always hated Monopoly. It’s a classic positive feedback loop where once you win, you continue to win.

REIN: Monopoly has a completely dominating strategy and you just play that strategy and you win and there’s nothing anyone else can do, unless they play the strategy and get luckier.

JAMES: Right.

MISCHA: It’s interesting. I was raised a Quaker and [inaudible] The Landlord Game was a Quaker so I was pretty familiar with this early on. But the game actually had two sets of rules. One was supposed to be a capital set of rules and one that was supposed to be a socialist or communist set of rules. The whole point was to teach people, “Oh, look at how much the capitalist rules suck and how miserable everyone is,” and then Parker Brothers was like, “This looks great. I guess we’ll make one with just the capitalist rules.”

JAMES: So it kind of works, right? Because anybody has played Monopoly. It has [inaudible] that beat down. It’s built into the game, for sure.

MISCHA: Definitely.

REIN: I found more info on that game. It was called Suffragetto and the suffragettes have a home base of Albert Hall and the police are the opponents, of course and they start around the House of Commons.

JAMES: That’s awesome.

REIN: Sonic, the Hedgehog was originally supposed to be a game about environmental sustainability.

JAMES: That’s cool.

SAM: But then capitalism happened to it?

REIN: You can see that with the whole killing the animal’s thing.

CORALINE: And there’s this whole contingent of Sonic deniers.

SAM: Too real.

JAMES: Where do you find these cool details about games?

REIN: I Google them immediately before the podcast. I actually knew about the history of Monopoly and I am an excellent Googler because that’s mostly my job.

JAMES: That’s awesome.

MISCHA: So, you’re a software engineer?

REIN: Yes.

SAM: Way to bring it back to tech.

JAMEY: We talked a lot about the metrics of accessibility and some games. We’ve talked specifically about a few games that are accessible but can we talk about some resources to find out about other games and about the accessibility of existing games that we know?

MISCHA: Sure. When I first got excited about this, I discovered a website called MeepleLikeUs.co.uk. They have a bunch of resources. They do standard reviews of board games then they do these accessibility teardowns where they look at the game from a bunch of different lenses and rate the different accessibilities. They’ve also created this master list which is a publicly-accessible Google sheet that just has every game that they’ve done a teardown of, then the grade in each area of accessibility. They’ve touched on all the versions of accessibility that we’ve talked about, including socio-economic and space. I would highly recommend that you check them out.

Another really cool resource for those who are visually-impaired is 64 Ounce Games. They actually make game modifications like sleeves and things like that, that you can buy as a set for a popular game. Predominantly, they’re targeted towards people who are partially or completely blind but it will be things like railcard covers and things like that so that people who can’t see can still play the game. It’s really, really cool work. It’s just two people out of Texas.

Then the third one is MaxiAids and they’ve also got some resources for games that are designed for people with visual impairments. A lot of versions of popular games with really large text and things like that. This is more towards partial blindness and nearsightedness. But again, a bunch of versions of games that you can buy that are a lot easier to seek.

JAMES: I want to just throw, one other thought out there is price of resource. That’s been particularly helpful to me. You know, everyone has their own limitations and you know what they are better than anyone else in the world. While all the things Mischa just recommended are great jumping off points, you should also validate. To do that, I do the blind thing of Dice Tower reviews. They showed the components of the game. They show the mechanics of the game and play and explain them. I just sit there and watch them explain the game and I’m like, “I could do that,” or, “No, I couldn’t.”

The reason I think that’s important is for example, Meeple Like Us, I just heard is rated Hanabi as a poor game for color blind people but I have actually played that game with a color blind player and they mentioned it. As soon as we started playing, they were like, “I’m color blind,” and we said, “We should play something different,” and they’re like, “No, no. The symbols are different. Just tell me what’s what,” and we did and the player played flawlessly after that. I’m not saying that means that Hanabi is a good game for color blind people. I’m just saying that obviously, some people are okay with it and able to function with it. It pays to watch the reviews and see if it meets your needs or not.

MISCHA: Another thing is like you mentioned, your experience is best and BoardGameGeek is a great place for starting threads where you can share your experiences with games and help other people who might have similar needs to be able to get more resources about what games they should be looking at, including things like linking to the reviews and such.

JAMES: A warning though, if you are a tech person listening to this podcast and you’re about to go to the website of BoardGameGeek for the first time, you’re going to have an experience where you see a pretty horrible interface. It’s actually gotten considerably better in the last two years, which is shocking because it still atrocious.

MISCHA: And it also does bring up the point that BoardGameGeek.com itself might not be super accessible. There’s that to consider.

REIN: I wanted to mention a couple of things. One of them was BoardGameGeek but I, especially want to highlight that each game and they covers many thousands of games, has a collection of strategy forums but also were rules-lawyering forum, where you can go and arbitrate your rules. Also, there are discussions about house rules in various parts of the forms as well, where people have said, “Here is how we prefer to play the game,” and list the house rules.”

The other one is Wil Wheaton hosted a YouTube series called TableTop, where he plays various board games with a group of YouTube celebrities essentially. It’s interesting because you get to see how the game plays in a group and what sort of interactions it promotes. For me, a large part of why I play games is to have fun interactions so it’s nice to be able to see the games being played and see how they play out.

JAMES: Plus one to TableTop. It’s awesome.

MISCHA: Definitely.

SAM: At the end of every show, we like to close out with reflections and Jamey had a great suggestion today, which was that in addition to our reflections, we should mention a board game that we particularly like. I’ll start that off. I have had the game Repello for a couple years now and I still really enjoy it. It turns out to be a really programmer-friendly game. It’s got a couple of clever mechanics that people who work in tech, seemed to do really well with. I’ll just leave it at that. It’s a fun game. It’s fairly quick to play and definitely, one of my favorites. As for reflections, I don’t have much other than perhaps six-year olds, speaking of which, I see a six-year old on the screen right now, are an incredibly valuable and national resource.

CORALINE: One of my favorite games is Tales of the Arabian Nights. It’s a storytelling game with a really interesting mechanic. At the beginning of the game, you are assigned a quest and you spend the game trying to fulfill your quest and you also set your own conditions for victory in the game and those are kept secret from other players. What I like about it is the storytelling aspect. You get to a place, you draw a card and there’s a series of tables, you consult which leads you into the storybook and then at the storybook, it explains the scenario that you find yourself in. Sometimes, you have choices to make. Sometimes, what happens is based on skills that you have acquired.

But the storybook is really thick and generally speaking, you don’t run across the same scenario twice, at least in the year or two that I’ve been playing the game. It’s very age-accessible. There are very few mechanical considerations and there’s only one dice for all [inaudible] in your turn. I think from an accessibility standpoint, it’s probably a good game and definitely very, very fun.

REIN: I’m going to mention two games. One for nostalgic reasons, Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition, which is a game that I have spent many hundreds, if not thousands of hours on. It was weird if the rules were bad and now they’re much better but I still have a soft place in my heart for those weird rules. I like TAKO. What is that? One of the games that I’m enjoying playing now, I think was mentioned earlier is Lords of Waterdeep, which is a Eurogame based on worker placement and it has a hidden win condition, I think. You also mentioned that Jamey and it’s a fun, probably top 10 Eurogame for me.

JAMES: I’m sure it’s ‘Tay-ko’ not Tako but —

REIN: Fight me.

JAMES: Let’s see. I’ll just risk our favorite game at the reflections. I’ve been swiping boards over here and thinking, that’s like picking my favorite kid which had cheated my way out and by only having one kid so —

CORALINE: — The six-year old.

JAMES: Yeah, the six-year old, right.

JAMEY: I’m sorry to make this such a stressful situation.

JAMES: It is very hard. I’m going to not mention anything I’ve mentioned before because you’ve been listening carefully and you know what I like but I will, instead choose role-playing game. I’m going to say, Exalted. If you have not heard of Exalted, everybody in the world plays D&D, which is just a really poor version of Exalted in my opinion —

REIN: Once again, fight me.

JAMES: Right. Rein is getting after me but Exalted is like an anime, swords and sorcery game. One of my absolutely favorite elements of it is if you describe what you’re doing and add a bunch of flair, then the game gives you extra dice to accomplish what you’re trying and a ‘Get out of jail free card’ against the game master unexpectedly killing you. It used to be a White Wolf game. White Wolf, I think went under and was purchased by some company and I can’t remember the name of right now but I’m sure, if you Google Exalted role-playing game, it’s in 3rd edition now. It’s a great game.

REIN: Oh, can I just say that a house rule we’ve had for a long time in most of my D&D groups is the dungeon master is allowed to award positive rolls for good role-play?

JAMES: Exactly.

CORALINE: We actually do spiffs in my game. I bought these little glass pebbles and I will award them for good role-playing. Then at the end of the game, all the players vote on who did the best role-playing and that person inherits the spiff for the next game. The spiff allows you to re-roll a bad roll.

JAMES: Oh, that is amazing and that idea, I promise you, initiated in Exalted.

REIN: I just want to tell a quick story. While I was playing a game, they had this rule and one of the players spent a good two or three minutes describing the way that they rouge, bolting around, ended various things and resulted in a completely impossible thing that they were trying to do. When the DM listen to all of this and thought about it and said, “You scored a crit.”

JAMES: Absolutely.

CORALINE: Jamey, what are some of your favorite games?

JAMEY: My favorite game is probably the Betrayal at House on the Hill, which is very similar to the game in many ways that Coraline was describing. It’s a story based where the ending of the story is different every time. It’s a Lovecraftian horror game, which is like an appealing genre for me. But it’s also very fun for me because it’s both a competitive and a cooperative game. It starts out cooperative for the first half and then once you enter into this second half story mode, you’ll end up competing against each other in various ways. It picks someone to be the traitor and that person is doing something different than the rest of the team. There’s kind of like, “Go into that other room while we discuss our playbook,” and you have your own playbook, which makes it really interesting and fun. But it doesn’t get as competitive as some other games do in my opinion because it’s so random like you don’t know who’s going to be the traitor until it happens and it doesn’t really allow for that kind of, “Oh, I’m better than you.” It’s just everybody is at the mercy of this Lovecraftian fate. [inaudible] about it.

JAMES: That’s awesome.

MISCHA: I think probably my favorite game that I didn’t already mention is Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. First of all, it’s cooperative, which is fantastic. It’s great from a bunch of different accessibility perspectives because you need to have one person in your group that can read the booklet but other than that, it’s all just working through a puzzle. The premise is that you are members of a street gang that Sherlock works with to solve crimes and there’s 10 crimes in —

CORALINE: The Baker Street Irregulars?

MISCHA: Yes, exactly. Thank you. The Baker Street Irregulars. In this game, you’re given a mystery to solve and you’re given a map of London and a couple of newspapers. After that, it’s just deciding where you want to go. There’s no time or anything like that. You can choose to go to the crime scene, you’ll learn some stuff, you can choose to go and visit the house of one of the people mentioned in some conversation or another. At the end of it, you’re all working together, trying to solve this as quickly as possible. At the end, you go a knock on the door and talk to Sherlock Holmes. Your score is based on how quickly you could solve the mystery, meaning how few places you could go to, to solve it compared to what Sherlock needed to do to solve it. You will always lose because it’s Sherlock Holmes but it’s a really fun evening. It’s a good two to three-hour game of trying to solve an interesting puzzle in a cool city. It’s very thematic and very, very fun.

CORALINE: I would like to remind people that if you enjoyed this conversation and other conversations that we have on this podcast, you can support us directly through our Patreon, that’s Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. All Patrons get access to outtakes from the show, which tend to be very, very fascinating. We call them truth bombs. You can pledge at any level and get access to our Slack community, where you can continue the conversation with other Patrons and with the hosts and with our guests as well. If you like us, prove it. Go to Patreon.com and put your money where your mouth is. Thank you so much to Mischa and James. It’s been a delight having you both on the show and we will talk to you all in a couple of weeks, with Episode 44. Thank you.

042: @CallbackWomen and Organizing Conferences for Diversity and Inclusion with Carina C. Zona

Mandy Moore — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 05:00:22 +0000

Panelists:

Rein Henrichs | Jamey Hampton | Sam Livingston-Gray | Coraline Ada Ehmke

Guest Starring:

Carina C. Zona: @cczona | cczona.com | @CallbackWomen | YouTube Channel

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “Life, The Universe, and Podcasts!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:13 – Carina’s Background and Superpower

02:58 – @CallbackWomen and The Naming Struggle to Make Sure Marginalized and Non-Binary People Know They Are Included

Ashe Dryden: Increasing Diversity at Your Conference

12:13 – Sending Signals and/or Indicators That Encourage People to Apply to Speak At Your Conference

I hate to say this, but conferences need to relocate out of the U.S. My country is making business travel to U.S. untenable for so many ppl. https://t.co/bMOfbe6VDP

— Carina C. Zona (@cczona) June 3, 2017

23:10 – Conference Outreach

27:56 – Accessibility at Conferences

34:19 – Conferences “Competing” for Speakers

Call For Proposals (CFP)

40:26 – Financial Aid, Travel Stipends, and Reimbursement

This is now part of the US non-immigrant visa application. This is obnoxious, absurd and threatens freedom of speech. pic.twitter.com/lnpLmC5v4I

— Nima Fatemi (@mrphs) July 22, 2017

49:05 – Making a Difference with @CallbackWomen and Codes of Conduct

#cocpledge

Ashe Dryden: Codes of Conduct 101 + FAQ

Fund Club

Donate to @CallbackWomen!

Pledge via Patreon!

Reflections:

Jamey: Having travel and accommodation expenses covered is important for speakers.

Sam: Flipping the paradigm.

Coraline: Using influence to affect change.

Carina: Having speaker mentors: both experienced and newbies.

Rein: How conferences have evolved in a positive way around diversity and inclusion.

Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

REIN: Hi, I’m Rein Henrichs and welcome to Episode 42 of ‘Life, The Universe, and Podcasts.’ I’m happy to welcome my co-panelists, Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Hi, although I believe this is just the regular Greater Than Code today, is that right?

CORALINE: I think we need to discuss it further.

JAMEY: I want to introduce one of my co-panelist, Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Thank you and in honor of an Episode 42, I think we can let that slide just this once but anyway, welcome to the show, Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hey, everybody. We have a wonderful guest today, Carina Zona. I’m happy to introduce her. Carina Zona is a developer, advocate and certified sex educator. She spends a lot of time thinking about the unexpected cultural effects of our decisions as programmers. Carina is also the founder of CallbackWomen, which is on a mission to radically increase gender diversity at the podium of professional programmer’s conferences. Welcome, Carina.

CARINA: Thank you. Great to be here.

CORALINE: We’re going to start off by getting to know you a little more. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what are your superpowers?

CARINA: Oh my God. What are you doing to me? I started off as a developer in the late 90s, just sort of sidled in needing to solve my own problems and gradually became a professional. I have, in recent years done a fair amount of volunteering with various groups that are about increasing diversity in tech, particularly in programming like RailsBridge, Rails Girls, PyLadies, Girl Develop It, Write Speak Code, Black Girls Code, Women Who Code, we have so many. Isn’t it awesome?

A lot of those, when I started attending and organizing, really woke me up to the possibilities that there were things that I can do too and that was really helpful, especially because those were places where I was getting mentors who were introducing me to conference speaking and giving me a lot of pro tips that helped me actually make that successful.

As I was dipping toes into those waters, it started to make sense to do a lot of things that my mentors had done, which is to scale beyond myself, to make something that other people could benefit from the way I was and to be able to give back the way I had been given something back so I always reach that hand back and bring someone forward with you. That’s really where CallbackWomen was born from. It’s all these various groups showing me the way and showing me that that kind of help is really powerful. It’s life changing and certainly, career changing.

CORALINE: We mentioned CallbackWomen, can you give a little background on what CallbackWomen’s mission is and what you’re doing?

CARINA: Yeah. The official mission is to radically increase gender diversity at the podium of professional programmer’s conferences. Let me break that down a little bit. Gender diversity, despite the name means more than just women. It means everybody who’s gender is underrepresented or has been underrepresented at the podium. That includes gender non-binary people, it certainly includes transwomen because women, but also for instance, transmen is a gender underrepresented at the podium as well. Those things are that first part of the mission.

The second is at the podium, not just attendance at professional programmer’s conferences, meaning not just tech conferences in general but one specifically by professional programmers so not academic conferences, not founders conferences, not hardware conferences, being really specific about who is being served and how do we bring them into the pipeline and how do we make sure that those people are recognized for their expertise and are successful and are building a career off of it if they want to.

CORALINE: Carina, it’s CallbackWomen but you just said that your organization is intended to encompass the white spectrum of gender diversity and I kind of empathize with that naming struggle. I have a project called open source for women (OS4W) and I was asked early on, “Can non-binary people participate?” and I ended up describing it as a place for anyone who is comfortable in women spaces but I’m curious if you gotten push back from people who don’t identifies as women and who also don’t identifies as gender man.

CARINA: I’ve never gotten push back, at least not directed to me. It’s possible that there are people who have dissatisfaction with it but my policy has always been to get permission so anyone who’s pronouns are not clearly evidence or they’re otherwise isn’t clear that their gender is woman before I kind of pull them under that mantle, I contact them privately and I ask their permission. If someone’s pronouns are, for instance ‘they’ or they’re indicating that they’re transmen, I want to promote their work but I also want to make sure that that’s not being done by misgendering them. Obviously, any time you’re pulling someone in under that name ‘woman,’ and they aren’t woman, that is inherently misgendering.

I have contacted a number of people and all but one ever said, “Yes, thank you for asking and thank you for promoting me.” It’s important to ask. It definitely is. I did have one person essentially say, “And if you hadn’t asked, I’d have been super not okay with that,” so it’s part of being respectful. I think probably one of the reasons why I haven’t gotten push back is because I’ve tried to be handling that correctly and certainly if anyone feels that I haven’t, I do want to hear from them and I can do that better.

The one person who said, “No,” just said no. They didn’t say, “That’s an offensive request,” or, “I just don’t feel comfortable with that.” When I started off, I was a lot less aware and I was thinking very much of women and inherently cis women and the name really was born out of that that that originally I saw it as bringing more women to the podium of professional programmer’s conferences and the name at this point is something I really struggle with. It’s difficult and I would like to change it on the one hand.

On the other hand, it’s been four years and there’s a significant brand that’s been built up around it. It’s always a little bit of a thing of do we end up losing some of the attention that has been built from conference organizers, the awareness of where to go, who to talk to, who to hear so that needs be dealt with. Every year the name is more problematic and every year, I’m not sure what to do about that. I have to admit also, I’m really wedded to the pun. It’s meant to evoke callbacks inherently programming and also calling back to the podium and to the industry. The women who used to be far more prevalent in the industry in the 1980s, calling back to the respect of our expertise. That name, I would like to be able to somehow preserve, at least in part because it has meaning to the mission and to me. However, if anyone wants to contact me and pitch better names that are more inclusive of the actual current mission, I would love to hear that. I would love to hear a way to walk that line much better because it needs to be done at some point soon.

REIN: I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s hard to find language that is both piffy and gender-inclusive because it’s very baked into our language, the notion of the binary.

CARINA: Indeed.

JAMEY: I had an experience with this when I was first starting to do conference speaking. Some friends of mine motioned me to CallbackWomen like, “This could be helpful for you,” and I have to admit that my first reaction was like, “Oh, for me,” as a non-binary person, I was like, “Is it really?” Bunch of my friends are like, “No, really. It is. Don’t worry. I understand what you’re saying but it’s going to be good and it’s going to help you.” It did help me and I think that a real way to combat that initial feeling that I got is like having a lot of people know about it and talk about it. If trusted people that I know are saying, “No, really. It’s good. It’s going to be good. It’s going to help you. It’s not going to make you feel bad,” then that’s more meaningful to me in a way. I think that’s how word gets out about things. In the tech industry, I think that’s how word gets out about a lot of things.

CARINA: Yeah, we’re very much a word of mouth industry. Thank you for saying that. That’s really great to hear. When I first started it in 2013, four and a half years ago… Wait, I’ve lost track… Yeah, four and a half. At very early on, I had envisioned it as somewhat like the mailing list that it was coming out of the discussions that we’re having on lists like Dev Chicks, I just thought it was of interest to women, for women, that only women would find it relevant. Even though it was on Twitter, it just never really occurred to me that there would be an audience beyond women.

Within months, I started seeing all these men following and I did have a little talk with myself about is this okay and decided, “Yes, it is very much okay.” The point here is to democratize access to information, to be able to have these conversations that are only being have in private, in small networks and to be able to have that, be something that anyone can benefit from. I also felt like part of the problem at this point has been that only, not only man, but largely, men in particularly white men at well-funded companies that can afford to send them out to talk are the ones in this inner circle of communication so they’re the ones that are getting lots of experience and exposure. But I feel really confident that once other people have that access and exposure, we’re going to kick their ass.

Let’s all compete. That’s fine because I know that this is going to be a very fair fight and the best thing we can do for conferences is to have a really lively competition of different ideas, different experiences and what CallbackWomen is trying to do is make sure that we can, as an industry benefit from having a lot more voices, a lot more topics, a lot more ways of thinking about existing topics. As long as we had this really small ecosystem of speakers, we were losing. As an industry, we were losing. I’m fine with anyone who wants to be benefiting from CallbackWomen and I know that it’s marginalized people who most benefit from CallbackWomen because marginalized people are the ones who are least being heard and who had a tremendous amount and still do, to say that’s useful to the whole industry.

CORALINE: It kind of reminds me of something that Sandi Metz had when we had her on the program early on. She said, she looks forward to the day that she gives her last keynotes because that means she’s made room for other women and basically not men to take the spotlight because what you’re saying about the small circle of speakers from big companies that will pay their way, it’s absolutely true. That’s something I’ve definitely seen.

CARINA: Yeah, this was some of the feedback I got. One of the reasons why there were women who were really helping me when I started out in 2012 as a speaker, literally saying, “I’m tired of being the one who’s asked to do everything and feeling the burden of having to say yes on everything or else there’s not going to be a woman there. It’s just too much. I want to help and have more women speaking because it takes the load off of me.” This pragmatic reasoning, not just I want to do this as some social justice cause but because I personally need this to happen so I will put the time into mentoring you and others in order to just take a weight off of my career and my sense of responsibility to my gender.

JAMEY: I wanted to muse a little bit about how organizations and conferences may be sending some kind of signals are indications that may discourage people from applying even if they don’t need to do that. I’ve personally experienced this specifically. I do speak at women’s conferences even as a non-women and I have contacted people sometimes and like, “Am I welcome as a non-binary person to speak? Do you want non-women speakers?”

I’ve had some people that are like, “Yeah, why are you even asking this. It should be self-evident that you are welcome,” and I’m like, “I’m glad that you’re saying that I am welcome but it’s not self-evident because I have not had the same answer from everyone.” That made me feel like they don’t realize the signals that they’re putting out on who they’re trying to welcome and I think that’s true for women in conferences too, like what kind of things might people be accidentally doing in your experience that are discouraging women from wanting to come.

CARINA: Yeah. There are a lot of things. It’s almost easier to say what are the things you can do because there’s such a long list of things that are either implicit or explicit that are discouraging. I think actually the thing to look at is how do you make it clear and incentivize having people speak who otherwise would not be sure whether this is the conference that they want to choose. At this point, CallbackWomen follows over 1300 conferences just for by about professional programmers. That means that everyone should feel like you have a tremendous amount of choices and conferences should feel like they are competing for speakers.

What are you doing as a conference to be competitive? Is a conference not doing something to show that they’re really trying to compete for all speakers as many as possible to choose them? Propose to us. Give us the chance to have you. What kind of things can a conference do about that and what are some particularly big turn offs?

Some things that you can do definitely are to have things like say the words literally. Don’t make the assumption as you’ve noted, that’s really important to say things like we want to hear from as many diverse people as we can. We want to hear from women. We want to hear from people of color. We want to hear perspectives from people who have disabilities. Go through our list and make sure it’s clear that that is not the exclusive end of the list but be really explicit that this is something we not just are okay with but we really actively are hoping to hear from you.

Some other things that I think send really strong signals are when they make a point of saying, “We have gender neutral restrooms.” Right away, that acknowledging that people exist who are not just going to be having trouble with restrooms but in many cases, I think we have serious problems with conferences continuing to choose locations where it’s illegal to be a transperson in a restroom. We need to start having conference organizers be far more conscious of the choice that they’re making.

Even things like location for people who have to make those kinds of choices, you see the location and immediately know, “I’m not going to that.” You see a conference being held in North Carolina or Texas and it’s immediately off your list. That conference has lost the opportunity to compete for a whole bunch of speakers and that really sucks.

JAMEY: Someone invited me to a conference in Russia recently and my talk is about being trans. I’m like there’s nothing that anyone could do to convince me. I’m sure the conference is really great or whatever but there’s no way.

CORALINE: I had a conference invitation last year to go to South America. The country that I was requested to visit, I looked on the State Department website because they had tips for LGBTQ travelers abroad and the laundry list of problems that transgender people have in that country, including beatings by police officers, hospitals refusing to treat you, it just went on and on and I was like, “I’m sorry. I can’t go,” and they said, “We wanted you to come as an ambassador,” and I was like, “I’m not putting my life on the line for that. I’m sorry. I can’t do that.” Worth noting that under the Trump administration, those LGBTQ traveling abroad pages had been removed from the State Department website.

REIN: Yeah, and unfortunately that there’s a calculus that a lot of people outside the United States are now having to consider a lot more as we’ve become much more actively hostile to pretty much anybody.

CARINA: Yeah, this is something that I actually had a lengthy tweet storms/conversation about recently, holding conferences in the US at this point, among a number of other countries like we’ve just discussed. I think at this point, it’s really become unethical. If it’s a regional conference that is about serving and promoting regional developers, that’s one thing. But if it’s meant to be an international conference, at this point having it in US, excludes a tremendous cross-section of people who either literally are never going to be able to participate, they can’t get the visa or at this point, a real threat. Their presence is not something that they’re willing to or should have to risk-attending here.

North America and primarily by far, America hosts a tremendous number of conferences for professional programmers. Usually, conferences are organizing one or two years ahead as far as reserving a venue. I understand that it’s going to take some time but I really want to see conference organizers at this point commit to making choices that are inclusive of our entire industry, or at least as much as humanly possible our industry. You can’t say are trying to be inclusive, while holding it in a place that is absolutely categorically, assuredly not inclusive. Your question, earlier I want to go back —

JAMEY: Yeah, I don’t mean to derail the list of things that we can do. I’m sorry.

CARINA: Oh, that was definitely not a derail. I really love that you asked that question and we could get on some of that stuff. One of the reasons why I wanted to be here today is because there’s a lot of conversations, as an industry we’re not having and a lot of conversations, specifically the conference organizers need to be hearing and speakers need to know, you can ask. You can make these choices. You’re not alone. It’s not weird that you have these feels and these are things that you can and should get feedback on and not feel that your opportunities to speak are going to be threatened by it because there are plenty of organizers who do want to hear that feedback and who do want to be responsive to it but they need to hear it. They need to understand it. They’re not aware. One of the things that we can do in this conversation is how exactly those kinds of conversations aren’t nearly as visible as they should be. I love that you asked that.

Some of the things that kind of give some signaling, offering things like a nursing room and childcare. Even if absolutely no attendees are going to use them, it’s really strong signaling and oftentimes, what happens is in the first year, no one signs up for childcare and I’ll explain why in a second. But then in the second or third, because people have learned to trust that that really will happen, that’s when you start seeing the sign ups.

Meanwhile, what I love seeing and this is one of great things about having so many men at CallbackWomen is seeing how many people of any gender who are parents saying, “Wow. This is so cool. I got to go to this conference because they’re offering childcare,” or because, “They have child-friendly events that are part of the conference. I can participate with my kid.” Even if they do see that as something that they can do this year, they can envision that as their future and that’s something that really makes them feel excited about that particular conference. It’s something that they’re going to watch for next year and they’re going to mention other people, “Did you know…” It seemed that kind of enthusiasm is really neat.

Conferences, be serious about offering these things and don’t give up in the first year when they’re not necessarily used because parents, particularly have to make long term plans. You can’t look at it and say, “Well, they’re claiming they’re going to offer it. They’ve never done this before. They’re not even totally sure how they’re working this out but I’m willing to gamble on showing up with my kid and everything being fine.”

They need to see that this is for real. They need to have time to be able to make plans, for what happens, how do you even bring your kid with you, what’s going to happen during parts of the conference where there isn’t childcare and yet you’re supposed to be, for instance at a party or some sort of networking event or a workshop. That stuff that is far more complicated than just providing childcare but again, it’s about signaling and being real about your signals, being honest about it and being committed in the long term to what that signal was saying.

REIN: It seems like there are some signals that demonstrate that you’ve put actual effort into it like setting up childcare. That requires work and there are other signals that are just, “We value diverse people,” that require no work. It’s just some words on a page.

CARINA: Yeah. The ones that require no work are always the ones that you have to be a little more wary of. What are they doing about inherent bias? For example, I get much more interested in conferences that do anonymized review because there is such a ton of research in various fields showing over and over again. When reviewing materials, research, proposals, even say performance reviews, when you know the gender of the person being reviewed, there is very strong bias. It’s usually unconscious bias but it exists and it’s not just by men. All genders demonstrate gender bias in doing reviews like this.

One of the things that anonymized review is meant to do is just level that playing field. It doesn’t favor any gender. It just makes sure that we’re taking out a certain amount that we know exists and we can try to set aside. Doing things like removing any indications of pronouns, anything else in the bio that might indicate the gender of the person and by the way, this also means, trying to factor out things like making it ambiguous as to say nationality or primary language or race or other things that also very easily biased the selection process. Taking out any indicators there and in the proposal and doing that first round based purely on this idea, regardless of who it would come from, am I just excited about this idea. That kind of thing says that they’re not just giving lip service but they’ve actually thought about what it takes to have a diverse end result.

Another thing is outreach and a big one that I see at conferences struggle with or not understand is they’ll get to the end of the CFP and even to the end of selection and announcements and have absolutely nothing but men. When called out on it, they say, “No women applied,” as if that is a reasonable justification for their end result, rather than seeing that as a failure in their process and it is a failure. It’s a total failure. What did you do about outreach? If you’re not doing the work to have a diverse pool of proposers, there is absolutely no way you’re going to end up with a diverse pool of speakers. It’s impossible. What are you doing? Are you doing that early enough in the CFP process to be able to correct for mistakes? Are you monitoring?

You’re going to have to ask questions and conferences are so scared of asking on a proposal, simple questions about what’s your gender. They’re afraid of asking and it’s weird because I’m not sure why. If you can’t measure your current status and your performance over time, how are you actually able to approve. Every time I see conferences say things like, “We have twice as many women speaking this year,” I’m thinking, “Are you sure? How do you know that? Have you asked? Do you know what their gender is? Did you know in previous years?”

It’s speculative and it’s a real problem that they’re not able to measure, at the time of the process where it’s most useful and they’re not able to measure over the long term and be able hold themselves accountable next year to, for instance target like, “We can’t close our CFP until we see, for instance at least X percentage of people in the pool who are not men.” That stuff is incredibly useful and I think bottom line, absolutely minimum necessary in order to achieve anything useful result.

SAM: It sounds like some of these things are a longer-term commitments, which I think is a good thing but some of those things when framed that way, can seem kind of like chores. I think what you were saying earlier about parents seeing childcare and being enthusiastic and maybe planning to attend next year, that really made me think about how these aren’t like check boxes that you have to tick off in order to be a more wholesome person or a conference or something. These are actually competitive advantages. When you do them properly, they can bring you a lot of benefits as a conference.

CARINA: Absolutely. Actually, I should revisit the childcare because another way conferences can do this is if they feel like it’s going to be complicated and obviously, for many speakers, it’s complicated. Bringing your child along to the conference changes your experience of the conference, for better or for worse and probably indeed both. What are some things that you can do? A conference might do something like providing a stipend for the child to have nanny care at home.

I’ve seen two conferences in Colombia: RubyConf Colombia and JSConf Colombia, they cover the expenses of bringing your child and if the child is young enough, the expenses of bringing some other adult and they’re open ended about that. It’s not your partner or spouse or the other parent, or something like that, it’s another person. You can choose who you bring, who can be helping in whatever way you need, dealing with your child so that you can have the full experience in your conference, including your child’s participation at whatever level that you find appropriate.

I think the biggest you could do is much like what we talked about with diversity in various level. Say the words and say, “What can we do to help you? We would love to hear from anyone who has needs that we haven’t it listed here. We are eager to hear from you and try to work with you to make sure that you can participate fully.” I have seen a number of people, including Sarah Mei talked about what it’s like as a new parent to have to ask and be brave about asking, “Would it be possible to have a place for me to nurse?”

It’s really, really helpful to be able see that. That’s not going to be a scary conversation. They might have to say no, but at least it will not be a scary conversation and will not, in some way threaten your participation that no one is going to withdraw your invitation for having asked a question that is hard and this is certainly something that inexperienced speakers rightly assume is that if I ask for anything, if I inquire about anything that I don’t know about, I will look in some way, either ignorant or greedy or prima donna and that will get me into trouble. They don’t ask for what they need. My experience with conference organizer is overwhelmingly, they really do want to hear. They just didn’t know that they have to actively solicit that kind of feedback and request that doesn’t happen easily.

CORALINE: I saw a recent Twitter thread. I can’t remember who is having a discussion about conferences claiming to be accessible to people with disabilities and making that claim without really understanding what all that entails.

CARINA: Oh, yeah. I saw that thread too. First of all, every conference should be, as part of the venue selection process, drawing a hard line on, the venue must be accessible. You’re going to have to make a clear definition about what you mean by accessible but if it’s not even on your checklist at all, you’re failing at diversity right there. That has to be part of the decision making process and be ready to say no to a fantastic venue that is going to exclude people with disabilities.

Obviously, there’s some minimum stuff in the US like ADA compliance. In other countries, you have to find out what minimum standards exist there. But I would like to see more conferences choose venues that are as compact as necessary. Last year, I was really struggling with an injury and I found out it is really hard to walk back and forth in a convention center-sized venue regardless of how accessible it is to someone with wheelchairs. People with, for instance canes or who have various disorders that make it really tiring to be physical. Those kinds of things create a significant burden when you’re forcing people to walk long distances, especially quickly.

If you’ve got five to 10 minutes between sessions and you’re supposed to walk what is essentially a block in that time, that’s a heck of a lot of people with disabilities that might not be admissible but who are really constrained in their ability to participate in the conference at all. Some more things that I think are really important for accessibility and much like childcare, turn out to be exciting and useful for a far broader range of people, than is initially assumed: live transcription and also sign language.

With live transcription, you’re not just helping people who are for instance, deaf but also people who are hard of hearing. You are helping people in a room that is say, noisy or large where it’s hard to get the speaker sound all the way to the back of the room or who are in the middle of the room, far away from a speaker or there someone for whom, the conference language is not their first language so they need a little more time to process what’s being said or someone who is distracted by looking at the slide and didn’t fully hear what was being said or was tweeting and thus, didn’t catch the next thing that was said or would like to tweet that last comment and is really glad that it’s been captured so they can quote it accurately.

There are so many reasons why live transcription is tremendously valuable and then afterwards, you get to just pop that right into the video as captioning. There’s this long term benefit that doesn’t just exist at the talk itself. But when you just see these things as accessibility and you think, “We’ve never had someone who is deaf asked and it’s unlikely,” don’t reserve that for someone having to ask. It’s putting a burden on them, especially since these things are not cheap and it’s missing an opportunity for a whole bunch of people to benefit. I see this over and over again, following the hashtags to so many conferences over and over again, people are saying, “Wow, this is great.”

Now, let’s talk about the other one, the sign language. That one seems like would be far more specific, unlike say typing, people who can read sign language are a lot smaller subset. Here’s the neat thing. Watching sign language turns out to be highly entertaining. People end up really loving it. They learn some signs for things that they would never otherwise heard because the interpreters usually have to deal with are highly technical language by getting to see the slides, the script, the transcript or whatever you can provide so they’re able to prepare in advance for our jargon. It’s this neat opportunity sometimes to see how our unique jargon is translated into sign language. People get really excited.

There’s also been some cases were a speaker was speaking so fast that the audience just goes bonkers overseeing the interpreter keep up and it becomes almost like rock stars doing a riff together. It’s like they’re jamming so it becomes something that’s really exciting and dynamic and brings energy into the room. These are things, again where if you’re only thinking accessibility, you’re missing out on something that’s really bringing a spark to the conference and certainly reputation. People are taking notice and they’re really excited to want to participate next year.

Then as a speaker, if I know I get to do the guitar riff on stage, I’m kind of excited about that and thinking I want to propose next year. Obviously, for some people, it’s totally scary and that’s also a great reason to have that public. You want that to be known in advance. Put that on CFP that they will, for instance be an interpreter because you do want to find that up before you walk out on stage. I think accessibility is a really exciting to topic, once we see it as something that is about access for all, rather than access for a handful of people who need to go out of their way to ask for it.

CORALINE: I can say at RubyConf Australia last year, there was a live transcriptionist and she got a standing ovation at the end of the conference. She was an absolute rock star. It was great. She improved the conference for so many people in a lot of the ways that you mentioned.

JAMEY: Anecdotally, the first conference I ever spoke at was AlterConf and they have live transcription in ASL. It was my first speaking day. I was very excited about it and my dad who was also in tech and really wanted to come and he was not able to come to New York City to see me but he was able to read the live transcription while I was speaking from home so that was really nice.

CORALINE: That’s so cool.

CARINA: Yeah, [inaudible] also had a live feed of their live transcription. It’s much more uncommon to do this for small live feeds and general are less common and then combining it with a live transcription is even less common. It’s really exciting to see these highly technical talks scrolling by in real time like that and being able to follow it from remote. These are really neat things to be thinking about and doing. There are services now that are incredibly experienced at doing a live transcription of tech conference specifically and have gotten really, really good at being able to make that work well.

CORALINE: Carina, I want to go back to something you said earlier about conferences competing for speakers. It seems to me and this is something Sam pointed out in chat, that the way we think of conferences is that we are competing through a CFP process but you’re sort of flipping that perspective, instead of conferences should be competing for good speakers.

CARINA: Yeah. Realistically, it’s both. They have to compete to even have us propose and then we’re competing among other proposers. That’s assuming there’s a CFP. There’s also noncompetitive processes where the speakers are selected by invitation or sometimes, it’s a pay-for-play spot. Sponsors sometimes can buy a speaking spot and they put usually an employee into that. Not every speaking spot or speaking slot is competitive but those that are going usually through the CFP process — actually, I should have define it a long time ago for those who are new to this. That’s ‘Call For Proposal.’ That’s literally a conference calling out, “Please, propose things to us that we can consider and hopefully be able to pick.” That’s CFP. We’ll keep on saying that. So yeah, there’s two stages but the conference doesn’t have the opportunity to have a competition among speakers if they haven’t done the work of competing for speakers.

REIN: We’re talking about conferences competing for speakers and I guess the main way they could do that is trying to offer more value to the speakers to go to their conference over another conference. I’ve been thinking about these different ways of trying to benefit disadvantaged groups and there is a frame that may be useful to think about this that I’ve been trying to work through where there are certain actions that intentionally favored disadvantaged groups. For example, ASL intentionally favors the deaf and hard of hearing community.

But there are others that don’t intentionally favor disadvantaged groups but they counteract this systemic equality that’s caused by discrimination. A good example of that in the broader sense would be universal health care. It’s intended to help everyone but it disproportionately helps minorities because minorities suffer from structural inequalities where they have lower incomes, less access to capital, and things like that. There are things that conferences can do that are of value to everyone but just proportionally help disadvantaged groups. Does that makes sense?

CARINA: Yes, although I’m going to push back on the language of that because when you’re starting from a point of significant disadvantage, really all these things are not advantaging those people. They’re trying to level up and at best, that’s usually what they accomplished. They’re not benefiting the people who are being targeted typically. I do want to make that clear and I think we’re probably in agreement on that —

REIN: Yeah, absolutely.

CARINA: — But it is meaningful language when we think about this. For instance, like anonymized review is being a good example of that. It’s not advantaging anyone. It’s making sure that as near as possible that we can get to everyone have the same level of opportunity to compete.

Some of the other things — I’m going to really come to money — we have pay gaps in general. We have pay gaps specific to our industry. We have pay gaps specific to programming side of things and when you look at those, the bottom line is that there are many people who are underrepresented at programming conferences and it’s for darn good reasons that are purely pragmatically financial.

I’m kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier. When your company can afford to just cover all your expenses, including getting you work time to prepare your talk and even giving you, for instance fellow employees to provide mentorship, giving you opportunity to practice your talk in front of your team or your peers. All of that stuff tremendously advantages people who have not just benefited from pay gap but are benefiting from their employer’s resources. Compare that with someone who self-employed, every single hour that they’re not spending on generating billable hours is out of that loss. They don’t necessarily have a circle of people to help them polish that talk. If they do, that’s more time that they have to take away from earning a living. The structural systematic, cultural pay gap is one thing.

There’s also just the pay gap between what kind of advantage do you have in your employment environment. We have really clear understanding that in our industry and in general, black women and Latina women are significantly underpaid compared to white men and Asian men. In fact, even significantly compared to Asian women. But talking just about gender here, we’re looking at as much as half of the income for a Latina versus a white man.

If you consider that they have similar expenses, we’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars per year of disposable income for someone to invest in their speaking career and being able to take unpaid, without any covering of expenses by their employer or by the conference, they’re able to go and really put themselves out on the international stage and be able to do that incredibly well-prepared because they had purely financial access to do so. It puts people who don’t have that financial resource because of structural reasons, completely at a disadvantage. You cannot really talk about having a commitment to diversity at the podium without talking about money.

SAM: Yeah, I’ve observed that just in my own career. A lot of the time that I spent getting into public speaking in the first place was when I was working at LivingSocial which had a really good policy about sending you to, at least one conference a year and sending you to more if you were a speaker on a case-by-case basis. I spoke at four or five conferences when I worked there and now that I’ve moved on to another job that doesn’t have the same policies, I go to a lot fewer conferences and I don’t speak at very many of them.

CARINA: Yeah.

REIN: If you have two people, one of whom are benefits from this structural inequality, has access to the spending money to go to conferences and one who doesn’t, financial aid offered by a conference, travel stipend and things like that, would let someone who couldn’t otherwise go, even though nominally have benefits both of them the same.

CARINA: Yeah. There are a number of conferences that offer financial aid. I think there is some problematic things about that. One problem is that financial aid implies something that is stigmatized, essentially implying poor, need, having to ask. If one has experienced having financially process, for instance in school, it comes with lengthy paperwork requirements that can be not just time consuming but doing documentation and being fairly intrusive. I think when you use that language, even though conferences usually are not doing that kind of stuff, it comes with the baggage of our understanding of that word, that phrase.

I would like to see it, first of all come up with better phrasing and secondly, I think again flip the paradigm, offer up front to everyone that this is what we cover and then — a few conferences do this — essentially saying, “If you don’t need it, if you would like to decline it, we will use it to invest in other things such as being able to offer more diversity scholarship –” I’m going to use that word just because I don’t have better language for it either right now, “Or we’ll invest it in paying speakers or we will use it to expand how much we can cover for our speakers.”

In some way, make it optional to opt out, rather than put pressure on people to do the uncomfortable thing of asking for something that can feel stigmatizing and potentially really hard. Change the way that that’s offered and if that does mean potentially almost certainly, you’re going for budget for more because there are people who have held back. But again, if you’re serious about diversity, these are things that are mandatory. You can’t decide that it’s too expensive to pursue diversity.

REIN: It’s funny. This is exactly why I used universal health care as an example because it’s not aid. It’s a human right that everyone should have access to. I think that it’s going to be hard to find language that’s not stigmatized because the very idea of helping the structurally disadvantaged people is stigmatized in our culture. Whatever language there is around, we have to try really hard to find that neutral or non-stigmatized language.

CARINA: Well, right now what conferences do when they offer this is they say, “We cover travel and lodging.” You don’t have to call it scholarship at all. You’re simply saying, “This is what we pay for.” We can have a whole discussion about whether covering travel or lodging is A, quite an accurate description of what gets paid for and B, whether that is truly covering all the speaker’s expenses. I’m going to say meekly, “No,” but you can describe it in ways that are affirmative, neutral and don’t put a mental burden on people to feel they’re asking for something special and burdensome in itself.

REIN: Yeah, I think we are in strong agreement about that.

CARINA: Yeah.

JAMEY: Another thing I’ve noticed since I’ve started speaking is that I try to apply for conferences that say they’re going to cover travel like you just said. Aside from it, not always carrying all the expenses, I’ve noticed that normally I am booking things and getting reimbursed later. I’ve noticed that if I were paycheck-to-paycheck and didn’t have the expendable income to be able to wait for this money to come back to me in a month or two, I wouldn’t be able to do this. That’s been something on my mind lately when I’ve been doing conference.

REIN: Access to capital was a huge limiting factor.

CARINA: Yeah. I would go back to questions of who has access in the first place and you’re actually right, that for some people, the salary or their ability to save is really not making that viable to prepay on behalf of the conference. I think of it as also a geographical issue and a class issue. There are plenty of people and plenty of, not just in other countries but within the US who make far less money than they do in major tech centers of the US.

I know people who in Eastern Europe, $10,000 a year is a good salary as a programmer. Pre-paying $1000 to travel to a foreign country is absolutely not viable under any circumstances. Not a matter of being able to save or borrow. If you want someone to come from places that aren’t wealthy and that aren’t themselves individually well-paid, regardless of whether their area is wealthy, again diversity is not realistic without dealing with the money barriers.

Another one is visas. There are many countries that have essentially reciprocal agreements on visas where you just can show up at the border and if your passport is valid and if they don’t think you’re trying to overstay, you’re just going to be let in. Then there are many countries for whom going to travel is tremendously hard and expensive and you have to spend quality time, documenting through visa application. Every bit of travel you ever done, why, proving that you are legitimately going to be speaking at a conference, have no other purpose and definitely would not be staying and you have plenty of money back home, all of this stuff is even if the person can afford to do that, it goes back to, “What billable time are they losing on doing that? Is the conference willing to, at least pay for their visa application fees?”

I, at one point was concerned about entering a particular country that had been having problems. Yes, Rachel Nabors specifically is the one I was thinking of. I had to really lobby the conference, “Please have an immigration lawyer available to you that you’ve already identified. In case I get stopped at the border, I need to know that I’m not just going to be stuck there.” It did take some education on their part for them to understand that I’m not kidding. I can’t participate without knowing that you’ve got my back in a real way and it wasn’t, “Hey, have a retainer.” It’s, “Have it identified in advance that there’s someone who has requisite knowledge and you have their phone number and I’ve got your phone number. I can ping you right away if I’ve got a problem.”

Dealing with all of logistical stuff, these are all expenses for conferences. I get it. It’s really hard to raise sponsorship money. It’s complicated. It’s easy to gloss over these things or not be aware of them and I think particularly, not aware is the big one with dealing with now, which is why it’s really, really important to have these conversations and for people who are much more visible about the financial barriers that they’ve experienced or that they know of so we could start really pushing further on the stuff. Really educating and then frankly being more demanding, saying if you want people to come from developing countries, you’re going to have to really work with them on the visa process.

I know a number of conferences that have had speakers turned away at the border because customs just didn’t believe that that person was there to speak. That’s really insulting first of all. Also, that’s a loss of the conference, it’s a loss of the person and somebody paid a whole lot of money for a ticket that didn’t get to be used. What are you going to do to prepare in advance for not eating it on the cost of say, that person’s airfare? You can look at it as it’s really expensive to have an immigration attorney available or you can look at that as is really cheap to have an immigration attorney available.

SAM: Travel insurance, basically?

CARINA: Yeah. Actually, that would be really neat if the conference is when they’re paying for a flight, included paying for travel insurance because stuff happens. Great idea. Travel insurance, usually isn’t terribly expensive. Now, these are all things where individually do something. As a conference organizer, pick at least one of these things. If it feels overwhelming to do all of them, I understand that so much but this is part of demonstrating our commitment as actually look at some of these things and choose, at least one of them every year to add and make a serious long term commitment too. We’re not just experimenting with this. We’re doing this.

SAM: We’re almost at the end of our show but before we go, I wanted to give you another chance to talk about CallbackWomen and what that’s been like for you. I wanted to ask, have you been able to see any changes from the work that you’ve done on this?

CARINA: Yeah. Like I said, it’s been four and a half years and that’s amazing. First of all, that’s been going on this long. I did not envision that and part of the reason is because there’s still so much more work to do. CallbackWomen started off as just providing information, “Here’s a CFP,” and quickly expanded beyond that into advocacy and education. A lot of times that’s meant really having to do the emotional labor of conflict of pushing conference organizers who particularly in the early years, really didn’t see it and felt offended by being asked who felt very defensive about the idea that they needed to make changes, particularly on issues like Codes of Conduct, on outreach.

I heard so many times the answer to, “Why are there only men in your roster?” The answer was, “Well, there are no women in our niche of the industry. You don’t understand. It’s not our fault.” That kind of blew my mind but it also really spoke to the ignorance and the narrowness of the networks and the part of where CallbackWomen was originating from is the networks that conference organizers were drawing from were really small. It was people that they are, either in it personally or who they had seen as speakers at other conferences so those people were getting recycled over and over and over again because it’s the low-hanging fruit. Every time that that person is giving another talk, they become essentially more renounced. It becomes even more obvious to choose that same few people over and over and over again. Expanding the network of conference organizers is hugely important in order for things to change.

CallbackWomen started to be really promoting speakers and their talks and people raving about them and saying, “This is what I drew from that this. This is how I’m changing my work because of what that person said.” That was me, essentially pushing back on that, that it was easier to show that we are in every single niche in the industry, in large numbers with significant expertise that people value when they get to hear it. You don’t get to have that excuse because it never was a real excuse. It was never valid. The problem was we don’t exist. It’s that you didn’t know. You didn’t see us. You don’t know us. If you haven’t done the work of trying to do harder, do more.

The advocacy stuff and being able to make changes on that has been really exciting. I don’t usually hear that anymore. Occasionally, I do but it’s become a lot less common and I think that really has to do with doing that particular work. A lot of conferences for CallbackWomen and it is that opportunity to really push the needle forward.

Travel funding is one that I really do feel CallbackWomen has had a major impact on. That was very rare when I started in 2012. Extraordinarily rare and usually, it would turn out that if you were willing to ask because they were then just going to cover one speaker’s expenses, they’d say, “We probably can find some money for it. Let us get back to you,” so it became something where again, you have to be in the know. You have to have some sort of inside knowledge that these are okay questions that can be potentially met with a positive answer. Really pushing conferences A, to by default cover travel and lodging and B, to make that public as part of the announcements, as part of the CFP, as making this integral to their process.

Codes of Conduct was another one where I push really hard. Ashe Dryden made the Code of Conduct pledge. I’m trying to remember what year that was. I want to say something like 2015 or 2015 —

CORALINE: It was 2014.

CARINA: Thank you. I really piggybacked on that and really use that to push hard on Codes of Conduct and that meant that CallbackWomen had to take the heat of those. A lot times when I did this, I would switch the conversation off to my private or for personal rather account: @CCZona, rather than have it all come through Callback. But it was still regardless of which handle it’s under, me doing all of that emotional labor and dealing with a lot of confrontational stuff, which needed to be done but that’s how it gets done. It was me and a number of other people, certainly not me alone but a bunch of us deciding to take that heat in order to push the needle forward. We have seen a great deal of change.

In 2015, the response that we got so commonly was if we adopted a Code of Conduct, it would look like something bad happened and nothing that’s ever happened at our conference so this would just be essentially tarring us unfairly. We can’t do this. It’s unnecessary and it would make us look really bad and that’s not fair to our attendees. I could spend a whole hour on the reasons why that is not valid but the important thing is that within a year of that Code of Conduct pledge and all those hard conversations we had, the environment changed a lot.

Conferences did truly get the message. They saw so many people saying, “I literally pledge to not participate in any conference that doesn’t have a Code of Conduct,” so it became something with fairly wide adoption. We still have some exceptions, which I think is great when they’re really visible about they’re exception because identifying themselves as a hostile space so we know not to participate. They have competed and lost. Please feel free to visibly eliminate yourself from competition for great speakers. I’m very happy with that choice.

CORALINE: Free speech, Carina.

CARINA: But I think that —

CORALINE: Diversity of thought.

CARINA: — Speak out saying you absolutely will not adopt the Code of Conduct and you find it ridiculous and offensive so that all of us know not waste any time at all in your conference. If that’s your posture, I’d rather it wasn’t your posture but as long as are candid and loud about it, awesome.

CORALINE: I have to say that as an attendee and as a speaker, it’s important to actually read that Code of Conduct because there are some very bad ones now.

CARINA: Heck, yeah. And deliberately so. Some of them were created to evade real responsibility after having called out. They are created for the purpose of being faux Codes of Conduct, for having no actual safety provided and no accountability for trying. I agree with you wholeheartedly on that. The other thing is that is their training. Did they link to a Code of Conduct without really reading it and embracing what that requires of them? Did they provide contact information for an enforcement officer and probably, at least two is really minimum. Ashe Dryden has a great 101/FAQ on the COC so I’m not going to spend too much time on that. But everyone should be reading that and taking very seriously what to do about that.

We’ve really changed now to the conversation is what is a good CFP? What is a valid CFP? What is their commitment to the CFP? How do they follow through with enforcement, rather than it being you must adopt one? That’s no longer good enough. I love that we’ve pushed forward the conversation. Again, that’s something where the work is clearly not done but we’ve moved into a next stage and that’s really exciting. It’s no longer okay to just be, “Meh!” We don’t want to do that or we have very strong reasons why we consider that absolutely unacceptable to do. Those have become marginal, rather than the rule.

Some other things that I’m really excited about are and I mentioned this earlier, getting much more conferences to care about having gender neutral restrooms and that was something where CallbackWomen could be a pretty easy influencer. Just by constantly retweeting people and showing pictures of the signs going like, “Oh, this is so cool. Look! They have gender neutral restrooms here and look at this neat logo for it,” and there are so many different kinds of variations and just normalizing CallbackWomen.

One of the great things that’s very, very easy to do is just normalize things that people don’t believe are normal. Sometimes creating that perception is not normal today but I can sure very easily, make it normal by having a whole bunch of people repeating that same message. You may not be paying close attention and noticing that was just from a handful of conferences at all that buzz was coming, but was legit buzz. People were that excited. Over and over again, you have all these people going to the restroom and taking a picture of the door. It matters. Stuff like that.

I think the live transcription stuff, I think also would have been a niche thing, stayed a niche thing without having something like CallbackWomen constantly promoting it. From that perspective of this, this is really cool rather than this is just something that accommodated me as an individual or the one person there. I think a lot of these things CallbackWomen has just had a real easy opportunity to provide exposure and normalization that’s helped get people on the same page about these are things that we just do by default rather than things that are something unusual to budget for or aspire to in some future year.

Here’s the thing, when I say that I follow these hashtags to find all of this stuff and promote all the speakers and all the wonderful feedback given to their talks, that takes time. Every once in a while someone will say to me essentially, “Oh, you just retweet.” Yeah. There have been days where I’m retweeting very carefully over 150 things and putting them all in buffer to make sure that you’re not going to lose with a wall of 150 things at once and that’s where I picked out reading a thousand or more tweets that day from one or a couple of conferences happening concurrently.

The idea that it’s just this quick thing you can knock off in a few minutes is really not understanding that 1300 conferences, all being active at once and having so much good stuff happening that we want to be able to share and we want to be able see and want to be able to benefit from, that actually is a significant amount of time. It’s a significant amount of processing. Some of the things, I’ll have to go back and forth over tweets about a given talk because there’s so much good feedback and I don’t want to be a wall of a feedback about just any given person so I have to figure out what is the best, say seven to eight tweets about this talk that cite the person by name. Please always cite the handle of the person so that we’re not just giving a vague quote that was good but attributing it to somebody.

I only retweets the ones that are attributing that talk or that thought to a particular person. Picking out those ones that form a narrative logically and can hold up on their own and cite that person’s expertise. It takes a lot of time and I love doing it. I wish I could do it full time for a living as a paid job and unfortunately, for four and a half years, it has largely been a nearly completely uncompensated job.

Fund Club last year was amazing and took it on very short notice and raised about $9600 which was great for paying my rent for several months. I really appreciate that. But it frustrates me that the industry individuals are benefiting financially from this work being able to get raises, being able to get exciting new jobs, being able to have other opportunities. Companies are benefiting from having their speakers represented and being able to have their message pushed out. Sponsors are benefiting from being able to, essentially put a halo over themselves by affiliating with these conferences. Conferences are getting better speakers and more variety. They’re having unique talks that if you want to hear this talk, you have to come to our conference. That’s a reason to buy a ticket to our conference.

There’s all of the system of people who are benefiting financially from free labor and significant amount of free labor. As much as I’ve talked about the free labor of speakers and how that’s completely unreasonable to not be covering their expenses at minimum and hopefully to treat with respect to the work enough to actually even do things like speaker pay, not just covering expenses. I would like to see people look at CallbackWomen too, as a vital necessary community resource that’s doing something a financial benefit and thus should return some financial investment that’s sustainable in order to make this work sustainable because there’s so much more work to do. I want so much to be able to do it.

At this point though, it’s really hard to be able to keep that up. I really am very torn about that. Every day, I have to do less on CallbackWomen every day. It really eats me up. I’m troubled by it and it makes me sad. I see more things I want to do not less and yet I have to do the less because I have to set boundaries between my ability to earn an income and my ability to help other people and then come quite frankly. What I really like to say as closing words is consider the value of CallbackWomen, consider the value of other services doing similar things and put your money behind them. Make sure it’s viable for these things to exist and make the impact that they’re making.

CORALINE: Do you have a Patreon for CallbackWomen?

CARINA: I will by the time this airs. Meanwhile on CallbackWomen.com, there is a donation page. You can use Square or PayPal to provide funding but I think Patreon has the really useful part of ongoing payments. The main reason I haven’t done Patreon is it’s essentially more on paid labor. The expectation that you do things like provide newsletters or some other work product, rather than just what CallbackWomen has already done or is continuing to do. It’s kind of not optimal because it still shifts the burden of being compensated for unpaid labor by doing more unpaid labor. I would like to see that model be re-thought a bit.

Fund Club was just amazing because there’s absolutely no strings attached to it. I think they had me write up a paragraph or two on what CallbackWomen is but otherwise, it was just them: Ashe Dryden and Shanley Kane, literally ordering their members to pay $100 each right now. You have five days to pay CallbackWomen $100. That is amazing and they do that every month for some other project that is for and about and benefiting marginalized people in tech and gaming. I absolutely love what they’re doing and you cannot imagine until you’ve experienced the impact of them just doing what I asked.

Every single donor on the donation page, how do you know about CallbackWomen and how does it impacted you, I think out of the 960 donors, there were two who didn’t even heard of CallbackWomen. They didn’t donate because they felt it mattered. They donated because they believe in Fund Club. Those kinds of things, you can do too, even if you don’t personally benefit from projects like CallbackWomen. Decide that you’re going to fund them and decide that you’re going to tell other people. You should too.

CORALINE: Actually, we were from clubs on a pick for June so I could definitely see the benefit there. We’re going to wrap up now and we like to wrap up our episodes with reflections on the conversations we’ve just had and maybe calls-to-action. Jamey, would you like to share your thoughts?

JAMEY: Yeah, this conversation has been really interesting for me, as someone who’s new to the conference speaking scene. I’ve been doing conference speaking for about six months and really enjoying it. But I’m having a lot of trouble with deciding what conference to go to and I think a lot of the things that we’ve talked about are things that I’ve been subconsciously thinking about without really always realizing that that’s what I’m thinking about.

The aspect having travel and such expenses covered, it’s important to me when I look at conferences but I definitely have this mindset of like, “I’m a beginner and I have to establish myself. This conference isn’t going to pay all my expenses but I really need this experience,” so being able to be part of the conversation must have like, we deserve to have this and we should be able to be more demanding about what we need, what is really valuable to me. Thank you, everybody especially Carina.

CARINA: Thank you. That’s exactly the kind of impact that is the point.

SAM: If I can piggyback on that, that was one of the aspects that I picked up on and has really been catching my attention throughout this whole conversation. That idea of flipping the paradigm, I always love finding those places where I don’t even realize I’ve been looking at a thing in a particular way or through a particular lens until somebody comes along and says, “But what if you look at it from this completely different angle?” and then everything just falls into place in a new way. I love watching my brain do that. I love the feeling that I get from having that happen. Thank you for being able to frame the competition angle in a completely different way. I really enjoyed that.

CORALINE: Yeah, I really enjoyed that too. One of the takeaways for me in this episode is I’ve been speaking for about four years and I’ve given close to 50 talks. I want to think about what influence I have and how I can use that to affect change as someone who’s woman for speaking. It’s definitely something I would be thinking about, maybe tweeting about. Thank you for that, Carina.

CARINA: I love that you brought this up because this is something else that CallbackWomen has been able to do and I would love to be able to do more, which is retweet women, making the offer to do mentorship of speakers. There have been a handful of people who’ve been doing this consistently for years and [inaudible] Ricky Ensley, Susan Axtell, Jen Myers or Jen Meyer, I forget which her last name is but people who have decided to make a long term commitment to helping new speakers get a leg up and it would be really cool to have more people choose to do that, to just say for instance typically something like, “I have office hours. I’m willing to give 30 minute slots. Feel free to DM me,” whatever it is that you want to do and whatever scale, we all have expertise, even I would like to say Jamey, newcomers and especially newcomers.

This is something that I’ve really, approximately annually have done, a speakers panel on video. I always try to make sure to have speakers from a range of experiences, including new speakers who have given one or two talks total because you actually have tons of valuable feedback to give to new speakers and to conference organizers. Your perspective is so valuable and it’s that phase when you’re figuring everything out and everything that you have to say, you can say to a brand new speaker because you are closest to the problems and you’re closest to the questions and you just discovered what is okay and useful and clever and you can share that right away with someone else. They’re going to have that sense of empathy of like, “Well, you think you are totally a beginner and unqualified and you’re doing it and you’re really need that.” It’s not just some senior person saying giving lip service the idea that I could do it too, it’s someone who genuinely knows that it’s like me saying, “You can because I did.”

JAMEY: Totally.

REIN: So much of this conversation has been meaningful to me but I think the thing that strikes me the most is that it’s taken CallbackWomen four and a half years but there has been a real change in the conversation, a real change in how conferences go about organizing themselves, inviting speakers. They’ve changed things in a real material way, not just for conferences but also for the people that go to conferences. If you’re a person that cares about gender inequality or racial inequality or class inequality and all of these things are deeply connected.

This is the kind of activism that needs your support and there are a lot of ways that you can support it. You can support it by donating your money, your time but I’m reminded of a quote by Margaret Mead, which is, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” CallbackWomen is exactly what she was talking about and they need your support.

CARINA: Jamey, you also mentioned the difficulty of pre-paying for travel and of course, the obvious solution would seem to be to have conferences pay for the travel expenses up front. I do have some sympathy for conference organizers why this is difficult. I talked to some who have said the reason that they can’t is because there are people who abuse the system who literally take the money, either been given as a grant to cover expenses or who take the free ticket and don’t even show up. They don’t speak. They completely cheated their system and that’s really shocking to me but I understand why a conference would need to have some safeguards, controls.

It’s typically why a conference does something like either reimbursing only on-site when you arrive or after the fact. Of course, it will also give them time to raise sufficient money if they have to pay expenses a couple months ahead. That’s also harder for them but there are genuine reasons for a lot of these problems and I think it would be really helpful for all of us to come together and try to find ways to, at least moderate, minimize, reduce the effect of those kinds of dilemmas.

REIN: I want to thank Carina and all of our co-panelists for this episode. It’s been really important to me and I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks everyone.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

041: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mind Manipulation with Casey Watts!

Mandy Moore — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 05:00:41 +0000

This episode is sponsored by Upside!

Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.

Panelists:

Jessica Kerr | Coraline Ada Ehmke | Sam Livingston-Gray | Janelle Klein

Guest Starring:

Casey Watts!: @kyloma | caseywatts.com

caseywatts.com/mindmanipulation

A Neurobiologist’s Guide to Mind Manipulation [slides]

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “CBT: Chunky Bacon Tacos and Psychological Safety” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:18 – Empathy Development

03:25 – Training for Customer Support

Greater Than Code Episode 037: Failure Mode with Emily Gorcenski

A Neurobiologist’s Guide to Mind Manipulation by Casey Watts @ EmberConf 2017

06:53 – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Coraline Ada Ehmke: Emotions as State Machines (from the GTC blog!)

10:48 – Acknowledging Emotion; Rationality

14:23 – Inner vs Outer Brain

via GIPHY

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

16:22 – Empathetic vs Empathic; Empathy vs Sympathy

Pavneet Singh Saund: Practical Empathy: Unlock the Super Power @ NDC Oslo

21:32 – The Earned Dogmatism Effect [Video]

26:10 – Maladaptive Thought Patterns

31:34 – The “Woop” State and Psychological Safety

Amy Edmondson: Psychological Safety

Coraline Ada Ehmke: Antisocial Coding: My Year At GitHub

38:09 – Leading with Vulnerability

Reflections:

Janelle: Choose your presence.

Jessica: Feel feelings in the moment, and then act on them.

Sam: Rationality is a facade and state machines can be edited.

Coraline: Understanding empathy over only performing empathy.

Casey: Making responding with empathy a habit.

Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

CORALINE: Hello and welcome to the Episode 41 of ‘CBT: Chunky Bacon Tacos and Psychological Safety.’

JESSICA: [Singing] Chunky bacon tacos!

CORALINE: I am very happy to be here with Sam Livingston-Gray. Thank you, Jessica for the musical interlude.

SAM: Thank you that was amazing. I was away from my time zone for three weeks but unless I missed a memo or I suppose a robot uprising, I think we’re still Greater Than Code. With that out of the way, I’d like to welcome Janelle Klein to the show.

JANELLE: Thank you, Sam. I’d like to introduce, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Good morning. Thank you, Janelle and I have the great honor of introducing our guest today. Casey Watts works for Heroku doing Ember. His superpower is empathy and helping others become more empathetic. Casey never leaves home without bubbles. He has a background in both psychology and software development, making him well-prepared to discuss psychology with developers. He studied neurobiology at Yale University and he co-published a few neurobiology papers. Casey, welcome to Greater Than Code.

CASEY: Thank you.

CORALINE: Casey, it says in your bio that your superpower is empathy. Were you always an empathetic person?

CASEY: That’s an awesome first question. No, I was born a robot.

JESSICA: Were you an empathetic robot.

CASEY: No, I don’t think it matters.

SAM: Then how did you acquire your superpower?

CASEY: Eventually, I use my robot introspection abilities to realize that other people mattered and that understanding myself and my feelings matter because my subconscious brain has lots of secret messages for me that are really useful.

JESSICA: That’s interesting. How did you figure out that the stuff was useful?

CASEY: I remember a friend in middle school who helped me learn that having friends was useful and good. He would tell me things all the time like, “Casey, you can’t say that to people,” like I have a mentor of sorts in that way, then I learn.

CORALINE: Casey, you studied neurobiology at Yale. What brought you into neurobiology?

CASEY: It was almost accidental. I went to college expecting into computers or maybe biology or genetics. Those are very interesting but the classes I took, I just took the ones that were taught the best, would learn the most from for proportionally the least amount of work. I didn’t mind working but I had to optimize the amount that I was going to learn and the psychology classes at Yale was just awesome. All of that [inaudible]. They were some of the most satisfying classes that I took but I love biology too. I took enough biology classes that I can kind of cross it together. But then I found a lab that I could work in for two or three years there, doing really cool research and that was neurobiology. That’s my major.

JESSICA: Did you write software as part of the research?

CASEY: Actually, I did work at a lab that did that for one semester earlier at the college but I made no software for my major really. Software was totally like a side project hobby thing. I had a student internship for four years doing software development and computer tech support stuff. That’s kind of a fork part of my life.

SAM: Out of curiosity, did the tech support contribute to your empathy development?

CASEY: Surprisingly, yes. Customer support is really important to work well with people and the things that taught explicitly there just kind of clarified, solidified and crystallized some of the thoughts I had about it anyway.

JESSICA: So the training for customer support, that’s interesting. Could software developers use some of that training?

CASEY: There’s an exact training, absolutely customer support people could use, like role playing on angry customer and then considering all the options you could use. I think software developers could also use it in terms of working with your problems with teammates, maybe a role playing a scenario where you disagree with a teammate because their idea is different from yours and what things you could say. I kind of imagining the different options of the reactions and situations that you have, that’s really useful.

CORALINE: It kind of reminds me the previous podcast that we did on failure modes. It seems like this kind of training for dealing with emotions and different situations, it could be considered prepping for failure mode in interpersonal communication.

JESSICA: That makes a lot of sense because it’s a lot like with failure in software, we’ve accepted that a distributed system is going to have failure somewhere all the time. It’s just a matter of making it not catastrophic and it’s the same in conversations, right?

CORALINE: Yeah. Basically, the idea is that when you’re designing a system or participating in a system by managing it and extending it, you need to plan for failure modes because failures are inevitable. If that’s not part of your thinking early on, if it is not part of your planning and design, it’s going to come back and bite you. That’s something that’s really lacking in software architecture but it seems like that it can also be lacking in interpersonal relationships.

SAM: That’s interesting. I, sometimes get overwhelmed in trying to game out things like that where people are involved because what I’m thinking about a software system, I feel like I can almost predict the states that it’s going to be in but dealing with other humans, it’s so complicated that my mind just kind of freaks out and goes, “Ahh! I can’t deal with that.”

CASEY: I think a lot of disconnect happens when people aren’t not of the same page and they don’t realize they’re on the same page, also.

JESSICA: Like when we use the same word for two different things and we don’t realize that each of us has a different definition.

CASEY: Yeah, definitely. That’s a clear one. Even deeper sometimes, people just have different values, different things that they value more than the other person and then if you don’t get to the root of that, they can argue in circles forever.

JANELLE: Other thing I’ve seen what happen with circles is when you end up having projections of other people that aren’t quite accurate and then you’re reacting to each other based on these projections and models that you have in your head for another person that doesn’t necessarily match where that person is actually at. I was watching your video on cognitive behavioral therapy and the interrupt patterns in it, just reminded me a lot of research that focus more on neuroplasticity and changing your patterns but something I’ve noticed a lot in my self is just the mechanics of projection and how we see other people and then incorporate that into our own thoughts and feelings.

CASEY: If you got a friend close enough or a coworker close enough, you could talk with them deeply about this thing. You can really learn so much about them. I just had — I don’t want to say fight — a disagreement with a friend the other day and as it turned out, she imagined that I was thinking very different thoughts than I actually was and she was thinking very different thoughts than she actually was. When we set out and to talk about it later, we imagined other person’s mindset. The projection was just completely wrong for both sides.

CORALINE: Cognitive behavioral therapy just got mentioned. Can you, maybe give us indoctrination of ‘chunky bacon tacos,’ I mean, cognitive behavioral therapy?

CASEY: Cognitive behavioral therapy, I want to introduce it as the correct answer for every psychology test that I took. It’s like circling ‘C’ on a math test. It’s very likely going to work. Out of these therapies, CBT is a really good one. CBT is a type of therapy you would do with a therapist most often. There are also like, of course 100 types of therapy but you could do just one of them. I think the core of CBT is the most important part and a lot of other therapies have the same core. The core is just introspect, think about your thoughts and emotions naturally, reflect on them, critically think about them and then take the best action after that. Really deep thought is the core of what CBT is.

JESSICA: I like the part about when you have a feeling, you can consciously decide how to feel about having that feeling, sort of, so it doesn’t spiral.

CASEY: Yeah. Part of CBT distinguishes between automatic and deliberate thoughts and feelings. I think of automatic feelings as kind of inputs to your system but as soon as you can stop yourself and notice, you can’t decide whether you want to continue feeling that feeling or not, once you’re in this kind of introspective state.

JESSICA: So your example is like when you step in a puddle and you’re like, “Gaah!” and super frustrated. What’s your reaction to that with consciousness?

CASEY: I can tell you my inner narrative of what will go through my head. If I step in a puddle, I think terrible thoughts like, “Today is the worst, everything is terrible, my foot is wet, I hate it.” A lot of that and there’s a negative feeling then negative word and thoughts also and I can catch myself and say, “Casey, is it useful to feel upset about this?” Probably, it’s useful to feel the emotion and be with it for a moment so that it doesn’t fight back harder. But then to continue feeling it and thinking about it and focusing on the negative outcome that I just experienced, it’s not really useful. I can hopefully catch myself and say, “Casey Watts, this is not useful [inaudible] this, make a plan and just do it and shut up.”

CORALINE: This kind of reminds of I’m working on a book called ‘Compassionate Coder’ and I have a chapter that models emotions as state machines. My thinking there is programmers understand state machines. If we transcend emotions to a state machine model, maybe we can better analyze our feelings. One of the examples that I give in that chapter, ‘Hostile is Anger,’ I think a lot of the triggers for anger involves a boundary or a self-image being challenge and that trigger is anger. You have different options in how you want to respond to anger. Probably our automatic reactions to lash out and by lashing out, we internalize our anger and at least to resentment. But if, rather we acknowledge the fact that we have anger, then we can work in a more rational way to restore the boundary or self-image that got challenged. This is going to be a blog post on the Greater Than Code Blog, by the way.

SAM: The thing that strikes me about state machines is that, as we encounter them in computer science, we tend to see them as these static things. There’s a path or a graph that you can’t get out of but it sounds like maybe CBT is a way of editing the state machine, giving yourself another option at a particular point.

CASEY: Yeah, I love that image but I think those state in which you can modify your thoughts and emotions control them deliberately is just like having a debugger at break point in your mind.

CORALINE: Nice.

JESSICA: And then your talk, Casey you pointed out that a system has input some processing and some output and a feedback loop because as conscious humans, we can observe the state machine as we move through it and then, we can change it for next time. We can change that process step so that the same splashy puddle produces a feeling of frustration and an attitude that is not grumpy.

CORALINE: I think one of the important things that you mentioned, Casey kind of in passing that I like to talk about a little more is the fact that the goal is not to become emotionless but rather to acknowledge the emotion and be with the emotion for a while and then handle the processing.

CASEY: Yeah, love to the brain is not the conscious brain. Most of it is just subconscious part of emotion and I think my brain is useful. Most all of my brain is pretty useful and I like to respect it too. The emotional parts are there for a good reason. People who had lose the ability to feel emotion by losing a part of the brain with the senses it, are just really crippled. They unable to perform even basic tasks of choosing what food to eat for breakfast. A lot of decision making is rooted in that emotional part of the brain.

SAM: That sounds like there’s some fascinating research behind that.

JESSICA: Yeah, that’s really interesting. It implies that most of the decisions that we make on daily basis don’t have a clear rational answer but we need to have some answer anyway so we do that with our feelings.

CASEY: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. The feelings I’m equating here, I guess to subconscious mental process, the calculus that’s underlying your brainfolds.

JESSICA: Yeah, the people who can’t feel emotions can’t do that. Clearly, the emotions are like you said, they’re input.

CORALINE: I think we have software developers that the ideal software developer is emotionless and is a purely rational creature. I think a lot of people aspire to that and that’s seems so sad and so damaged to me.

CASEY: Yeah, I think there’s something to it though. If you could be a robot that takes into account feelings, you could be a formidable force and be very effective but a lot of people just forget to incorporate emotions into their heuristics that they’re using.

SAM: I use emotions in my programming all the time, though like we talk about code smells. I think a code smell is a taxonomy on top of the gut reaction that we have after working with code for years and years of, “That doesn’t seem quite right.” At least, the way I experience it my first clue that there may be a code smell I need to pay attention to is that feeling of, “Ugh!”

JESSICA: So emotions are not in opposition to rational thinking. They are crucial input to productive rational thinking.

CASEY: Yeah, I like the way you said that a lot.

JANELLE: I think even more than that rationality is at the side on top of an emotional brain. I don’t think rationality is at the core of the way that our brains are wired as irrational, emotional systems. We’ve got a set of rules and metaphors for what is logic, what is rational that sits on top. As soon as people get to energy zero status and their ability to interrupt themselves and think and be aware of their decisions kind of goes away and they’re stuck in that subconscious emotional processing mode —

JESSICA: Is that like being ‘hangry’?

JANELLE: Yeah but you start to see the rational stuff that go out the window because it’s sitting on top, like the outer brain.

JESSICA: For the record, hangry is a word that comes up in Casey’s talk and of course, it means angry because you’re hungry. I learned about this while pregnant.

SAM: I first encountered the word when some friends of mine were parenting a kid who’s a couple years older than ours. I was like, “Oh, that’s what’s coming.”

CORALINE: Inner and outer brain has now come up and I know that’s something that you cover in your talk, Casey. Do you want to introduce that concept?

CASEY: The inner brain versus the outer brain is really useful. I’d like to illustrate it with an image of a cat you may have seen. There is a cat eating its food, behind it there is a cucumber sneakily placed by the cat’s owner. When the cat turns around, the cat jumps because the cat is so afraid of what the thing is.

JESSICA: What is up with cats and cucumbers?

CASEY: I don’t know why they’re so afraid. I can’t explain it.

SAM: My daughter has tried it and our cats are not fooled.

CASEY: I wonder if there’s a conspiracy in the cats aren’t afraid of cucumber but some loud sound off screens. The cat has two responses. One is the jump, which it’s afraid and then afterwards, the cat looks at the cucumber and realizes a cucumber looks like, “Uhh, this is fine. Seriously, this is fine.” This illustrates the inner versus outer brain. The inner brain is super quick. It’s really fast to make a snap judgments like being afraid of potential threats on the ground. Then the outer brain is the thoughtful conscious part that realizes after the fact, “That is not actually a threat. That is a cucumber.”

JESSICA: Cucumber, tacos! Is this like System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow?

CASEY: Yes, just like that. Exactly. I love that people bring that book up. System 1 and System 2 and that’s like the feeling part of the brain and the thinking part of the brain. The feeling part has emotions and amorphous things and the thinking part of the brain has more conscious verbal words.

JESSICA: What is it we can do once we have that model?

CASEY: Your brain has made up of thoughts and feelings and to realize they’re different parts of the brain is pretty useful. There’s no direct action here. This is just background how the brain works stuff.

JESSICA: Cool and it’s more useful to recognize that feelings are fast but they’re not our last reaction. We can jump at the cucumber but later, we can go back and eat it if we were a vegetarian cat.

CASEY: True.

JANELLE: Casey, I have a question. I was so fascinated by your talk and your interests and your perspective on life and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about just your story and how you came to be the person that you are today.

CASEY: There’s a story recently about how I have a smoker living near me that smokes a lot and I confronted him empathetically and it turned out great. He’s sorry. He doesn’t want to do that to me and now that he knows that’s uncomfortable. Empathy is powerful and useful.

JESSICA: There’s that word empathetic again. Can you define empathetic versus empathic.

SAM: The way that I’ve always encountered them is that empathic is an ESP psy power, an empath is somebody who magically intuits the feelings of others or gets them across the ether or something. It’s very sci-fi, right? Whereas, empathetic is I just think of it as somebody who has empathy or who perform empathy. I have no idea if that’s useful but there we go.

JESSICA: So empathic would be like a literal super power of supernaturally knowing what someone else’s feeling and empathetic is using our outer brain to figure out what someone else is feeling?

CASEY: I think it involves the outer and the inner brain both but it’s like using the clues from the environment that you can pick up like facial expression, tone of voice, things they said and the background maybe, the history if you know that and how a normal human would feel in that circumstance, using all those inputs to formulate in your mind then imagine feeling of how they feel. Probably, actually feeling it too like mirroring that bad feeling in a part of your brain.

JESSICA: The other day at NDC Oslo, Pavneet gave a really good talk about empathy and he distinguished sympathy from empathy as sympathy is, “I can tell you how I would feel in your situation,” and empathy is, “I see how you feel in that situation.”

CASEY: Yeah, I like that definition. Similar in what I use. It’s pretty close. I think in sympathy, you are just thinking about the thoughts of what it would be like but not actually feeling it yourself but then actually feeling empathy is feeling the feel, experiencing yourself really deeply.

JESSICA: That’s interesting, so in this case, you’re outer brain is influencing your inner brain because you really do feel it by conscious decision.

CASEY: I suppose you can only really feel it if you felt something similar before and remember that feeling. There’s even some prep work to make yourself able to empathize.

CORALINE: There was an interesting study that I heard about that dealt with learning empathy. It involved rats. I think the research was done at a university in Japan. There was a box with two compartments that was divided by a partition. On one side of the box, a rat was placed in a pool of water that was not so deep that the rat would drown but the rat had to tread water basically.

On the other side of the box, another rat was placed on a dry platform and there was a small round door that the dry platform rat could open. Within a few days, the rat placed in the dry platform learned how to help the rats in the wet side of the compartment. If the other side was dry, they weren’t concerned with opening the door. But the rat perceives the other rat was in distress, it would actually go and open the door and let the rat climb through to the dry side. I think some people feel like empathy is something you either have or you don’t but I think the lesson with the rats is that empathy can be learned. You can learn to practice empathy or perform empathy.

JESSICA: Because empathy is an active process.

CORALINE: Yeah, and with regard to what Casey said about having to draw on your own experience, in that study the rats that had previously experienced being on the wet side were faster to react to the distress of the other rat.

CASEY: That’s awesome. I’m so glad to have heard of that study.

SAM: So the first step in learning empathy is go feel all the things.

CASEY: Yeah, exactly or imagine feeling all the things, at least like you’re [inaudible].

JESSICA: Or like you brought up in your talk, read fiction.

CASEY: Yeah, I love that one. People say fiction is useless. Nuh-uh. No way. Fiction is the place you go to see other people’s thoughts clearly written out.

CORALINE: Please expound on that. How can fiction lead to a greater performance of empathy?

CASEY: Structure of empathy must hold by helping you imagine what other people are thinking and feeling and it’s done extremely well in fiction because the main character you’re trying to think about being, you have to get their head to really experience the book fully. It’s possibly you could do something similar by talking to friends who are very introspective but with books, there’s so much [inaudible] for you.

CORALINE: It kind of reminded of an observation I made about William Gibson’s writing. His main characters, you don’t really see their motivations and I think that he leaves that out deliberately to encourage the reader to place themselves in the role of the character but I wonder if he’s doing a disservice by not sharing that emotional journey as part of the plot. By the way, I think that’s why Keanu Reeves is perfect in one of Gibson adoptions because he does not display emotions.

Casey, this podcast is aimed at software developers and one of the interesting things that I saw on one of your talk slides was this idea of Earned Dogmatism. I think that it resonated with me because I see this in a lot of senior developers. Can you go into that a little bit?

CASEY: I love to. That’s one of my favorite psychology phenomenon, probably because the term to describe it is so flowery and interesting. The Earned Dogmatism effect is when you are so experienced in something, you have so much experience that you know the correct answer and you know what the incorrect answers are, very like black and white and this experience is often useful. For example, I’m dogmatic about basic math. Two plus two is absolutely four. Do not argue with me. I know that it is true but that’s kind of useful on a low level. But as soon as you get into more complex systems, it’s not as useful where you think that this implementation of code is better than the alternative because you’re so experienced.

The problem with the Earned Dogmatism effect is when you’re in the state, you’re close-minded to new information, you’re so sure that you don’t want to hear about other people’s perspective because it could be like a waste of time, you’ve already thought of everything. Of course, people act like this sometimes. Probably you’ve seen it. Your senior developers you’re working with just know that they’re right, they don’t want to hear about other options but you suspect that your solution that you’re proposing has some merits and the other one has some demerits that we haven’t even discussed yet. They are on the table.

For me, the best tincture, the best solution or cure for this situation is to help the dogmatic person realize they’re missing information because if they’re missing it, of course they would want to have the full picture hopefully. But it doesn’t always work. It’s not a fool-proof thing. You can’t make anyone be open-minded all of a sudden just by your actions.

CORALINE: Something that helps me to avoid that, what I think is an instinctive reaction really is pairing with someone less experienced because they are more apt to ask questions like, “Coraline, why are you doing it that way?” Or, “Why do you see it that way?” Then having to explain it to them, I get beyond the knee-jerk pattern recognition impulse to solve a problem the way I’ve always solve the problem and actually consider like, “Is this the best way to approach solving this problem,” because if I can’t explain it, then it’s probably not a good idea.

SAM: I feel like what you’ve just described, Coraline is a wonderful hack and a wonderful way to get yourself back into beginner’s mind but you have to place yourself into an appropriate frame of mind to be able to take that feedback. I’ve worked with a couple of seniors when I was earlier in my career that they were just there to teach me the right way to do things.

JESSICA: It goes back to Coraline state machine of at the point where you’re challenged, when they ask you why did you do that, they’re challenging your boundaries or if you’re really dogmatic, yourself image and you can either acknowledge, “Thank you, and I’ll try to explain why,” Or you can lash out and that’s really destructive because then you’re teaching that junior dev to shut up and that’s the last thing you want.

JANELLE: I think the other thing it does is it forces us to come up with words for a lot of things that are driven solely by gut instincts, like you get used to making lots of development decisions based on gut feel and doing things because it’s just the way that makes sense to do it without really spending a whole lot of time thinking about it and processing what’s going on and having clarity in your own way. Working with more junior folks, I find that it has forced me to clarify a lot of my own ideas and opinions during those challenges.

CASEY: I think I would defend the human brain for a moment. This is a natural brain tendency to take shortcuts, become close-minded and do things very quickly and that’s awesome. Our brains have to conserve a lot of resources, it helps us do lots in our life like choosing what clothes to wear in the morning. You don’t need to deliberate on that for hours but it gets in our way a little bit when we’re doing software development of complex systems and we really should be thinking critically about these things. I think it’s an appropriate mental response in a lot of situations. I don’t want to poo-poo on it at all. I don’t think we’re done yet but it’s natural to want to do next.

SAM: One factoid that I ran across when I was researching a talk on cognitive bias I gave a couple years ago was that the brain is 2% to 3% of your body mass but it accounts for 20% of your caloric intake, approximately. That’s just a huge amount of resources to be used by a tiny part of your body so your brain naturally has to be very efficient with the resources that it uses because your body, otherwise literally could not support it.

CORALINE: Yeah, the biology of neurobiology, right?

JESSICA: Casey, in your talk, you gave some interesting examples of negative ways to react unhelpful mental processes and you had a cool graphic of that so question one, do you have a link to that little summary because I want to stick it to the wall? And two, can you give us some examples of what not to think about how we feel?

CASEY: There’s an awesome graphic that I’m really into it. It has ten maladaptive cognitions. The most common unhelpful thinking patterns. The link to this is at CaseyWatts.com/mindmnipulation, all lower case, one word, no dashes, nothing. That’s a Google Doc that I published that has a whole bunch of links to things. One in particular has the word ‘Poster.’ If you [inaudible] that page for poster, that’s the [inaudible].

Generalizing is a short cut [inaudible] and it’s useful but it’s not always the most effective. Sometimes it causes us to have trouble. Another one is magnification. If I stepped in a puddle and I say, “This is inconvenient,” I also probably think of myself, “This sucks. This is the worst. This day is terrible. I hate everything.” You’re kind of generalizing and disqualifying the positive things that happened that day and fortune telling the rest that is going to be bad. Probably, you’re having those kind of thoughts too and those are all examples of maladaptive thought patterns, ways of thinking that aren’t always bad but are kind of like red flags that you should stop and think about them if you notice you’re thinking in that way.

Probably, any time you’re angry, a lot of thoughts that are the most satisfying to say are going to be these maladaptive thought patterns. I think that seems to be true and that’s unfortunate. I don’t know why that’s true. That’s a standing question.

JESSICA: That’s interesting.

SAM: Is it related to why we want to swear?

CASEY: Yeah, probably. Part of it is expressing that you’re upset to other people.

JESSICA: So maybe, we should just curse and not think. “This is all my fault.”

CASEY: Yeah, probably externalize it. Let it pass muster. I think cursing is not bad in that kind of situation anyway.

JESSICA: Now, I have an excuse.

CASEY: Cathartic release.

CORALINE: [inaudible] aside, I know there have been studies about cursing in mental health. Does anybody have any memory of what that was about?

JESSICA: It said that cursing is totally good for you. I’m making that up.

SAM: Like 87% of statistics which are made up on the spot?

JESSICA: Research is so great at providing a narrative to what I already want to believe.

JANELLE: I was just thinking about the other side of empathy as a human. We have thoughts and feelings and we want to be heard. I think it’s just one of the deepest needs of the human heart so amplifying your feelings and your experience such that someone else can go, “Wow, I can really see that you’re having a really awful day and feel really frustrated.” We want somebody to empathize with us so we can feel connected. I’m guessing that amplification probably comes from that inner drive to need to be heard.

CASEY: That sounds true. Bonding with other people is certainly proven to be useful and good for health.

SAM: Okay, now I’m thinking about something I read a little while ago about yawning and how yawning is this deep-seated behavior built way down in the limbic system. I read some theories about how it is used as a signaling behavior to signal to other members of your species that you are changing state, either into or out of wakefulness and they then maybe need to pay attention. It’s a signal that is wired into us in a very low level. I wonder if the swearing is a higher level manifestation of that same thing, is what you’re saying.

CASEY: Now, that sounds great. This is a signal. Swearing is certainly a signal of some kind, either to you or to people around you. Probably to people around you since you’re saying it out loud usually.

JESSICA: Casey, when we hear someone else, either cursing or doing one of these maladaptive cognition things, such as magnification or filtering out the positive, what can we do when we hear that on our team?

CASEY: That’s tricky. You can absolutely do this to yourself but you can’t just make other people think differently. You can do it ahead of time, maybe by sharing this talk or a book about CBT or the chart with your team and helping them think about it more but it’s hard to make them do anything. You can’t really force anyone to do stuff.

JANELLE: At the same time, though if we translate this back to what we’re talking about and when the human is expressing is that they’re frustrated and they have a need to be heard that I think the thing that we can do in response is to hear them. Somebody is essentially calling out from their heart and these feelings that are coming up and they just want somebody to hear them. I would think that helping to give the person what they need makes sense.

CASEY: Yeah, I totally agree. I think validating their experience is the most powerful thing you can do at that moment probably. If you were to skip straight to, “Oh, I noticed you were thinking some maladaptive cognitions,” that’s kind of invalidating him.

SAM: If that were me, I would be thinking, “That might be maladaptive cognition.” See, it turns into a nice statement.

CASEY: That’s awesome.

JANELLE: It kind of goes to psychological safety thing too we’re just creating beyond on your team where that’s okay.

CASEY: I like to think that I really got another saying, “I’ve always entering the whoop state.” I didn’t define that, yet. Do you want to hear about that?

JESSICA: Whoop!

CASEY: When I’m getting upset over something in a bad mindset, I often catch it and I think to myself or sometimes out loud if I’m around the right people, I’ll go, “Whoop!” and that puts me into what I called the whoop state. The whoop state is something where I’m very introspective and I’m thinking about all the inputs that are affecting me and my mood and if I’m hangry or not and what just happened to me and what someone said and my values and principles. I try to think about everything and how would I ideally respond to the situation. I can think about all the thoughts and feeling inputs and I can choose which outputs to do. I’m pretty good in getting into the state being introspective and I’m really proud that I can do that. Every time I do it I’m like, “Yes, until the end. Pretty awesome, Casey.”

The next step is what I’m proud of is sometimes I say that it is useful to be upset in the situation so I should maintain it and not defuse it. But most of the time, it’s not really useful being upset over walking out a street and somebody cuts you off like a driver drives by and he’s mean or terrible. That’s not really useful to be upset on that person if your upsetness is not having any positive impact on them or the world or anything so that one, I might [inaudible]. But if it’s a neighbor that’s always parking at the end of the line and I can barely get in, it might be worth getting upset over that enough to talk to them about it rationally. Choosing your response is really the core of this idea of CBT.

JESSICA: And you want to talk to them about it while you’re annoyed but before you’re furious.

CASEY: Yeah or at least I want to write down why I’m annoyed so I can read it later to get into that state again maybe. I want to maintain the annoyance such that I actually do take action and talk to them like with the smoker upstairs. I think that’s a fun anecdote.

JESSICA: Yeah, that is.

CASEY: I mentioned the smoker earlier. I actually got a note from him yesterday. It’s taped to my door and says, “Thank you so much for talking to me like an actual human. That was amazing. Here’s my phone number. Text me if anything else is terrible,” and I have to have saga with this upstairs neighborhood. Three months, four months, he’s always smoking and I always ask him not to and it’s just awesome.

JESSICA: Does the smoking example is a good example of there’s a time in between when you have the feeling and when you suppressed it so much that you have a narrative about it about how terrible that person is and then you’re furious with them. This applies on our teams too, right? On our teams, we want psychological safety. Could you define that first?

CASEY: Amy Edmonson is a researcher who did a lot of the initial research on psychological safety and her definition is, “It’s a shared belief how members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” Teams that have this property ended up being way more effective as teams, they’re able to collaborate better and make more creative output. They’re just better by many metrics that teams that don’t have this. In fact when Google was doing research into what makes Google’s teams the best, it wasn’t any of a list of 10 or 20 things that they thought it would be. It was psych safety which is number one.

JESSICA: What was that interrelational risk taking?

CASEY: Interpersonal risk taking.

JESSICA: I was close.

CASEY: Yes, same idea.

JESSICA: Would that be like talking to your neighbor?

CASEY: Yeah. The upstairs neighbor who is smoking, I don’t know him. I don’t trust him closely. I’ve never interacted with him except in this situation so we didn’t really have a safe environment. I didn’t feel like I could tell him all of my thoughts and feelings that he would respect them immediately because I don’t know this person. You should probably expect that most people aren’t going to care about you very much. They don’t know you. That’s a pretty good baseline.

Probably now, I have psych safety with, like he respects and values my thoughts and feelings and experiences and I respected him and his and it only went well probably because I went up to him and tried to make an environment where we’re safe to talk about what we’re thinking. I was like, “I respect you. It’s fine that you’re smoking. Some people are probably very stressful and you smoke extra today.”

I try to be very empathetic with them and not shame him for smoking and he needed this piece of information from me and I needed him to be in a state where he accepts it. He just needed to know that smoking indoors go through the vent into my room. That’s a thing I’m sure he could not know of on his own. This information is only I had and I wanted to convey it in a way that he would accept. I thought really hard about being empathetic and I presented it in just the right way and apparently it worked. All of my friends are saying, Casey, no. Don’t even. Just tell the manager. You don’t have to deal with this.” I’m like, “No, I want to treat him like a person.”

JESSICA: You mentioned that you didn’t have safety and then you took the risk any way and now you think you do have safety. This is another one of those spiral things that psychological safety makes it okay to take this risk of sharing information like that, which in turn increases psychological safety.

CASEY: Yeah, definitely. It’s a feedback loop. Once you have it, you’re kind of cool. It keeps proliferating itself, hopefully.

SAM: Assuming somebody on the team doesn’t take that as a sign of weakness and lash out at it, right?

CASEY: It could happen.

JESSICA: That’s the risk part.

CORALINE: I recently wrote about my experience in working on the community in safety team at GitHub and they got some attention. In thinking about that and framing it in light of our conversation, I think that what I experienced was a false sense of psychological safety. I was hospitalized for depression, and immediately coming out of that was forming a performance plan the worst possible timing. When I tried to share the effects of the trauma from my hospitalization that I was experiencing, I was accused of being manipulative, rather than being with empathy and compassion. Do you think that that false sense of psychological safety is prevalent and that endangers, if one person feels psychologically safe and the environment actually is not psychologically safe?

CASEY: But say, you felt like it was safe to take the risk of sharing this personal stuff with your team but it was not safe, that was a risk that turned out poorly. I’m sorry that happened. That was stressful. It’s more than stressful.

CORALINE: How do we identify, whether a situation really is safe or not?

CASEY: I’m not sure you can ever know for sure. I think there are some factors that make it more or less likely that it’s safe. I think smaller groups are more often safe. Groups of which you know people better or trust them more, even on a personal level, that’s more likely going to be safe. There’s no guarantee.

SAM: I think as Jessica was just saying, that’s just the risk and you have to, at some point decide whether it’s an acceptable level of risk and either do the thing or don’t do the thing. What I’m curious about is whether it’s possible to turn those situations around if there’s anything we could do other than burn it to the ground and leave, which is of course my first reaction to most things.

JESSICA: Janelle, you were saying earlier that you have a strategy of leading with vulnerability.

JANELLE: Yeah. I guess what I’ve learned is that people will naturally reciprocate. Casey you were talking about modeling in your video and essentially, what I’ve learned as I’ve learned to feel safer and more comfortable in myself is that floodlighting vulnerability generally reciprocates vulnerability. Also, I’ve learned is assaulting to people that are just can’t get there. I’ve had to learn how to tone down my intensity at the same time but it’s just kind of how I am. I want to sit around and dream and talk about philosophy of life. This is like where I’m at mentally.

There are some people that are willing to challenge themselves in the way they think about themselves and there’s other people that’s like the thought of whooping themselves and living in that awareness. It is just like too much effort.

JESSICA: Janelle, when you are in that situation of leading with vulnerability and it’s been successful, at least sometimes, what were the power dynamics there. Were you leading from a leadership position?

JANELLE: Generally speaking, yeah. I’ve been either like a team lead or leading like consulting team and with consulting, it’s all a matter of leadership because you don’t have any official control with you. It’s all influence in the context of my job of figuring out how do I take this corporate monster organism of people that are so very deeply in their dysfunctions and figure out how to make them move together. I learned these set of skills of basically understanding my own energy and how I was able to pull on the emotional energy of others to influence.

I’ve got skills in that regard that has become eventually came to like my trauma that I went through is given me a really useful set of skills in regards to self-awareness. Now I can kick ass at work because I’ve been traumatized. I kind of just come to this place of accepting all my past, put me in a position so that I’m capable of doing all the things I can do today and that helps me to just be in a place where I can be deeply vulnerable and lead at the same time. I think one thing missing in most of our leadership is that kind of deep, strong empathy, that ability to not need to defend your ego or your sense of feeling that you know all the things, like just being comfortable with being ignorant.

CORALINE: But how do you think the power dynamic influences that because in my particular situation, I was not a person in power so I did not have the authority to set the tone and make this an empathetic interaction. Do you think that being in that leadership position gives you that advantage, that may be other people don’t really have?

JANELLE: I think that’s why I feel a sense of responsibility with that because a lot of people that feel trapped in that way and when I was in the system, I felt trapped like I was ready to explode. Working in the context of organization, I had so many times where I just like rock the boat and almost got myself fired because I cared to damn much and with stupid decisions and things that were just wrong and broken, I get railed against the machine and exploded. But then when I was a consultant, it’s like you’re on the outside and then it was about me seeing all that pain in the machine and being able to figure out how to make things move so I could help people.

JESSICA: As a leader, there’s a lot you can do with vulnerability. Casey, do you have any more information for us about how we can encourage psychological safety on our team?

CASEY: We could break psych safety down into two parts. One part is about the average social sensitivity on your team, which is empathy and that’s something people can learn, people can train in empathy but it’s harder and slower to train technical skills for sure. The other one is communication, like how often people share their thoughts and feelings. It’s pretty good to correlate to how safe they feel.

I used to manage 300 students that work for the IT department of university and when we hired, we decided whether we wanted to hire on two scales: how empathetic they were versus how technical they were. We’re inclined to hire people who are five out of five technical that literally have done this job before but that was the opposite of what was good. Our favorite employees, the most effective ones, were the ones that had [inaudible] low tech skills but learned the tech. We taught the tech. They can learn it absolutely. We’re not so worried about it. The high empathy people learn the tech but the high tech people didn’t learn the empathy on the job. They could have potentially somehow but it wasn’t a priority of theirs.

JESSICA: Did they have earned dogmatism with their extremely high tech skills?

CASEY: Actually, often they did. Some of them felt superior to the students they were helping, like why don’t you just [inaudible] already know how to do everything. They were all trying. They want to do their best but it’s harder for them if they were already empathetic to be empathetic at the instance they were helping.

JESSICA: So that disparity in tech skills actually magnifies the communication problems.

CASEY: Oh, yeah.

SAM: This is reminding me very strongly of a recent tweet storm that Sarah Mei wrote. She’s talked about this a couple times on Twitter, I think. She talks about how the rise of code schools is allowing people to change careers into tech from other careers and how that plays out interestingly over the course of five years or so that code schools have been around. She talks about specifically how people who are changing careers have already developed their communication skills in some other arena and they bring those with them when they change into tech so they spend a couple of years learning the tech and they get slowed down a little bit because of that but once they hit mid-career at three to five or so years, they start to pull ahead of people who have started from a computer science background because CS doesn’t teach empathy or communication skills. They’re really minimized or neglected entirely.

She’s been observing some interesting patterns in the careers of people who come in with those communication skills and that they’re starting to outperform those of us with a traditional CS background, which I think is great.

CASEY: Not only does it not teach empathy. It doesn’t teach you core value empathy even. I think more important than being empathetic is valuing empathy because at least, when you’re on a trajectory to get better. I can be immensely patient with people who are learning things but I really not that patient at people who actively don’t want to learn empathy. I don’t know what to do with those people.

JESSICA: Like you said earlier, Sam to perform empathy, means to care about it. It doesn’t mean to fake it. It means I am trying to do a better job at this than I have been able to do in the past. Casey, we’ll link to your video in the show notes. What else will people learn from watching it after listening to this podcast?

CASEY: I’m so glad you asked. In the slideshow/video, there are a lot of diagrams that explain the kinds of things we’re talking about visually. That’s pretty useful. Also, we didn’t talk about how to encourage psychological safety in your workplace. I have 10 specific things you can do on your team to make it better. Some of those are from the research and some are from my experience, it kind of mixed both. The video I guess is probably the best way for that. I don’t think it’s written up fully. There are a lot of links to articles and other videos that go to all of these topics in more depth and of course, you could do your independent research to go even deeper. I’d love to hear from you what you find.

JANELLE: I was having this conversation earlier with Jessica about identity and our presence within our self and I found that there’s three primary ways of being in the world. If we connect with others and see ourselves through their eyes like we live in a reflection of ourselves and define our identity in terms of how we believe other people see us and then we can live within our body and we can feel ourselves and we can feel our feelings as inputs an do this whole awareness of this translation and feel that process inside of our body, then we can step out of that which I call the choose your presence, where we start looking at life and who we are as a set of first principles, the set of vectors, a direction as opposed to a goal.

To me, I see bubbles as the vector so I find so much beauty in this idea of bubbles that just really resonates with me. When you’re describing empathy, this idea that empathy is this value that we need to hold, it seeing empathy needs to be a first principle, this chord of who we are. But it’s also a centric to that ‘choose your presence’. I think the thing with cognitive behavioral therapy is it allows us to shift to that ‘choose your presence’ and make a decision to take ownership of our lives. That’s really powerful. That’s how you find your way in authentic alignments is making a decision to choose your life. That’s pretty beautiful to me.

CASEY: I love the word in volition. I think it sounds really good. It means choosing the actions you do. That’s like how a will power and executing it. I think that’s what Janelle just say.

CORALINE: Jessica, do you have a reflection on our conversation today?

JESSICA: One of the things that I wrote down in my notebook about this conversation is the part about when you have that feeling of frustration or anger, it’s still useful to feel it in the moment so that it doesn’t hang around and it eat you. But after you feel it, then we decide how to react. That’s important because Coraline, you said something about how if after anger you lash out, that internalized your anger and for a second, I was like, “Wait, but didn’t you just express the anger?” But I think actually by acting on it, you made it yours. You made it a part of your history and yourself, as opposed to choosing a different reaction.

SAM: And you reinforce that path for future use.

JESSICA: Yeah, nice.

CASEY: We wield anger like a sword.

JESSICA: Our weapons become part of us.

CASEY: It can be really useful when wielded properly or you could hurt yourself.

CORALINE: Sam, what are you taking away from this conversation?

SAM: Oh, there’s a lot. I feel like I need to go back and listen to this like always. But there were a couple of things that I wrote down. I wrote down that rationality is a facade, which I knew as an idea but I hadn’t heard it expressed in those four words before and I like those. The other thing I wrote down was this idea that state machines can be edited because I hadn’t realized that I thought of them as static before, until I actually said that. Looking at those two things: rationality is a facade and state machines can be edited, I’m really enjoying the apparent contradiction between those two and I’m going to have to sit with that for a while and enjoy how they are contradictory and yet, not at the same time. Thank you.

CORALINE: [inaudible] and I’m going to think about this a little more. I use to phrase performing empathy and in the chat that we have going on while record the podcast, it was pointed out that maybe that was in the [inaudible]. Empathy is our [inaudible] and didn’t necessarily sincere. Casey, you talked about the importance of valuing empathy and I think the idea of performing empathy is basically that if empathy doesn’t yet, come naturally it’s you. It’s something you’re still learning or adapting to.

If you don’t initially have the response of understanding and feeling with another person, you can learn that by performing it as an action, making deliberate choice to try to be empathetic even when you don’t necessarily feel it. I think that’s probably part of learning and internalizing and strengthening the empathetic reaction to the emotions of others.

JESSICA: Casey, do you have any reflection?

CASEY: I’ve been reflecting this week a lot about this smoker and I’m so glad I responded empathetically to him because he was responding empathetically back and everything turned out great. But I’m wondering why don’t other people do this. I think responding empathetically is just not always a good idea but it takes energy to do, especially if it’s not your habit. The more of a habit we can make it, the lower energy costs it is for us and I just want to help a lot of people lower that cost and that would be awesome.

JESSICA: Sweet. I think you’ve done that today.

CORALINE: This has been a really great conversation as usual and I want to remind people that if you enjoy the conversations that we have on this podcast, you can support our efforts directly by going to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. One of the benefits of becoming a patron is you get access to our patron-only Slack community where you can speak at greater lengths with our guest and our panelist and other members of the community and explore the ideas and share your thoughts and opinions on the ideas that we talked on the podcast. We are very thankful to all re-patrons and your patronage ensures that we can continue having these conversations so thank you all.

JESSICA: Also, you get access to the outtakes that we record while Coraline is in the bathroom.

CORALINE: Thanks for oversharing that, Jessica.

SAM: I feel like that should be our unofficial motto. “Thanks for oversharing, Jessica.”

CORALINE: Thank you all and we look forward to talking to you again in a couple of weeks. Bye!

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040: F*ck It And Be Nice

Mandy Moore — Wed, 26 Jul 2017 05:00:28 +0000

* Extra super disclaimer: This episode contains a lot curse words.

Panelists:

Jessica Kerr | Jamey Hampton | Mandy Moore

Guest Starring:

Jenn Schiffer: @jennschiffer | jennmoney.biz | Glitch and Jessica Lord: @jllord | MongoDB

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “The Upcoming Release of the iPhone 4!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

01:36 – The Tweetstorm that Started it All

04:29 – Our Communication Skills and Curbing the Snobbery

Greater Than Code Episode Episode 020: Sexuality in Tech with Jenn Schiffer

“It’s just not good business to be a jerk.” – @jennschiffer

— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) July 15, 2017

Greater Than Code Episode Episode 039: The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman

11:33 – Arguing on the Internet

Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

16:55 – Dealing with the Jerks

psa: all of your code is ephemeral & will one day not even matter. it probably doesn’t even matter now. how you treat your peers matters

— jennmoneydollars (@jennschiffer) May 18, 2015

36:28 – Reacting with Meanness and Failed Attempts at Banter

29:08 – Teaching by Example

31:52 – Practicing Restraint

37:45 – Defense Mechanisms; Empathy for Offenders and the Offended

Reflections:

Jessica L.: You are way more evolved and valuable if you can work with humans and write code.

Jenn: We have to actively be learning how to interact with people in the industry and people entering the industry.

Jamey: When you’re mad, approach it offline.

Jessica K.: Tell people they’re great publicly, not privately! Make it normal to tell each other we’re awesome.

Mandy: Just be f*cking nice.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

MANDY: Hello, everybody and welcome to ‘The Upcoming Release of the iPhone 4!’ My name is Mandy Moore and I am here with our new panelist, Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Hi, I’m Jamey but when I join this show, I thought I was joining Greater Than Code. Is that wrong?

MANDY: Oh, yeah. It’s Greater Than Code. I’m sorry. I did make you that promise. I’m sorry.

JAMEY: Okay, I feel better now. I’m here today also with Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA K: Thank you, Jamie. I’m really excited that you’ve joined us as a panelist. I’m also excited that today, we have two fabulous guests. The first one is Jenn Schiffer. Jenn works at Fog Creek as the Community Engineer on Glitch.com. She’s also an artist and she’s extremely strong on the internet. Jenn, welcome.

JENN: Hi, thanks for having me again. I’m going to introduce your second guest, a dear friend of mine, who’s in my apartment but in another room and that’s Jessica Lord. Jess is a Node.JS engineer, recently joined at MongoDB. She loves scented papers and burning wood that smells nice. She also loves open source and she built a lot of it. Welcome, Jess.

JESSICA L: Thank you.

JESSICA K: Awesome. We invited you both to the show because there was an interesting tweet storm the other day and in this tweet storm, Jenn credited Jess with the statement that the way we communicate on Twitter influences the way new developers communicate. Was that right?

JENN: Well, actually I was talking at Jess over a [inaudible] and it wasn’t enough to just talk at her. I figure I tweet at everyone about this topic. I have recently spoken at a conference in Seattle called Deconstruct Conf, which is really cool. It’s like a polyglot conference. I gave a sort of satirical talk on how to be a real web developer —

JESSICA K: Only ‘sort of satirical’?

JENN: Yeah because all of my satire has a sort of moral to the story thing towards the end of it so I guess it was full of satirical but I went on this rant at the end of it about how we portray ourselves on the internet and how new people are entering the space and learning how to communicate with each other, through how we speak. For example, if you’re a new developer, you’ve probably learn online or through your instructors and like, “Here are the people you need to follow on Twitter,” so I got a lot of followers who are new to code and they follow me. I can see that they’re in a boot camp or something or they DM’ed me questions and stuff like they’re new so I have to be on my best behavior, I guess that reminds me to do because they are not only learning how to code but they’re following developers learning how we communicate with each other and how we answer questions. I think that we’ve been doing a disservice to the community by being jerks on Twitter especially, and this is just something that I was kind of ranting about because I think the parallel of that discussion and I wish the video for this talk was out, it’s not yet, the parallel was the JavaScript bread making community. There is this weird —

JESSICA K: It’s a what?

JENN: JavaScript bread making community, not JavaScript bread but there are a lot of JavaScript developers who recently discovered that instead of buying bread, you can also make it at home, given the correct ingredients and ability to follow directions. They’ve even like making bread and tweeting about it and they’re all talking about if you don’t use self-leavening dough, then GTFL. I’m like, “Oh, this sounds familiar. This sounds like how we talk about programming. This is all problematic as well.” Of course, it’s mostly men who are posting about the bread that they’re making, which I think is kind of ironic but we have fun. That conversation was about —

JESSICA K: Snobbery and bread making. That’s so hipster.

JAMEY: There’s going to be snobbery in everything. That’s what I’ve learned from [inaudible].

JESSICA K: So how do we change that because we’re all part of everybody?

JENN: I did this yesterday: someone said something annoying to me at Instagram and I was like, “Go fuck yourself,” which I feel was warranted but that was, in retrospect, what they said was but a mild annoyance. They actually reach out to me and apologize and I said, “Apology accepted. Sorry, I was so cross in return,” and we had a good conversation about it.

JESSICA K: That was in private, right?

JENN: That was private. That conversation wasn’t public so I’ll probably tweet later that the person apologized. When I get angry on the internet and I lashed out like that, it’s in response to somebody being mean to me. If someone’s tweeting about a product I’m working on or something like that and they’re like, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” I’m not like, “What do you mean, you don’t get it?” Like I try to empathize at them and learn what they don’t get.

When I was on the podcast last, my job was a secret. I think we called it my secret lizard job and then a week later, it was announced that I was working at Fog Creek and I work on Glitch so now my job that is partly dev role, I have to learn about our user or our potential users and empathize with the issues that they have that’s related to the product. I won’t say put on a better face about those things because I feel like my online presence was already doing that but I think that a lot of people can work on, I guess, improving the rhetoric around speaking. Jess can probably speak to this. She formally working at GitHub about GitHub users and issues and how people speak and reply to projects.

JESSICA L: There is a ton of work all of us can do in thinking about our communication skills and how we communicate and understanding who are we communicating with and trying to possibly over-communicate just for the other person’s benefit. It sounds really lame but I think a lot of this goes back to just the benefit of being nice. We get on Twitter and when we’re jerks to each other and when we’re really tribal and defensive about our language or if we use semicolons or not, we are creating these communities that aren’t welcoming. That does a disservice in whole because everything we do will be better if we have more people and more different perspectives working on it so being jerks, not only this cycle where we teach all the new people to be jerks but we’re also losing the people who don’t want to come in to a crappy environment and we need them.

JESSICA K: Yeah or we need the nice ones to stay and not be driven out because that makes us, in aggregate, jerkier.

JAMEY: When we’re talking about like teaching people how to communicate, I think people may get this idea that it’s cool to be a jerk about this issue, like you mentioned, semicolons or it’s cool to post mean jokes about it and then people will think I’m funny or whatever. I think that’s a perception that we give to people.

JENN: Yeah. I know for sure that the perspective that you want to give that you know something so you either prove that you know it by doing it or you can prove that you know it or some fake idea of knowing it by shitting on everything else around it, just putting on a [inaudible] error about you. We’ve seen this with the early JavaScript framework wars that were going on the rhetoric. It was very toxic. I think that it hampered the community growth and therefore, the framework growth of some of the frameworks. But now, all of those framework organizations seemed to be talking to each other more and collaborating more and ideas of moving, like JavaScript as a language forward.

I think that everyone’s getting along better and the rhetoric is getting better but I still hear about people who are like, “Oh, I don’t use this because those people are jerks.” They were online three years ago but it’s a lot better now but when you are looking at something new and your first impression are the contributors to a project alienating others, being rude to people on Twitter, I feel like a lot of people are left out to want to be involved in that community because why would you want to spend your time outside of work or even in work in a toxic space. To me, I don’t understand why people would want to do that. I think that the rhetoric is not only better just for new developers but also for yourself, from a PR standpoint, if you’re working on a product. It’s just not a good business to be a jerk.

JESSICA K: So true. Last week, we had Scott Hanselman on the show and he talked about how it takes a lifetime of being kind on the internet to get a reputation for that and just one mean comment and people can remember it forever. But he has the amazing distinction of being known for a kind comment on Twitter. We talked about that last weekend. There was a civil discussion and people were like, “Oh, my God. This is the most civil discussion I’ve ever seen in hundreds of thousands of retweets.”

JENN: I know the bar is so low. I’ve never met Scott but I follow him online and he seems like a really nice, chilled guy. I was going to say about the bar is so low but the more people like him that can have civil discussion with people who are usually not civil, especially with women, the better. We all can be like our male allies. A lot of that is getting involved in discussions that are normally uncomfortable for them and bringing it back down a notch so that everybody can be at the same level and discuss these issues together.

It sucks that if I have a discussion with somebody and they’ll argue with me and a guy comes in and explains to them and they’re like, “Oh, okay…” It sucks that has to happen but at the same time, I appreciate it because I can argue until I’m blue in the face and it won’t go anywhere. I just have better things to do with my time.

JESSICA K: Yeah, true. We have some family members that when I disagree with them, like to my husband, “Eric you talk to him because you’re a man and he’ll listen.”

JENN: Yeah, you got to choose your battles. In this landscape of tech, there’s so many battles and [inaudible] shutting going on. Sometimes, I’ll just say, “This conversation is unproductive. Let’s move on,” and it comes off very terse and bitchy if I’m like, “I’m very busy. We’ll figured it out.”

JESSICA K: Yeah, that’s the least bitchy thing you can say right there.

JENN: Yeah.

JAMEY: I think arguing on the internet is really hard because you’re not seeing the person that you’re arguing with and I think that tends to dry out into these long things where people get really mean, where maybe they wouldn’t in real life. I have a really hard time disengaging from that. I’ve been finding that like I just have to be like, “Someone said something mean and I just have to let it go. I don’t have to have the last word because my emotional health is more important than having the last word with some stranger.” But I still find that really hard to do in practice, even though I know that’s what I need to do logically. I’m wondering how you all deal with that and making that decision to be like, “I’m not going to spend my time engaging with this.”

JESSICA L: There’s so many layers to this. There’s ‘how do people argue on the internet’ but then I think still the root of that initial conversation that Jenn and I were having, was about why the state of affair is that it’s so cool to talk shit about the tools that you don’t use and the frameworks that you don’t use and the languages that you don’t use, that in of itself, is cool to be that way. We’re teaching people, not even how to argue, we’re teaching people to get online and just be jerks about things that are different, which isn’t that the stupid, fundamental human flaw.

We’re all scared of things that are different. We all want to belong and feel like we’re the same as the people in our community. Our community is teaching people to fear languages and tools that aren’t yours and that it’s cool to mock them. It’s just so exhausting.

JAMEY: When you’re talking about things that are different and how I scared of them and I think that’s very true, I got the impression that we’re talking about languages but I think people that are different is very scary for people. I think there’s two types of being mean. There’s being mean about code stuff and languages and the things we do for work. Then there’s also being mean about each other as people and those feel different for me.

JESSICA K: Oh, yeah because earlier, Jenn was talking about how people being mean about frameworks drove other people out of these frameworks and they still don’t use them because historically, there was that meanness. As opposed to, if you get mean to someone personally, you can drive them out of the industry or Twitter entirely.

JENN: Can you drive them out? I feel that because the bar is so low, that a lot of people get to stay in and I think that’s contributing to this vicious cycle.

JESSICA K: Are you talking about driving out the people who are mean or the people who are not mean?

JENN: Driving out the people that are mean. You meant driving out the people that are not mean, the innocents. I think that in tech, it’s cool to be cruel, as opposed to cool to be kind. I see it getting better. Speaking of your earlier question about when do you know to disengage from rudeness, I involve my core group of friends in discussions that I have online. If somebody tweets at me on something I don’t like or whatever, I have a core group of local pals that I’ll send them a screenshot and I rant about it in there and keep the rant offline because I don’t need other people to see that I’m upset all the time because I don’t want the perception that people have of me to be, “Oh, she’s upset all the time,” because I think that’s detrimental to my career.

That might be stifling the problem in tech but that’s just how I feel that I can better handle my business. I think I’m also publicly angry at things enough for people to know that I don’t take much shit from others. But I’d say something in our group chat and I’ll see what their reaction is. If they’re like, “Whatever. Just move on.” I trust them to tell me, whether I should escalate or not. I think that’s very important.

Of course, I happen to have a very awesome expansive core group of friends in the same industry but if you’re the only developer of your friends, it might be hard for them to empathize with us, as a woman, the concept of micro-aggressions that come with existing period, let alone in tech. but just finding a support system where you can be like, “Look what this jerk posted. Whatever, man.” I know, that sort of how I go about things.

That also applies to conversations outside of tech but I don’t get nearly as much shit from people outside of the industry as I do inside but that’s also because most of my life is this industry at the moment.

JESSICA K: If you’re looking for a community like that, a group of friends who can support you, you might try our Greater Than Code Slack, which if you donate any amount on Patreon, even a dollar once, you get an invitation to a community Slack and people there are really nice.

JENN: I agree. I’ve been in the Slack and everyone there is very nice and they ask really good questions so it’s Jenn-approved.

JESSICA L: To the point earlier about if we were referring to driving out jerks or driving out the nice people who see that everyone’s a jerk, I also think there’s something to be discussed around the hero worship around individual contributors and thinking that smart people who contribute a lot but are jerks are people we still have to find a way to deal with. I really truly believe that if you’re not nice to people, then you can’t be smart and we don’t need you. Being good to people is smart.

It’s a different issue than just culturally us teaching people to be jerks about coding but still sort of within that world about what do we do with individuals who are just jerks all the time but we feel that they contribute a lot of code. I feel like, “So what? If you’re not nice, then you’re not smart.”

JENN: Actually, this is a really great topic, I think to discuss because we’ve seen a lot in the past, people invited to conferences who are known in the whisper networks to be predatory, homophobic, racist, transphobic and not good people and you hear from some of them like, “This is about code. It should be about code,” and everyone is like, “It’s about code, not about other feelings. Focus on their work.” While everyone is forgetting that programming is a human thing, we are solving human problems using code. We’re not solving problems for a sentient robot that has nothing to do with society. We’re solving society’s problems. Therefore, allowing people who are bad to society to build so-called solutions, to solve those problems, sounds extremely problematic and illogical to me.

JESSICA K: The code is not central to what we do. It’s a material that we work with in our problem solving. If you were building a skyscraper, would you be like, “It’s all about the metal. I don’t care what the shape of it is. If the metal is pure, that’s all we care about.”

JENN: Right and if someone designs a building that looks like it’s not going to hold enough people, this building isn’t being built for people. When you have a humane perspective on things and you care about people, you solve a problem that involves all people. Otherwise, we have so many buildings, at least in New York that are old, that are not handicapped-accessible because the people who build those things don’t think like, “What about wheelchairs?”

In 2017, now we have laws that require people to think about that but it kind of boggles the mind that people have been using wheelchair for a really long time and we’ve been ignoring them. The same thing is going on the web. There are people who have been hard of sight or blind, hard of hearing or deaf, not able to use keyboards or can only use keyboards. Because many developers are abled and they just don’t think of those things, we’ve been building a really shitty world wide web for a large populations of people.

Of course, you need to have empathy in order to be a good engineer because what we’re doing now is not cutting it. When there are people who are like, “It’s just about the code,” and the code is inherently about people, you’re right. Why are you arguing against me? Stop inviting racist and sexual predators to your conference.

JESSICA K: Yeah, conferences are not about code. Conferences are all people.

JESSICA L: I completely agree. There’s an old tweet of Jenn’s where she just said, “Your code doesn’t matter,” and I love when it makes people mad but it’s absolutely true. Your code doesn’t matter. I can get real worked up on this but we’ve been able to do all what we’ve been able to do because unlike many other species, we can communicate with each other. I believe that all that we can accomplish comes down to how well we can communicate with each other so your code doesn’t matter.

If you can communicate, if you can be nice, that’s what matters and that’s what’s going to enable us to have nicer and better things. It’s easy to not let racists and sexual predators into your conference and it’s easy to not let jerks be a part of your project because the better your spaces are, the better your communities are, the better people you’re going to get in them and the better contributions you’re going to get in the long run.

JESSICA K: Let’s face it. Somebody else can write that code.

JAMEY: Yeah, I think it’s a total fallacy to be like, “This person contributes a lot so we can’t lose them. We need them,” because if someone is contributing a lot but their meanness or their bigotry is keeping 10 other people away, then those 10 people would be contributing more than that one person is anyway.

JESSICA K: This contrasts productivity and generativity. Generativity, I define as the difference between the team’s output with you and the team’s output without you. There are plenty of people who are personally incredibly productive and yet, their contribution to the team or the community is a net negative.

JAMEY: That’s a really interesting way to think about that.

JESSICA K: Jenn, I want to get back to your original story about somebody said something mean and you reacted with meanness. You reacted with, “Fuck off, dude.” That wound up being constructive because in this case, clearly it wasn’t like a serial offender. It was someone who actually did give a shit.

JENN: Yeah. He messaged me and he was, “I’m a fan of your work. I’m sorry. I was annoying.”

JESSICA K: But it’s also productive in some ways at a community level because when we see people reacting to meanness with rejection, then we understand that meanness is rejected. This is the tolerance as a peace treaty thing. Part of enforcing tolerance is being intolerant of intolerance.

JENN: True. He made a comment that said, “Don’t mean to mansplain but,” then he continued to mansplaining and that was the ‘go fuck yourself’ response because it was like, you knew what you were doing and you did it and then you ended it with a smiley face emoji which drives me fucking bananas. Whatever a guy replies to something in a snarky or annoying way and ends it with the winky face emoji, I’m like, “You know what you’re doing.”

JESSICA K: That’s like, “But I can get away with it because I’m a white dude face.”

JENN: Right. On what planet do you think I find that charming? I think a lot of that has to do it, again the perception that people have of me and all of us online. I feel like a lot of the guys knew how my close friends and I, who we’re all in the same community and they want to be in that community, how we banter with each other. They’ll see it like my best friend, Brian. I messed with Brian once when I walk into a room. He’s like, “Here comes this bitch,” and it’s a joke. This is just how we talk but then it’s my meet up. One of the attendees was like, “Hey, come over.” I guess he brought some friends and he want to introduce me and he’s like, “Look at this bitch,” and I was like, “Excuse me? You don’t get to say that to me,” and he apologize but I was like, “Do you understand that if you heard that from a close friend of mine, you don’t address me that way because we have different relationships.”

I was kind of worried because it was my own meet up and I’m like, “That’s not okay,” and teaching him that that’s not okay. But also understanding that this is because of how he saw me and my close friends interacting with each other so you thought it was okay. I’m like, “I’m not going to tell you to go fuck yourself because it’s my own meet up and also, I could understand why you think that’s okay but also I’m going to tell you that it’s not okay because you should know that our relationship is not the same.” It is the slippery slope that as a community organizer and a public person, I have to deal with.

JESSICA K: Exactly. It’s a slippery slope, which we can react to proportionately, which is also part of the peace treaty is proportionate response and you responded in a way that’s corrected the misconception of what was appropriate but you didn’t tell him to go fuck himself.

JAMEY: — Because how do we draw that line sometimes between failed attempts at banter and actual meanness? I feel sometimes, it’s obviously one or the other and sometimes, it’s hard to tell.

JENN: Also, the venue of that interaction provides an important distinction. This was at my meet up, which I consider work. It’s part of my work so I know I have to react a certain way and act a certain way and I have a responsibility. The guy I responded, “Go fuck yourself,” to who’s mansplaining was in my Instagram comments. Instagram is what I call my chill space. [inaudible] and I post my art and he was responding to how I made my art. That’s a different venue. It’s not work related and that key word, “Don’t mean to mansplaining but…” that is why I acted that way.

It’s hard for even me, as I’m still learning to rein it in before I make a gut reaction, especially in [inaudible] space. It wasn’t a proud moment but in my brain, I understand why I made it. Would I do it again? Maybe on Instagram because now people seen it and then it’s like, “Why are you saying that to me. You know what I’m going to say.” Again, probably one of the hardest parts of being a visible woman in the industry is learning how to interact socially with people who don’t know how to socially interact with people.

JESSICA K: Because there’s another consideration there like you talked about the venue and yeah, who’s watching? When your friend, Brian was like, “Here comes this bitch,” that had an effect on the people watching and not everyone might know that he is a really close friend of yours and they’ll get confuse and then they get the wrong signals and then you get to correct them. But correcting them is also providing information to everyone else present.

JENN: Yeah. I think the ideal situation for ‘this bitch’ introduction would be if this guy had saw that and he went up to Brian and said, “Hey, you don’t talk to women that way,” and then Brian would say, “You’re correct. Jenn and I are best friends and this is how we interact,” and I wouldn’t be like, “Yeah, it’s fine but you are correct. That is typically how you should have.” That would have been the ideal adult utopian conversation.

JESSICA K: Yes, which gets to the things that everyone can do, that every white man can do to make this community more welcoming to everyone else. When you see that comment, when you see, “Don’t want to mansplaining but…” just say that’s not cool.

JENN: Yeah. I agree.

JESSICA K: And say it publicly so that people can see that does get projected in small ways, proportionate to how dumb it was.

JAMEY: We’ve talked a lot about teaching by example in a negative way, like teaching people to be mean but I think that we’re also teaching by example in a positive way all the time, whenever we’re acting cool and reasonable. Personally, I know when I first started getting involved with tech at Twitter and following people, I was like, “I don’t want to shit post anymore because if I’m just silly and I post silly nonsense and now, I have followers and they’re going to judge me for it or whatever,” and then I saw lots of people I respected posting silly nonsense.

I follow Jenn and follow and Aaron Patterson — @tenderlove — and he just shit posts all the time and everyone thinks it’s funny and it made me, not in a mean way but just in a really silly way and it made me like, “I can still post silly things and still be a professional,” and that was a huge epiphany for me in a way. I really appreciated other people on Twitter doing that kind of thing. I think it’s important to look at the ways we’re teaching people that they can be casual and be themselves and be funny and be nice too.

JESSICA K: Do post about your bread making but don’t just other people’s bread making.

JENN: Yeah or just make bread and not post about it. It’s bread. I’m trying to keep Twitter funny and you all are posting loaves and I’m like, “Urgh!”

JESSICA K: Well, put a bread on a cat.

JENN: Yeah. Keep it interesting in that way. Put the cat in the bread like one of those spinach dip, bread bowls but for kittens.

JAMEY: I disagree. I want to see everybody’s bread. I think that’s —

JESSICA K: — is not a thing anymore. I’m so sad.

JENN: Okay, I’ll allow bread then. As order of Twitter, the website, you all can post bread but be nice.

JAMEY: In my job, we post a lot of pizza because one of my coworkers, literally wrote a book about how to make pizza dough and there’s a lot of trading of pictures of pizza happening on my Twitter. It’s really a lot better than people yelling at each other so I recommend it.

JENN: Pizza was just more interesting bread, honestly. I was telling Jess earlier that all food is a vessel for sauce so when I see people eating foods that don’t have sauce on it, I’m like, “What are you doing?” But I don’t say that because I don’t want to shit on how people live their lives but in my head I’m like, “You’re doing it wrong.”

JESSICA K: More butter.

JENN: It’s called self-restraint. Some people went for pizza but pizza is the ultimate vessel for sauce.

JESSICA K: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the different ways that you practice self-restraint because that’s not the first word that comes to mind for you, based on your satire and your Twitter.

JENN: I always have a lot of things going on in my brain that need to get out and be expressed in some way but I also do have a huge filter. People think I don’t have one but I’m like, “Oh, no…” There’s a lot of things in my head that you will never hear or see because I know that it’s not appropriate in a current context or it’s just super extra and I’m going to rein it in. I do try to not talk shit about people unless they’re themselves are more toxic than the shitting about them. I also try not to complain about other products that people are working on. I try to reach out privately if I have an issue with something, unless it’s Verizon or Chase or like flying. But even that, I try to tone down the complaining because those are just default things to complain about. Internet, phone and flights, we get it. It all sucks so why noise up? Twitter was with that.

I’m working on a product now, Glitch and we had relaunched right after the podcast I was last on with you all. You know, there are some people who’ve written blogs about it and we’re getting really great feedback. But then there was some that just say, “I don’t get it. Why do this? Blah-blah-blah.” I’m like, “It sounds like this could be a private conversation that we can have,” Or, “We could have a public conversation.” But I found that when people complain about things and who they’re complaining about reaches out and says, “I would love to get feedback,” it reminds that person that’s a human up there talking shit about and they’ll either ignore it or back pedal.

I love watching people back pedal. I love that moment where they’re just like, “Oh, no. I don’t mean it that way,” and it’s just like a satisfied moment where they’re realizing that somebody is a human being. This happened with me in Gamergate. They are investigating me for a very weird reason and I found out what was going on and I reached out to them on Twitter and I’m like, “If you have questions, ask me.” I’m trying to approach them like a human so that they would see me as a human and stop trying to find out where I live and it actually worked, which was very strange.

That experience made me learn that I should approach other things in that way because, I guess first priority is my safety. Second is my cats. If everybody can work that way, I feel like the world would be a much better place and we’ve got a lot of better code, honestly. We wouldn’t have to wait five years for the iPhone 4 to have a period tracker or something like that. There’s a lot more empathy for everybody that’s using the stuff.

JESSICA K: We talked about earlier, reaching out as a human to a human, that’s an awesome thing to do but if you don’t get a ‘to a human’ response, fuck that person and you are not obligated to continue being nice.

JENN: Yeah. That’s how I try to approach people. A lot of people say like, “You’re nicer in person that you are on the internet,” and I’m like, “I’m a very nice person but if you do say something that rubs me the wrong way, I will tell you very abruptly and upfront, I don’t like how you said that.” A lot of people, especially men are not used to being told immediately and straightforwardly that they did something wrong and that’s why their perception of people like me is, “Oh, she’s not nice.”

If you say, “I don’t mean to mansplain but why don’t you just do it this way,” and I say, “Go fuck yourself,” I’ve seen it as mean but that me saying, “Go fuck yourself,” my overpower [inaudible] person’s offense. It’s more about me being angry and explosive than that person knowing that they’re going to mansplain and then doing it and just being able to live their life, while I’m angry on Instagram on the 4th of July.

JAMEY: But I think that being straightforward and telling people when they do something on immediately is really a kindness to them. If you’re a good person, you should know when you’re coming off as a jerk right away so you can stop doing it.

JENN: I think that being straightforward and communicative is ideal. As someone who’s known for being straightforward and very communicative, it definitely screwed me up sometimes in job situations and relationships and stuff like that because people are just not used to it. It’s a cultural thing, I think because I have friends who are so used to that who grew up in a similar way that I have.

I can’t teach everybody in the world how to communicate better or know so I try but that’s just something that I can deal. That’s why I say that I sort of grow in this industry learning how to interact with people that don’t know how to interact with people. I’m not dumbing down or sort of decreasing my social skills in order to be at the level of some people. I’m trying to teach them but it is very exhausting. It does lead to the consequence of some people thinking that I am very hard to work with and deal with but I’ll accept that because you can’t please everybody.

JAMEY: Can I ask a weird question?

JENN: Yes.

JAMEY: Because it would be like weird and silly question time. What’s the most bizarre mean thing someone ever said to you on Twitter?

JENN: The most bizarre mean thing?

JAMEY: Not the meanest thing but the weirdest mean thing.

JENN: I posted a selfie as I wanted to do and some guy responded to something and I forget what the conversation was but it ended up him saying, “Your eyes are awful like you are also awful.” I actually have it on my website, JennMoney.biz, in my bio. I have it opened now and I said, “My visual art has been described as ‘neon abstract pixel erotica’ and my tech satire has been described as ‘your eyes are awful, like you are also awful.'”

I get what he was trying to say that my eyes are asymmetrical with my eyelids and he said something like, “I look like I have crazy eyes and you must have seen some shit.” I don’t know what I responded to but it wasn’t mean and he just said, “Your eyes are awful, like you are also awful.” It was very poetic and I loved it. It was heartless to me at that point. I think that he was just uses it as a defense mechanism and just turn it into a joke.

JAMEY: I think putting it in your bio is a pretty good shield.

JENN: Yeah. I also know that my eyes aren’t awful and I’m not awful. I mean my eyesight is awful but I don’t think he was talking about my eyesight.

JAMEY: Maybe he was secretly your optometrist.

JENN: Getting a postcard in the mail and like, “It’s been a while. Your eyes are awful. You are also awful.” [inaudible] Dr Wong in the next two weeks through your checkup. Shouts out to my optometrist, Dr Wong.

JESSICA K: And Jenn you had a point there about how you can take it as hilarious because you do know you’re not awful and that’s another thing that we can do for each other in our community is to remind each other that we’re not awful because once in a while, it gets hard to remember.

JENN: Yeah and there are times that we do feel we’re awful. I have times where I feel like, maybe I am awful. If I heard that at that time, it probably we would have had a greater impact, which is why we all can do a lot better with the words that we use because you’ll never know what situation someone is going to end up in or someone is going through when they’re being mean online. Empathy is required for both the offenders and the offended, I believe.

JESSICA K: Yeah, because usually, whenever somebody says something negative to me, I try to remember that that is coming out of their context and their day and whatever the heck ran over their foot this morning, it’s usually much more about them than me. When somebody says something positive, I’m like, “That’s on me.”

JENN: Oh, yeah for sure. No one stop telling me how awesome you think I am. I mean, don’t stop.

JESSICA L: Whenever I see people just generically shit posting JavaScript, I know it’s because they really are insecure and I don’t get as mad as I could get. Maybe that’s bad to say. That’s the point I got to because I haven’t been in tech for a long time. I switched career in 2012, I started working fulltime in 2013 but I knew JavaScript and worked at a giant Ruby shop and people were always talking smack again. JavaScript, it’s just like, it was so cool to just talk about how bad JavaScript was. After years of that, I just really came to realize people were just insecure. Not that it’s an excuse and that’s the whole point of this talk. It shouldn’t be cool to shit talk other things but now, I just feel like I see [inaudible] through it.

JESSICA K: I really like it and it’s true because Ruby takes a lot of shit from people who believe in static typing.

JAMEY: This was in real life. This wasn’t on Twitter but someone was like, “Oh, what do you do?” and I was like, “I’m in tech.” Then, “What language do you have?” I said, “Ruby,” and they’re like, “Oh, so you’re not a real programmer, then.”

JESSICA K: Oh, my God and I’m sorry. Writing Ruby is way harder than writing some other languages.

JAMEY: And I was just like, “What?” And he was like, “It’s not a scripting language.” This is like a Twitter interaction happening to my face. It was so disconcerting to me that someone would say that right to my face.

JESSICA K: It’s like that display of judgment is a display of ignorance because if we really understood the purpose and context of something, then we wouldn’t see it so shallowly.

JESSICA L: If that person probably heard somebody else, insecurely joke that Ruby wasn’t a real programming language so it’s learned behavior that is just getting perpetuated.

JAMEY: And I think the more absurd someone says something to me, it’s the less likely it is to upset me. If someone comes on and says, “I think you’re a freak,” I get all mad. I’m not but if someone comes on and says, “You’re not a real programmer because you write Ruby.” I can just be like, “You don’t know anything about me, obviously.” I feel like it’s easier to be like, I don’t need this person’s approval because I don’t care about them when they’re being absurd like that. Do you experience the same thing?

JESSICA K: Yeah. It’s the awful eyes thing. I mean really, what do you know about Jenn’s eyes? Unless you are her optometrist, in which case it might actually hurt.

JENN: My eyes are in excellent health. My prescription hasn’t changed in three years. I go regularly.

JESSICA K: One tradition that we have here at Greater Than code is reflections wherein everybody in the call name something that they found particularly interesting or that they’re going to think about more or maybe a call-to-action for them. Who wants to reflect?

JESSICA L: I’ll reflect.

JESSICA K: Reflect.

JESSICA L: It’s really this reiterating this thing that keep pinging in my head about our hero worship of individual contributor and thinking their value is in the code and I just want to reiterate that it’s the only one thing you can do with code and you’re not very valuable, that you are way more evolve and valuable if you can work with humans and write code.

JENN: I guess my reflection is along those lines that we all, even myself have to not only accept that the industry means that we have to actively be learning languages, language features and frameworks and stuff like that. You have to be actively learning how to interact with people in the industry and people potentially entering the industry. It’s intense and there’s a lot to do which gives warranty to how we make so much money in doing it because it’s a very multifaceted industry and very public-facing.

We also have to recognize that there are people who are not visible online and who are engineers but there are like finance companies or something like that and they might not have the support system or the close friends in the industry that we have and I have to continually remember those people when I am, either writing talks or talking to people on Twitter and knowing that they’re watching and learning how to interact with people through me.

I forgot who said, “I never asked to be a role model.” I think it might have been Rihanna at some point. But in this industry, being a woman, you’re seen as a role model by default and also seen as the representation of all women, that’s something we can try to combat but it’s a thing that exists. Constantly thinking about that as well. It’s a lot of things to think about all at once. I think that’s why we burn out so easily.

JAMEY: I want to reflect about something a little bit smaller that got mentioned briefly, which was Jenn mentioned how she would message her friends about people who were mean to her on the internet. I think this idea of being upset offline, instead of online has something to me because if you’re upset offline, not only are you not putting your upset-ness and your negative feelings out into the void always for everyone to see forever because nothing ever gets deleted off the internet.

But also I feel having an offline in-person support network. I think it’s healthier in many ways to deal with that kind of stuff emotionally offline and in-person. I think there’s a lot of benefits to that and I’m going to try to remember that next time I get upset about something on the internet.

JESSICA K: Nice. That relates to my reflection. Coraline is not here today on the panel because this morning, she posted her story about her year working at GitHub and how that ended — tl;dr — they talk a lot of values but did not exhibit them and Coraline was like, “I have to take a day off to just deal with the blowback because I know I’m going to get a lot of blowback from that post.”

This is the kind of industry we live in, where she tells her story. She’s going to take some shit for it but there’s going to be plenty of us who say, “Coraline, you were great. Thank you for posting this. I think you were right,” and the converse of Jamey’s excellent point about when you’re mad approach it offline, I have the instinct to tell Coraline privately that I think she’s great, I agree with her post. I should tell her that publicly. Something we can all do is when you want to tell somebody, “They’re awesome,” and your instinct is to tell them that privately, posted on Twitter. Make it normal for us to tell each other that we’re awesome.

The same with responding to meanness with proportionate response, when somebody posts something that’s not cool, be like, “Dude, that’s not cool,” in public so that other people realize that it’s okay to police meanness so that we can all be nicer.

JAMEY: I think you’re all really awesome and cool.

JESSICA K: Yay!

JENN: You are all awesome.

JESSICA K: You are cool too.

JESSICA L: You are also awesome.

MANDY: I just think, everyone should just be fucking nice.

JESSICA K: Right. That’s a great reflection. Jess, Jenn, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

JESSICA L: Yeah, thank you.

JENN: Yeah, thank you for inviting us.

JAMEY: It’s really awesome getting to chat with you.

JESSICA K: Hooray for Greater Than Code #40!

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Episode 039: The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman

Mandy Moore — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 05:00:13 +0000

Panelists:

Jessica Kerr | Astrid Countee

Guest Starring:

Scott Hanselman: @shanselman | hanselman.com

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “Hanselminutes!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”

00:57 – Origin Story and Superpowers; Struggling and Prevailing

“The struggle is part of the journey.” – Scott Hanselman

13:51 – Systems Thinking, Problem Solving, and Instilling Those Values on Kids

19:11 – There is Value in Suffering

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

21:39 – Being a Teacher Over a Programmer; Ideas of Mediocrity, 10x Engineering, and Comparison to Others

We RISE Women in Tech Conference

Jessica Kerr: Hyperproductive development

Amanda Palmer: oh Lorde, deliver me from Fucking Joan.

36:28 – Being Nice Online

Scott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (1)

Scott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (2)

Scott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (3)

Scott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (4)

42:29 – Teaching (Cont’d)

Scott Hanselman: The Social Developer @ NexTech Africa 2017

Awesomely Luvvie

Reflections:

Scott: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Jessica: This show’s Slack community!

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and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon!

Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

Astrid: Looking for others to show you the way rather than assuming you know the way.

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

ASTRID: Welcome, everybody to our today in Hanselminutes. I’m here with my great friend, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Thank you, Astrid. I know this looks a lot like Hanselminutes because we have Scott Hanselman on the show but in fact, this show is called Greater Than Code.

ASTRID: I’m glad that somebody remembered that.

JESSICA: Today, we have Scott Hanselman and Scott Hanselman is a podcaster extraordinaire. He has recorded over 500 podcasts and he actually shows up to his own show every week.

SCOTT: Yeah, 585 shows every Thursday for… I don’t know, 12 years.

JESSICA: Twelve years. That’s amazing.

SCOTT: Yeah, it’s a marathon.

ASTRID: Scott, would you like to start the show with origin stories? Can you start with the very, very beginning of how you got started and work all the way up to what you’re doing now.

SCOTT: Oh, wow. That’s a long time. You got 40 years?

ASTRID: Well, you can just like focus on your superpower.

JESSICA: Yeah. What’s your superpower and how did you acquire it?

SCOTT: I think that I finally figured out after all these years that I am probably a teacher and not a software engineer. I was getting into trouble when I was 10 or 11, doing things I wasn’t supposed to be doing. There was a meeting at the school — back in the day, do you remember when teachers had time to do meetings like that — about what are we going to do with this child and they said that they would loan me the computer. It was ‘the’ computer because we didn’t have one per room or one per kid. There was just one computer.

On Friday nights, my dad would take his pickup truck and he would back it up to the building and we would steal the computer. It was one of those wink-wink, nudge-nudge things because if they did it for me, they have to do it for everybody. Then as long as I had the computer back by Sunday at 5PM, then it would be cool and we could have it set up for school on Monday. That kept me off the street away from the bad kids I wasn’t supposed to be hanging out with because we had a gang problem in my neighborhood and I was making fake IDs.

JESSICA: And that was before you had a 3D printer.

SCOTT: I was voted most likely to be convicted of a white collar crime. I would have been a gangster but I wouldn’t have been the gangster’s accountant.

[Laughter]

SCOTT: The point is that if a teacher hadn’t decided to loan me this Apple II, I would have been like the parrot from Aladdin. I would have actually been Jafar but I would have definitely been Gilbert Gottfried. Then after a couple of months of that, it was clear that I had some ability with computers. Then one day, I got home and my dad’s van was gone. I was walking up an empty driveway and I was like, “Oh, crap. What’s going on?” They had sold the van and bought a Commodore 64.

Then it became a problem of not getting me outside like I wouldn’t leave the house. They had to build in a ratio for a house where for every one hour inside, I had to be outside for an hour, then I would be on the computer for an hour and then they would push me out the door and I have to sit on the porch in the sunshine for an hour until they would let me in again.

ASTRID: Wow. Where that first early obsession with computers come from?

SCOTT: I don’t know because there’s no background. No one in my family had done any college education. My mom was a zookeeper. My dad was a fireman who drove an oil truck so there was no STEM background or science. My brother is a fireman. My grandmother was a nurse. There is no context for it so I think I just came out this way. I don’t know why. I will say to my dad took stuff apart. One of our family hobbies was going to the dump. I don’t know, I was taught this was a thing people did, apparently it’s not.

JESSICA: But now, it’s good though, right?

SCOTT: Well, I don’t go now because I don’t want to get dirty but going to the dump was a weekend thing. People dump stuff there and like, “Why would you not?” I remember one of my best memories of my dad, like a classic my dad thing is we went to the dump and somebody like three cars down was throwing out a barbecue. My dad was like, “Stop! What are you doing? That’s a perfectly good barbecue,” and then he has to convince the people at the dump to let him take it out because it’s supposed to be a one-way thing. You’re not supposed to take stuff out of the dump.

He took that barbecue off that guy’s truck and took it home and then sandblasted it and painted it and we ate on it that night. That frugalness, I think it’s a very Scottish thing. Our family is a Scottish. Last name, Hanselman is German name but we’re all Cormac’s and Lawson’s from Carnoustie, Scotland. Our family gatherings are bagpipes and kilts and it’s very Scottish. The Scottish people are notoriously cheap. Amongst my uncles, there’s this, “You’ll never catch a cold from a Scot because a Scotsman doesn’t gives anything away.”

[Laughter]

SCOTT: We were cheap, cheap, cheap people. Now, it’s Goodwill for me but junkyard trips and being generally frugal, which is cool because my wife is super cheap.

JESSICA: You’re compatible that way.

SCOTT: Everything she has is Goodwill and what’s cool is that she wears really bright colors and she can find those outfits that no one else could pull off and she gets them all at Goodwill. She’s like, “I just got all these compliments at work and this outfit cost me $6.” That’s us. Our first conversation always starts with like, “How much that cost?” This was only $5 and let me tell you why because it’s the hunt as much as it is the capturing.

Fast forward, I became a software engineer because I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t hack it at college. After a bunch of college visits, I ended up going to Portland Community College and it took me 11 years to graduate. I graduated in 2003 but I started in 1992.

ASTRID: What did you study at community college?

SCOTT: It was the first year that Portland Community College had software engineering and they were juxtaposing it and they made a big deal out of it. This is a big deal because there was a feud between the computer science department and the software engineering department, because each one thought that they were the one true religion and the juxtaposition that they made was that software engineering is the practice of making software, which they didn’t believe was being taught in schools, while computer science was teaching everybody Compiler Theory and a bunch of stuff that ultimately didn’t help them ship.

JESSICA: It makes sense.

SCOTT: I was the first year of the software engineering group.

JESSICA: And also in the next 10 years.

SCOTT: And then I did two years and was working at night. My first job was doing Visual Basic. I was making $10 an hour. I remember the negotiation process as I made $12. I was sitting in a Subway sandwich shop and I was like, “I’m doing really good work and I learned how to call C Code from Visual Basic and you should pay me two more dollars an hour.” I can remember that negotiation process. Then, I started to feel bad that I had never done my four-year degree. My wife has several degrees. She’s got three or four degrees.

I’m looking up at the wall here because there are all my wife’s degrees. She’s got a master’s degree and she went back to school and became a nurse. I just wanted to get another degree — not another degree — I want to get ‘a’ degree. I want to finish a four-year degree. I want to finish. I want to be done. She supported me by letting me go to school at night and I did that for six or seven years until I got a call that my credit was expiring because after seven years, your 101 classes and all that stuff, that falls off the other end because you’re going to have to finish your four-year degree in seven years.

I made a deal with the dean that if I taught classes at the college, they would waive that. I was teaching C# and testing while I was simultaneously taking classes and then finally, I finished in 2003. I’ve been doing software for 25 years but I only got my degree a little bit ago.

JESSICA: So you were both teaching and taking classes in addition to working?

SCOTT: Yeah. It was basically like 8AM to 10PM every night for six years or seven years. But you got to that. You’ve got to. The struggle is part of the journey.

ASTRID: That’s true.

SCOTT: I’m not trying to disrespect other people’s journeys but I’m happy with my journey because that means the catering jobs and the short order cook jobs and those things matter. I, sometimes get a little frustrated when I see other people’s journeys where it’s like their feet never touch the ground and they went straight from their parent’s minivan to Stanford to a job. I’m like, “That’s fine.” That’s their journey.” They didn’t control their journey necessarily but at the same time, there’s character in sifting through a dump. One of my jobs was making salsa in a 50-gallon garbage can. I had to put on these big rubber things and clean and mix the salsa. When you have jalapenos juice squirting in your eyes and you’ve got rubber gloves on and you’re trying not to get your hair on the salsa, that’s —

[Laughter]

SCOTT: Right there. Again, no disrespect if whoever’s listening, your feet never touch the ground, that’s fine but at the same time, I don’t want my kids to float right into ‘$100,000 a year job.’

ASTRID: I think you’re making a really good point, Scott about some people. They have a much more smooth transition but some people have to struggle and really, really pushed for some of the thing and that becomes a part of who you are and it becomes a part of why you do what you do. That story doesn’t always get told.

SCOTT: Right and I find also that in this time where we want to be more inclusive and get more people into technology, it is sometimes problematic but also sometimes useful when a cisgender straight white guys says, “I had struggled too.” The trick is not to make it about comparisons and not to try to make it about the oppression Olympics because one shouldn’t use their come up as a justification to be mean to somebody or as a way to juxtapose, “What do you think you had? Difficulties as a black woman? Let me tell you about the time I…” It’s not the oppression Olympics.

This was my story. This is my struggle but while there were financial issues, one of the things that’s worth pointing out about the degree thing is that no one really needed me to get the four-year degree. People always say, “Why do you need to do it?” You were already 10 years into the industry. It was for me. I have women and people of color on my team who are still getting questioned about their degree and where they went to school even though there are years in. You her what I’m saying?

JESSICA: So you had that option?

SCOTT: I had an option. I would argue that I did not need to go back and finish the degree because no one has ever asked me about my degree in the last 20 years of the 25 I’ve been doing software. I know that there are people who are getting asked about their degree even now. I think that’s why for some people, getting a degree at a Northwestern or at a fancy school matters more. I don’t think I would even need to put my degree on my resume now that I have so many years in the biz. That I think is a privilege that I have.

JESSICA: As a teacher, it makes a difference that you have a journey that wasn’t smooth, that has some jaggedness in it that other people can relate to.

SCOTT: One of the things I try to explain to my kids who are black — they are mixed but they’re young black men — is that they are going to have different struggles than I did. They won’t have the financial struggles. I like to say to my sons that their crown was paid for and they just need to put it on, to give them a sense of what has been done for them versus what hasn’t. There’s a lot of reminders of what you have.

We went to dinner yesterday and they were complaining about the food. My wife and I, still have — and we’re married for 20 years — issues about food security. When we’re sitting around, we’re thinking about our blessings. You have those moments. Those quiet, calm moments where you’re just like, “Oh, man. We’re just really lucky. There’s food in the house.” I was reminiscing with someone when I was in Atlanta a couple days ago and we’re talking about like who had the most [inaudible] dinners. We used to have eggs and oranges.

“What do we have in dinner?” Well, I got some eggs and we had some oranges. Maybe we have some bread. Twenty-five, 30 years, 40 years later, we still think about those things. When you say that to people they’re like, “Oh, you’re just being falsely humble. You’re just being silly.” No, that will mess you up.

JESSICA: That stuff is part of you.

SCOTT: Then, when the nine-year old is like, “Oh, Indian food again?” You are welcome, sir!

“I don’t want to eat this.” Well, then you don’t have to eat. You’re old enough to go to bed without a meal.

“Well, you can’t send me to bed without a meal.” I didn’t say that. Food is here. You choose not to eat it. Step off.

“I want to go home and I’m going to eat something.” No, you eat this or you go to sleep. You have to have an appreciation of like, “Wow, do you think these chickens slaughter themselves? That this spices were shipped here?” And this is where comes into systems thinking, “Think about the systems that were in place from the people who made the stove, to the people who killed the chicken, to the people who brought this spices from India to make this meal that you’re complaining about.

JESSICA: Does that help?

SCOTT: It does. It actually is two-fold. One it makes them realize that food doesn’t make itself. That’s why we have a garden. We go to my brother’s farm so that they understand that nothing is simply granted to you. Someone is digging that potato up. While you complain about the fries, let’s think about the person who doesn’t have health insurance because they’re digging potatoes. Then it helps them think about systems thinking, which I think is more important than coding, which a little bit of an orthogonal conversation but an interesting one, to debug a system. One needs to realize that there is in fact a system.

Toaster doesn’t work. The entitled child is like, “Toaster is broken. Blech! Let’s buy a new toaster.” The systems thinking child is going to think about, “Is it electricity? Is it the knob? Is it the outlet? Is it the fuse? Is it the ground fault interrupters?” Think about all the systems that are there to make the toaster turn on and that turns into these really interesting science conversations that will go on for an hour in our house because the toaster didn’t work.

JESSICA: My reaction would be, “I could use the oven or the stove,” and that’s also systems thinking because if the electricity is out, then the oven is not an option.

SCOTT: I heard what you’re saying. I think we agree though, right?

JESSICA: Yeah. Also, I think systems thinking is both the biggest thing that we’re coming to in code and that helps us more than anything with creating software systems. It’s also a fascinating thing that’s coming out of code because we finally have the opportunity to really study systems because we can change them so fast. My secret hope — well, it’s not very secret — is the software industry can change the world by teaching all of us more about systems thinking.

SCOTT: I think that those are very reasonable thing to hope for. I think that we need to catch the kids before they’re 10 because after having now raised two kids up to 11, I realized that a 10-year head start is an eternity. You can’t snatch a 20-year old out of school in a trade and make them the same developer. You could make them developers, put them in a bootcamp but they will be different people with different paths. It’s hard to teach systems thinking if one has spent 20 years of their life, not thinking about systems. Bootcamps will teach you ‘for’ loops and syntax but you’ll always be a little bit behind, unless it’s naturally coming to you. My kids can’t code. It’s too early. I keep them off the computer as much as possible.

JESSICA: But they can problem solve.

SCOTT: They can problem solve. There are systems thinking. I have conversations with my nine-year old because we listen to a podcast in the car, listen to Marketplace which is his favorite podcast. He will talk to you about currency fluctuations and how the dollar here goes against South African Rand and stuff like that and why those things matter but I couldn’t write ‘for’ loops to save his life. I would argue that they can pick up the syntax at some point but you have to get systems thinking early. We need to teach systems thinking at first grade and second grade.

ASTRID: I really like the focus on the systems thinking and the problem solving because I think it is way more inclusive. I think there is a lot of people who are very intimidated by the idea of trying to learn how to code but they are solving problems and making decisions all the time and I don’t think that they realize that those things are related. They think they’re very separate things and they don’t see that if they can bring them together, it’s a very powerful thing.

SCOTT: Well said, and they’re not giving themselves credit for that as well.

ASTRID: This reminds me when I was young and I didn’t know as a kid that what my parents said was like work or important was different than my play, which I thought was also really important. I didn’t understand why I would get in trouble for being loud.

JESSICA: Yeah, play is important but it can go to the other room.

ASTRID: Well to me it was like adults who were just getting to play at stuff that I didn’t get to play at like stuff I wanted. I used to have an obsession with getting mail, like I really wanted mail.

JESSICA: Oh, I remember those days.

ASTRID: Because I wanted somebody out in the world know I existed and want to talk to me and my parents would be like, “You don’t want mail because that was mostly bills,” but I didn’t know that.

JESSICA: Right. They want to tax you to get your money.

[Laughter]

ASTRID: I wanted money too.

SCOTT: Yeah, we made them little accounts that we put $5 in every month just so they get mail that shows their money is growing.

ASTRID: That’s so cool.

JESSICA: So you made the bank spend the money to save it for $5?

SCOTT: Again, it’s systems thinking. They don’t do home-ec anymore so how does someone going to learn how to balance a checkbook if they never seen a checkbook? Then someone might say, “Oh, I don’t need checks.” How do you manage your money? You started to think about it on a ledger, which is interesting.

Here’s an interesting question. I believe that there’s some value in suffering. Sometimes trite, sometimes manufactured. But mine are suffering and then you lift them above it. That might mean teaching someone see before you teach them Java, make them allocate their own memory and they go, “Ah, don’t worry about that.”

JESSICA: And that’s antifragile, right? Antifragile is a book by Nassim Taleb and the concept is something is antifragile if a little bit of stress makes it stronger.

SCOTT: That is now my favorite thing and I’m going to talk about it all the time and take full credit for it.

[Laughter]

SCOTT: Antifragile, I’m going to pick that up. That’s a really good idea. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I like it.

JESSICA: Right, but like you said, if it’s too much stress then that can damage a person or turn them off from ever trying.

SCOTT: Which is interesting. When I said before that maybe the kids won’t eat tonight, that’s not appropriate for a three-year old or a five-year old. But if a twelve-year old willfully refuses to eat the meal because they find it offensive, when it’s clearly not, missing one meal is not abuse. It is parenting.

JESSICA: Right, the three or five-year old is still unable to calm their emotions enough to really see the option of eating or not.

SCOTT: And they aren’t given the option. You don’t send a three-year old away. Well the twelve-year old it’s like, “Here’s the food. Finish it but there won’t be any food later.” That’s the trick. Sometimes the kids are like, “Oh, I’ll just eat oranges,” and I can work the system. No, you don’t eat the whole plate but eat until you’re done but here’s the food. It’s good food. I like that, antifragile. Thank you.

JESSICA: You’re welcome. My kids, they would totally get away with fixing themselves dinner later because I don’t care what they do if they do it themselves and don’t ask me to make the food.

SCOTT: I try to make things collaborative. We make our dinners together and I try to get them to make it with us.

JESSICA: You are a better parent than I am.

SCOTT: Well, I think I may just not have been broken yet but maybe in the next year or two. I think that at some point, I’m getting to that like, “Guys, just go to bed!” You know, that level of frustration which is born after 10 or 15 years of childbearing is why by the time they’re 20, it’s like, “Just get out of my house.”

JESSICA: You talked about your software development career but you said you’re actually a teacher.

SCOTT: Oh, yeah. There’s this ridiculous kind of myth of the 10X programmer and the myth of the rockstar programmer and just because I happen to start a blog 20 years ago and it’s still happening and just because I started up the podcast 12 years ago, because I am still here, people somehow ascribe longevity to, “Oh, Hanselman is an amazing programmer.” I’m a perfectly competent average programmer. I may be a B+ programmer. Being loud isn’t necessarily being a good programmer.

When I meet people who are like, “Oh, my goodness, your blog. Your podcast. You’re such an amazing programmer.” Well, you have me right up until the programmer part but you have no actual proof of my skill. You are ascribing those attributes to me because of my visibility. There’s all kinds of amazing athletes who have tons of money but it doesn’t mean that they’re experts in finance. You must have a lot of money. You must be really good at finance because you have all this money. No, those things are unrelated. Correlation doesn’t equal causality. Then I finally figured out the issue is that I have a blog and the podcast because I just am overflowing with enthusiasm for certain topics to the point where I have to tell people that sounds more like a teacher than a programmer. I decided that that’s what I am.

JESSICA: Do you think that teaching talent makes you more valuable on a team?

SCOTT: It is, also because when you have an argument on a team, when you’re trying to —

JESSICA: Consensus?

SCOTT: Yeah, consensus building. Like you want to create tension, create lowercase A arguments and then bring everyone together in the scope of the 45-minute class. “That is an interesting question but that’s against what little Johnny just said so Anna, why don’t you back up your –” and then you [inaudible] them against each other, again in a gentle and safe place where they think they’re having an argument but you ultimately know the direction of the class that is going to go. “Oh, we’ve all learned a lot so it turns out you all were closer in your opinions than we thought,” and then we all be friends. That’s what we have been doing in team designing features for the last 20 years.

JESSICA: So do you wind up moderating these discussions?

SCOTT: If there’s one thing I’m good at is panel moderation and I say that, as someone with impostor syndrome who is just now learning to say that I’m good at certain things.

JESSICA: Oh, good job.

SCOTT: Seriously. This is a big deal. The last 500 episodes of my podcast, the last 85 have been pretty awesome. At the last 85, I feel pretty good about it. Just being able to say that my podcast is a good podcast has taken me 20 years of emotional… I don’t know. I know what I’m good at and that’s a little bit important to be able to accept that. Yeah, I am good at that.

JESSICA: You clearly don’t get your validation externally. You got your degree for your own purposes and it took a while for you to decide that your podcast was [inaudible]. Everybody else was —

SCOTT: I need to lie down on the therapy couch here. You’re reading my life here.

JESSICA: That’s a lot of podcasts and I know people tell you all the time that your podcast are awesome and you get invited to keynote all the conferences and you do a great job of that, by the way.

SCOTT: If you ask anyone who knows me… Well look, okay let’s talk about this. I was at a conference last Thursday in Atlanta, a fantastic conference. You should go to next year it’s called WeRise.tech, ‘We Rise, Women in Tech in Atlanta.’ It’s a women’s conference and they asked me to give a little opening to one of the keynote panels and I freaking agonized about that. I want to be a good ally but I’m a man. I’m going to be the women’s conference, how can I be the best male that I can be at the women’s conference.

I sat with my friend, Safia Abdalla, she’s been amazing. She’s Captain Safia on Twitter and she went over my slides and emotionally held me for two days as I agonized over this 10 minutes to introduce this panel. Afterwards of course, everyone’s is gushing that I went great and like, “You’re amazing,” or whatever and I talk to Safia, she’s on a come up right now. She’s 20 and she’s about to graduate from school. She gave an actual one-hour keynote and I was like, “And that’s what a freaking out before keynote looks like.” She’s like, “I had no idea that that’s what people did,” and I was like, “Everybody does that.” The amount of effort required to make something look effortless —

ASTRID: That’s a lot.

JESSICA: Yeah.

SCOTT: Immense. She’s like, “I didn’t know that you freak out.” I said, “I freak out every time because if you don’t, it’ll look half-assed. It’ll look like you half-assed it,” so I went through that whole thing. I double checked every joke. I double checked every clip art. I went through the whole thing, multiple times. We were looking for punctuation towards the end of this process together. The other thing is I didn’t do it alone and this is really important. I actually thanked her on Instagram as being my conference buddy because we were balancing that whole introvert-extrovert thing and was like, “Are we introvert? Are we extrovert?”

We skipped the lunches because it was just too much and then we went across the street and had tacos just to be elsewhere, to get our brains in the right way. I appreciated her ability to help me thread the needle at this conference as I tried to be a benefit as opposed to being a, “Why are you here?” And all of that comes from a place of insecurity that is ultimately driven by wanting to do the best that one can do. I know it’s a long answer but it’s the truth.

JESSICA: So the insecurity is also part of the journey?

SCOTT: I think that everyone has to feel a little bit in over their head. Treading water makes you a better swimmer. This gets to your antifragile thing, which I’m adopting as my thing now.

ASTRID: When you say the earlier that just because you do something a long time, it doesn’t make you really good at it. I understood what you were saying but then, as you’re talking about things like after your 500th episode of a podcast, it also feels like you wouldn’t have made it that far if you weren’t good so it’s hard to reconcile this idea that just because you’re doing it a long time, you’re not necessarily good.

SCOTT: Why couldn’t I just be mediocre for years?

ASTRID: Because I think mediocracy is more than just your one instance of ability. It will start to bring you down because you won’t have the other pieces that it takes in order to keep going past mistakes. A lot of what makes people become really great is because they make mistakes, they learn from those mistakes and they keep going. People who are more mediocre, they don’t keep going, which is why they don’t increase their abilities.

SCOTT: Well, I would say though that I’ve met some PhDs that were not very smart and I was shocked that this person got a PhD. I asked my wife how they did it and they said that no one ever told them to stop and sometimes getting an advanced degree just shows that you won’t give up, not that necessarily naturally talented. I always have this little pity thing that I talk about where, “Do you have 20 years’ experience or do you have the same year 20 times?”

ASTRID: Yes but I think there’s a difference between when you are basically being supported by an entire other entity. If you’re in a program like that, it’s not just you. It’s also all the people who are working with you who are on the line for that.

SCOTT: I see, who are supporting your mediocrity over time.

ASTRID: Yes.

SCOTT: Okay, I think through with blogs and with podcasts and stuff, one could just blindly host their own thing and just march forward.

JESSICA: But you wouldn’t have listeners.

ASTRID: Yeah.

SCOTT: I don’t know how many listeners I have. I don’t look at the stats. If I look at the stats, it’ll freak me out so I just don’t look at them. I haven’t thought about how many listeners I have.

ASTRID: Well, you don’t necessarily have to know how many listeners you have but the fact that they’re talking to you means that whatever you’re doing is enough for them to come out of their way to make sure about it.

SCOTT: But I only get two or three emails about the podcast a week so I don’t know how many people are listening. It’s the emails that tell me. Comments matter more than the views. You guys are trying to make me feel better about myself. It’s not going to work.

[Laughter]

ASTRID: Well, I was thinking what you said about how ridiculous it is, this concept of a 10X engineer. I was thinking about why that could be ridiculous. I think there’s this thing that we do, especially in America where we have this idea of a self-made man and you’re supposed to be super-intelligent and able to do everything all by yourself and the more you can do by yourself, the more like a hero you seem to become. But that’s not the truth about how we do things for real in this country.

Usually what happens is that a group of people who are not all like superheroes. This group of people who are little bit better than average do something incredible. That’s what normally happens but we kind of have this fairy tale about how this one person who has all these super abilities made the world changed.

SCOTT: It’s a true American myth. Walt Disney built Disney World by himself, with his own hands.

ASTRID: Yes, exactly. The 10X engineer thing that you think is ridiculous is because so what? You do that all by yourself. You can’t build a community around you, then it doesn’t really do anything.

SCOTT: I think that myth, though gets perpetuated when those people, in fact do exist. Linus is that good. He balance it out, of course because he’s a jerk. But then someone says, “That anecdote proves that there are 10X engineers.”

JESSICA: So there are? I could be the anti-Scott Hanselman here because I’ve heard a blog post about 10X engineer on Sunday and I can tell you that this morning it crossed 35,000 views.

ASTRID: What did you say, Jessica?

JESSICA: I said that absolutely 10X engineers exists. They’re the ones that know the code inside out and backwards and forwards, usually because they wrote it.

SCOTT: Oh, okay that’s different. You saying, TLDR says the productive development happens when one person knows the system intimately because they wrote it. That’s true and this is the brilliant part of her thing. This is in conflict with growing a system beyond what one person maintains. That’s very smart. A 10X engineer definitely exists if they’re working on their own software and they’re the only one that’s ever worked on it. That’s deep. I like it.

JESSICA: And it’s true and sometimes that’s useful in what you want. This doesn’t preclude the idea that some developers are 10 times more talented or whatever or have a larger working memory and can hold a larger system in their head. Personally, I like being a person who can figure out somebody else’s system because that’s way harder than [inaudible] development. That’s entertaining.

SCOTT: I guess my point is that it’s not healthy to chase the myth. Let’s rather than making declarative statements like it doesn’t exist. I think that they’re not as common as we think they are and it’s not a thing to go for. I’m going to toy real with you. I’m going to bring it down to be real. I’m a little pissed off that Ryan Reynolds has my career. From the time he was on Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Shop, I knew that that was my role. I was supposed to be famous and then he became Green Lantern and now he’s an A-level star and I’m just like, I’ve got like dead bod and I’m in Portland and I’m sad about that.

He is the 10X person and I am not and that’s fine and I can’t fixate on Ryan Reynolds, that jerk, who has my career. If one is absolutely like, “I’ve got to be hyper productive,” it’ll chew them up from the inside. Do you think that we should put them on pedestals or should we just accept that there are some occasional unicorns and we just let Ryan Reynolds live.

JESSICA: I think we should recognize that having a 10X developer holds the rest of the team back and it’s a tradeoff.

ASTRID: I agree.

SCOTT: I like it. Now, I have to destroy Ryan Reynolds.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: Okay. Did you tell me that Amanda Palmer post about Joan this week, about Fucking Joan?

SCOTT: No.

JESSICA: Okay, I will find this and link it. It’s about exactly what you’re talking about. It’s about that one person who is what you feel like you should be but of course, you’re comparing your insides to their outsides and they have their own problems. It’s just not about comparison. It’s a great post. I find myself experiencing this right now with you, Scott because you are a great podcast, you’re a speaker and keynoter and teacher and you’re a great parent and you’re super humble about it.

SCOTT: Thank you. I’m learning how to say thank you.

JESSICA: It’s like what my VP of Engineering, he’s one of the 10X developers on our team, told me today, he knows the system inside and out but I wrote a good blog post the other day.

[Laughter]

SCOTT: I’m not sure if that’s helpful.

JESSICA: Well, I’m pretty proud of my blog post because clearly, it gave people words for something they already knew.

SCOTT: That’s the formula right there for a good blog post. You crystallize what we all knew in our DNA.

JESSICA: Exactly. Everyone has experienced this. They’re like, “These are the words for it,” and like antifragile.

SCOTT: Yes, which totally change my life. I’m going to incorporate that into everything I do.

JESSICA: There you go. You have a new name, for something you already were. Now you can feel good about it.

ASTRID: I think the other thing about the whole 10X engineering concept is that it’s not replicable. You can’t just take a 10X engineer and put them with other engineers and make more 10X engineers. That doesn’t happen. It’s nice that you do have that they exist and they can do great things but they can’t grow themselves. Whereas somebody like you Scott, who’s a teacher, exactly what you do is you put you with other people and then you can make them better.

I think in the big picture, that’s way more important because it’s very hard to be able to take information, synthesize it, put it in a way that another person cannot only digest it but also can take it on as their own and then grow from there. That’s a really hard thing to do but that is the process of how you make new things. Not necessarily that one person who can do everything because the user cannot teach that skill.

JESSICA: Ten-X developer is still only plus 10 but a teacher is multiplicative.

ASTRID: Yeah.

SCOTT: I don’t like having to constantly justify being nice online. I’ve got into arguments with other engineers like, “Talk is cheap. Show me the code. I don’t need to be nice,” because I’m always emphasizing how important niceness is and they’re always saying, “Nice doesn’t compile.” Do you really want to go to work with a 10X who is mean? That’s the unicorn. Can we be 10X productive and also 10X nice? Why are those things not always connected?

JESSICA: Right, at Atomist we have three 10X’ers in different parts of the system and they are all as nice as can be and it’s fine. It a startup. It’s supposed to take risk and if Christian gets hit by a bus, it’ll be a long time before we can modify Rug CLI but we can take that risk and it doesn’t cost us much because he is super nice.

SCOTT: Did you know that I went viral for being nice last week?

ASTRID: That’s awesome.

SCOTT: No, it’s actually a thing. Take a look at this tweet and look at the numbers on them, on the likes and the retweets. As of the time of this recording, it has 83,000 retweets and 184,000 likes. This young woman name, Halima Aden from Somalia was on the cover of Allure in her hijab. This fella shows up and basically is mean saying, “You’re wearing a burka and you’re oppressing, blah-blah-blah-blah.” I replied — if you go to the next picture and I said, “Well, that’s silly. It was a hijab not a burka. Watch the video interview with her.” Literally, the entire video is her talking about her decision to put the hijab on.

Then the guy says, “Oh, well. I’m guilty as charged. I didn’t watch the video and I don’t know the difference between a burka and a hijab,” and then I said, “Thanks.” Then I provide a little context like, “Well, a burka is when you’re covered in black and a hijab is a headscarf. It’s quite fashionable,” and then someone else, a third party as with Twitter jumps in and says, “Well, actually no. A burka is not covered in black. It’s a cloak and covers the face, including the eyes and using a mesh through the face.”

I replied and I said, “Oh, thank you for the additional info. I’m sorry. I was trying to get the point across somewhat quickly,” and then the third person goes, “Oh, no worries. I was trying to clarify, just in case.” Then the tweet that went viral was, “I have never in my life seen an argument being settled so calmly and respectfully.” Think about what it says about our national discourse —

JESSICA: That is a remarkable Twitter exchange.

SCOTT: Scroll down. There’s picture that’s like [inaudible] gives the people crying. People settle this like two adults and then the other tweets around this tweet went viral like, “Are they Canadian?” and they were like, “They are not Canadians.” Then one of the people came through and said, “Oh, well actually I am Canadian.” Then the guys are like, “We have a Canadian. We repeat! We have one Canadian.”

This tweet has gone so viral that I sent a winky face to the guy who did the screen shots and that tweet has 1200 likes. It’s the craziest thing and all I did was not be crisp with someone on Twitter. What does that say about our worldwide discourse that simply not being a jerk online is 200,000 likes?

ASTRID: We’re starved for kindness.

SCOTT: We are and to pop it all the way off the stack, to what you were talking about before, I feel like that tweet is just a tweet and it’ll be forgotten next week but I feel like it validated the last 25 years of my experience online because I don’t give bio a permalink. There’s no URI that you can find where I’m being mean. I might be poking jokes at the Skype team or the Outlook team for making crash-y software but there’s no vindictive URL and you can say, “Look at Hanselman for being such a vindictive jerk.” I tell that to everyone that what you’ve got to do is be kind and do it for the long haul and it will come back to you eventually. My point is that people are like reading people online, reading them hard like, “Oh I wish –” and then they go off and those permalinks stay forever. They get screenshot.

JESSICA: So you have a point that one piece of meanness is forever whereas kindness pays off in the long haul.

SCOTT: My wife thinks that it gets us better parking spaces. We call it parking karma. I have, amongst my many privileges, the most amazing parking karma that you will ever see and this isn’t a one-time thing. This is driving into a concert five minutes before it starts, just as someone’s backing out and I’m three slots from the first parking row. Every single time, my wife just goes, “I have no idea how this possible.”

JESSICA: So you can find a parking space in San Francisco?

SCOTT: I can find a parking space anywhere and I can do it in 10 minutes. I told her, I think it’s because we’re nice and we’ve been doing it. Now, I live in fear of not being nice because I don’t want to lose my parking karma because it’s really —

[Laughter]

JESSICA: Fear is also part of the training.

SCOTT: Exactly. Everybody else is afraid like, “I must be nice or I’ll go to hell.” No, I really need my parking karma.

JESSICA: So how is top of the parking garage?

SCOTT: I have never seen the top of the parking garage because I park —

[Laughter]

ASTRID: Thank you, Jessica. That’s how nice he is.

JESSICA: I do the opposite. I go straight to the top of the parking garage.

SCOTT: And I’m worried that it’s going to collapse. I guess, you’ll just surf your way down when it collapses.

JESSICA: I’ll get some exercise on the way down. That’s my theory. You said that you’re a teacher, you teach with your podcast, you teach on your team, you team at conferences, what’s your favorite thing that you’ve ever taught.

SCOTT: I like life lesson type stuff more than teaching software. At the conference last week, I did a whole thing on personal branding and I localized it to women and ran it by a bunch of women to make sure that it wasn’t garbage. It’s the idea of how could I be successful and visible while still being safe online. I really enjoyed that. It used to be called like personal branding or personal marketing but more, it’s just like maintaining your online resume as a software developer. The talk is called the Social Developer.

I really like that because I always open it up to questions and then it makes it better talk. My blog is okay but my comments are great. I curate my comments very much and the commenters on my blog are better than my blog. They don’t even realize it but they’re what makes the blog go, like my friend Luvvie has this blog Luvvie.com but the LuvvNation, which is all of her followers are as funny or interesting as her blog because she has cultivated that.

Having a good talk, where you talk at people is one thing. I like talking to groups of 50 people and then having it devolve into me moderating a talk show, where all of the people do that. When I gave my talk on the Social Developer, I keep in mind that I’m in a women’s conference, I come out and I said, “Hey, I’m Scott. I want to give this talk on being a Social Developer online,” and I realize that there’s a certain irony where there’s 50 women here at a women’s conference and I happen to be a man. By nature of the fact that this is a conference where I’m presenting, I am going to basically mansplaining here for an hour and how can we make that a positive experience for you.

I say, “What you can do is you can interrupt me. If anything I say doesn’t fit your experience, interrupt and let’s have that conversation.” I think, I got 10 or 15 minutes into my talk until someone said, “Well, I don’t think that’s really true,” and that was moderated and they were kind because I had set them up for kindness and it was amazing. It ended up going 90 minutes and it was only a 60-minute talk. They wouldn’t leave and we eventually got kicked out of the room. It felt like we all had an experience together.

I’m patting myself on the back a little bit. I don’t want my cape to get too heavy but I feel like I set up a safe space, I told them it was okay to interrupt me and that defuse the whole ‘dude in the space’ issue and the result was my talk was multiplied by their input. It wasn’t a whole series of each of us, ‘well, actually-ing’ each other. They could have done that. It could have been like, I’m going to make a bunch of declarative statements and a bunch of people the audience are going to be like, “Well, actually…” which hurts in any direction but instead it was, “Here is my experience online. Here are the things that you need to do. Here are the things that women I’ve talked to have said about their experiences online on what you need to do to be safe,” and a couple of people are like, “Well, that wasn’t my experience.”

Their experience is valid so then the question is, “How many experiences can we get out in the scope of the talk, such that people can go and make their own decision?” That’s the great thing about advice. You don’t have to take it and it was great.

JESSICA: You don’t have to go to bed without dinner if you don’t —

SCOTT: You don’t have to go to bed without dinner, look at you. That was brilliant. Doing talks like that about life talks, productivity talks, helping people explore, how they found success and leading them toward success are kind of like a less slimy Tony Robbins. Those are the things I like doing: my talks in productivity, my talks on personal branding, my talks on team building are more fun than my talks on coding.

JESSICA: Because they are Greater Than Code.

ASTRID: That was awesome.

SCOTT: That was a best tweet. Stop right away.

JESSICA: So Scott, we usually end our show with reflections, where each of the three of us gets to say what it was about the show that they’re going to takeaway and think about or preferences or points of action.

SCOTT: Yeah, anti-fragile was my takeaway. I’m going to go read the book.

JESSICA: Cool. I have one from just a last few minutes. Scott was talking the community of comments on his blog. My favorite thing about this podcast, as much as I love the podcast, I love the Slack community. We have a Slack community where everyone who donate any amount to our Patreon gets an invitation to the Slack and people in there are just so nice.

ASTRID: And they have interesting conversations. They help each other out. It’s just nice to watch. My takeaway is I really like the approach that you’ve taken to how you built your career, Scott. I really like the way that you tend to look around you, for others to show you the way, as opposed to assuming that you know the way, which I think makes people want to follow you. I like that there’s a certain kind of completeness to that.

SCOTT: I appreciate that. Thank you. That is a very nice compliment and I think it’s one, unlike compliments that make you feel awkward and uncomfortable, I think I will own that compliment and I thank you for it.

ASTRID: Yay!

JESSICA: Awesome. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much.

SCOTT: Thank you. This was cool.

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Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng

Mandy Moore — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 05:00:38 +0000

Panelists:

Coraline Ada Ehmke | Rein Henrichs | Jessica Kerr

Guest Starring:

Dr. Eugenia Cheng: @DrEugeniaCheng | eugeniacheng.com

Show Notes:

00:16 – Welcome to “Shopping is Hard; Let’s Do Math!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”; Eugenia’s Introduction

Books:

How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics

Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics

YouTube Channels:

TheCatsters

TheMathsters

Articles:

Eugenia Cheng Makes Math a Piece of Cake

Everyday Math

Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
and bring us to conferences near you?
Support us via Patreon

Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.

01:54 – Getting Into Math: Is math useful? Is that the point?

A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart

20:17 – Category Theory

Textbooks:

Categories for the Working Mathematician

Category Theory (Oxford Logic Guides)

Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories

38:17 – Changing the Terminology Around Gender to Focus on Character Traits Instead: Congressive and Ingressive Behavior

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Are you Greater Than Code?
Submit guest blog posts to mandy@greaterthancode.com

Please leave us a review on iTunes!

Transcript:

REIN: Hi, I’m Rein Henrichs. This is Episode 38 of ‘Shopping is Hard. Let’s Do Math.’ I am here with the wonderful Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Good morning, Rein. Shopping is hard but this show is called Greater Than Code and I’m thrilled to be here today with Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Good morning everybody. We have an amazing guest with us today and I know I say that every time but this time I really, really mean it. We have Dr Eugenia Cheng, who is a scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She won tenure in pure mathematics at the University of Sheffield in the UK, where she is now an honorary fellow. She previously taught at universities of Cambridge, Chicago and Nice and holds a PhD in pure mathematics in the University of Cambridge.

Alongside her research in category theory and undergraduate teaching, her aim is to rid the world of math phobia. Her first popular math book, How to Bake Pi was published by Basic Books in 2015, the widespread acclaim, including from New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American and she was interviewed around the world, including on the BBC, NPR and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and I have to confess I watched that clip today.

Eugenia was an early pioneer of math on YouTube and her videos been viewed over a million times to date. Her next popular math book, Beyond Infinity will be published this year. Eugenia is also a math columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a concert pianist and founder of the Liederstube. Eugenia, it sounds like you’re a big slacker.

EUGENIA: Yeah. I’m really lazy. I never do anything.

CORALINE: Your work with math has got some slight attention of some form, what got you interested in math at the beginning? Were you one of those kids who is just like really, really in a math your whole life?

EUGENIA: I was really into lots of things my whole life and it wasn’t like I just sat around doing math the entire time. I was not the kind of kid who just read math books. But my mother really got me into thinking cool things and she showed me the coolest stuff about math, just as part of life. The whole time it wasn’t like, “Now, we’re going to sit down and do math and then we’re going to go and play.” It was always there so I never thought of math as something separate. I just always have this natural assumption that it was really fun and exciting and I had the most fantastic ideas in it.

Then I went to school and school wasn’t very interesting. I basically didn’t find anything in school, particularly interesting especially not the math. I understand why many people can’t stand math because of the lessons that they had at school. But because my mother showed me these really fun, interesting things, I held out hope all the way through that there was something better waiting for me at the end and indeed, there was. When I finally got to start doing research, I discovered the stuff I had been waiting for. A lot of it when I was going to graduate and there were little bits of it all day long but really, I found home when I got to make my own things up.

I think it’s sad that it took all those years through the drudgery of school and tests and homework before I was allowed to make my own things up. I think that that puts a lot of people off of math so people who like making their own things up, it sends them into other things like music or art or cooking or maybe coding or something where you do get to make your own things. That’s the message that I decided to try and give everyone else that it’s not necessarily just that thing you do at school, where you have to answer questions and get the right answer. You also get to play and experiment and create.

CORALINE: I have to confess that I was one of those kids that struggled with math in school. To challenge myself in my senior year, I took an AP Calculus course and it was the only B I ever got, which was devastating and caused me the valedictorian position.

EUGENIA: Oh, this is a really tragic story.

CORALINE: But I did find that it got easier when I started taking physics classes because suddenly, I had a practical application for the math so the pure theory wasn’t doing it for me and it wasn’t sticking and I struggled with it a lot. But when I had something practical that I could apply it to, then everything started clicking a little bit more. Do you find that to be a common experience?

EUGENIA: I have the opposite experience and I think that for many people, it’s about practical applications but the trouble with that is that many people aren’t interested in the types of practical applications that get presented. For people who are maybe more like artists and I see artists all the time now because I teach them at School of the Art Institute, they also aren’t interested in physics applications and they’re not really interested in engineering applications and they’re definitely not interested in business and finance applications. For those people there’s something else which I’m showing which is it’s about understanding how things work and it’s about showing what the deep structure is inside thought processes.

I want to reach those people because I feel that they’re the ones who are the most left out at the moment because it’s true that applications do help a lot of people but they don’t help me to like math. On the one hand, maybe I am an entirely unique person but I doubt it. I suspect, if that doesn’t help interest me, maybe there are a whole lot of other people who also aren’t necessarily interested by direct applications but rather in more broad thought-based ideological applications where it’s about understanding how to use your brain really well, rather than how to use the theory to solve this particular problem.

JESSICA: Do you want to give an example of that?

EUGENIA: One of the surprising example of that is how I understood my life and therefore, quit my job. That, I really felt was something that I thought about mathematically by focusing really carefully on things that are relevant and things that aren’t relevant and following chains of causation. I did an analysis of it, of my life. It was at New Year of 2013, at the beginning of 2013, I sat down and I wrote a list of everything that I think I’m good at and I wrote a list of everything that makes me happy and then I compare that with what my current life consisted of. I just didn’t feel like it used enough of the things that I think I’m good at.

I really believe in life, for me, it’s important to find all the things you’re good at and figure out how to use them in combination in the best way you can to contribute to the world in some way that you want you. I sort of axiomatized myself basically because I’m a mathematician, I like systems where you boil everything down to some very basic principles and you see how everything else follows from those principles.

I axiomatized myself, I found the things that I think I’m good at and I tried to figure out how I could get a life that used more of those things and I realized that a normal academic job as a professor in a normal academic university was just probably not going to do it. I had tried for a number of years because I really wanted to contribute to the education system in England that had given me everything that I have basically and it just wasn’t doing it so I thought about what I would do. I saw various constraints so I just try changing a few constraints to see what it have, which is a very mathematical thing to do, where you look at a situation and then you try generalizing it by saying, “What if I just relapsed this rule?” What kind of world would I create without that law, which doesn’t mean that you can because in real life, you can’t just get rid of laws. But it helps you to understand what’s making things function in the world that you have.

If you imagine getting rid of some law and saying, “What would happen?” then you can think about it that’s sometimes I go, “What would I do if I had tons of money?” I can’t just have tons of money but imagining a fantasy world, in which I have tons of money, helps me understand what my real desires are. I think that’s a mathematical process if the thought process comes from the idea of abstraction where in math, you take the real world, you forget some ideas, you move into the abstract world of ideals and then you think about what works in that world without the details and that helps you understand the world that’s got the details in it.

I realized that if there were no such thing as countries and borders and visas and passports, I realized I would simply move to Chicago and figure something out. I realized that the big hindrance was just that I needed a visa so I then had to think about how to get a visa. That’s how I started the process of quitting my tenure job and becoming essentially freelance and living in Chicago my best life.

JESSICA: Wow. That’s beautiful. In the relaxation of constraints, you’re able to see over the wall of those barriers that you didn’t let yourself think past otherwise.

EUGENIA: Yeah, I love that image because you see through the walls, you see what’s on the other side and then you can focus on how to get over that wall. Or you get an overview of the wall so you can see maybe where the lowest point is or where would be the best place to construct a way of getting over it.

REIN: Yeah, I love that analogy and that reminds me of there was a time where I was reading a bunch of computer science papers to try to figure out what was going on in this world. I was really struggling to make my way through these papers. They were just in front of me and they were a huge challenge. I don’t have a formal background so they were this huge edifice that I was trying to climb and a friend of mine who comes from a similar background but has been very successful said, “You have to pick a fight with the paper. If you have to look at its assumptions and the chains of logic that follow them and say, ‘What if this one was different? Why is this one necessary for their result?'” Doing that gave me the motivation and sort of the path through this forest. What I realized later is that this applies to basically every challenge that I faced in my life.

EUGENIA: And that is a great way of approaching math in a way that makes it more personal because the trouble with math is often that when you’re studying it, it feels like a bunch of rules that have simply been imposed on you and you have to follow them. But actually, if you think about why those rules are there, then you can just imagine one of them going away and seeing what happens and that helps you understand the system better. It also makes you feel like you have some agency in it.

REIN: One of the things I love as you said, there are two possible outcomes, either you understand the paper or you have a new result.

EUGENIA: There’s a kind of related thing to that, where sometimes I read a paper when I’m trying to go to sleep on the plane for example and I think, there were two possible outcomes, either I’ll understand the paper or I’ll get some sleep.

CORALINE: Nice.

REIN: I love the way you talked about mathematics as being a creative process and not just a rote. I reminded of a Paul Lockhart’s Mathematician’s Lament. One of the quotes I love from that is that mathematics is the music of reason, which really speaks to me. It seems like if you wanted to build a system that was designed to make people hate mathematics, it would look a lot like our current education system.

EUGENIA: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think when you’ve done a really good job of building of really getting people to hate math and sometimes, I fantasize about the fact that if we simply stop teaching any math at all, we would probably achieve more than we’re doing now because at the moment, we’re achieving negative. If we just didn’t do it, we’ll achieve zero and because we know some math, we know that zero is more than a negative number.

CORALINE: I thought I hated math until I read Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and that spoke so much in me. I saw for the first time a relationship between math and music. I’m a musician. I saw for the first time the relationship between math and models of human intelligence, which sparked my work in AI, which I’ve been doing for 20 years now. It just opened my eyes so much and I wished that that book had been my textbook, instead of the boring calculus book that I actually had in my high school.

EUGENIA: I know but calculus altogether is such a strange thing to teach people in high school. It’s definitely, dare I say, it’s very American. I don’t think other countries do that and it’s such a weird introduction to difficult mathematics because the structure of it is not, I think exactly illuminating so it puts off a lot of people who don’t just want answers, they won’t to understand. For me, there’s a real difference between a proof and an illumination because a proof is a step by step series of logical justification. But an illumination it sheds light on why something works. A calculus proofs, if you even get to them, don’t really shed light on what’s going on there. It’s kind of a trick to say, “I can’t shed light on its own. I’m just going to do this little trick and ping! I get to the other side. Huh?” I think that that is a strange introduction to the beautiful world of logical reasoning.

If you present it in another way, then it’s a really amazing introduction because it’s a way of getting around the problem of infinity that is really difficult to get around but it’s never presented like that, rarely anyway. When I taught it, I’ve presented it like that but usually, it’s some kind of weird set of manipulations and you just learned how to do tons of manipulations for no apparent reason. In the UK, where I’m from, there isn’t an obsession with teaching calculus. In fact, we don’t teach calculus until quite high up in an undergraduate math degree so I found it very surprising when I moved here for the first time and discovered that everybody does calculus and that’s the thing that you do, if you’re good at math, you do calculus. Then when you gets to university, the thing you have to do is you do calculus.

I was talking to another European person about this, “Do you understand why there’s all this focus on calculus?” And he said and he was just maybe a tiny bit cynical, “You know, what I’ve learned about this country, if you can’t understand why something is going, ask yourself where the money is coming from.” I thought, “Ah, yes. Calculus textbooks. They make people tons of money. They are really heavy and expensive and they make another edition every two years so everyone has to by a new one.

JESSICA: Since math changes so quickly.

EUGENIA: Right. Exactly and if you think about the number of people who are forced to buy those textbooks, I read an article about one of the calculus textbook authors who died recently and apparently, he’s very famous around here but I don’t know many calculus textbooks. He was so rich from calculus textbooks that he built himself something like an eight million dollar house with its own concert hall in it. The reason that I read an article about his house, it was ostensibly an architecture article and the house had calculus principles in it and he loved music so he built this concert hall. I just loved it and I thought, “Maybe, I should be writing calculus textbooks.” Then I remembered that I’m not primarily driven by money and that’s why I’m not writing calculus textbooks.

REIN: There are obscure subjects that I’m interested in, where the only way to learn about them is to either read a bunch of papers, which is very undirected and most of them are behind paywalls or to buy an obscure textbook and they cost $400.

EUGENIA: Yeah. I think that I love the idea of somehow trying to break the stranglehold that the publishing houses have on those textbooks but can you imagine the amount of pushback there would be if we tried to say actually, no, which is not going to teach calculus anymore.

CORALINE: We get pushback in trying to put evolution in textbooks so I don’t think you’re going to change the textbook publishing world any time soon.

JESSICA: It is changing. My 12 year-old doesn’t have a lot of textbooks and she does have a lot of online material that she uses.

EUGENIA: Right and I love the fact that with the internet, there are all sorts of problems with the internet. But instead of focusing on the problems of the internet, let’s remind ourselves of the great things about the internet and the amount of information that can be shared without having to go through those old gatekeepers. Of course, the old gatekeepers want to keep things the way that benefits them. But guess what, we don’t have to go through them anymore and that’s why I started making videos on YouTube because suddenly, I had always wanted, I had always dreamed of making a textbook — for category theory, which is my research subject — and I think about category theory isn’t involved a lot of visual diagrammatic reasoning. It’s very difficult to show that statically in a book because you have to see how the diagrams grow as you’re thinking.

I always fantasize about writing a textbook that had a DVD at the back. That was like those language textbooks where you have a DVD of native speakers speaking it. I really wanted to just include a DVD so that everyone could watch the lectures with the text but to see the diagrams growing. But back in those days, millions of years ago, when we were young that it was really expensive to make DVD. You have to get a video team or something and then someone invented the YouTube and webcams and suddenly, it became possible to just point a webcam at a board and make a video and then just shove it on the internet and everyone could see it. I just had this amazing vision that everybody would have access to me teaching category theory.

The thing is at the time, hardly anyone was actually teaching it so as you say, loads of people were stuck with trying to learn it in from textbooks and the only textbook at the time was Categories for the Working Mathematician which is so dry and I don’t know how anyone ever managed to learn category theory.

REIN: I could tell you what I did. I would read a paragraph of Mac Lane and then I would read five pages of Awodey. Then I would read the chapter of Conceptual Mathematics that would explain that to me. I would work paragraph to paragraph. Each paragraph in Mac Lane would be a forcing function that would require me to spend a week with other sources.

EUGENIA: And the thing is that when I started making the YouTube videos, there weren’t that many other sources. I can’t remember when Conceptual Mathematics were in but Awodey’s book was years away from being written yet, I think anyway or maybe just a little bit away from it. But certainly, because I did my PhD in Cambridge, there was a category theory course there and then I went off into the world and met other people who had not had access to that. I saw that, because they learned category theory from Mac Lane, they had a, I want to say, slightly strange view but they could do lots of technicality without knowing quite what the point was.

JESSICA: They have wrong proof but not the illumination?

EUGENIA: Exactly. Thank you. They have the proof but the elimination. I think that is how so much of math is taught at all levels that people are trained to do manipulations and computations and to get answers that consist of a number here or a number there. But without the illumination, it doesn’t make that much sense to them plus it means that they’re not able to see why math is wonderful. They just see it as a series of manipulations and this happens at every level. It happens with high school math. It happens in elementary school math and everybody. It happens with math for scientists. Some scientists I’ve met, many of them actually, especially engineers, think of math as just something to help them answer their questions. They don’t see why research in it has any point.

But then it happens even inside math so category theory is like the math of math so it does for math what math does with the rest of the world, in a way. But then some mathematicians don’t see the point of that and they think of category theory as just some manipulations that don’t really have a point. Or they think that you only do it if you need to reach a particular answer, rather than doing it in order to illuminates what is going on in mathematics. The thing that I always want to do with my brain most is illuminate what is going on, just in anything: the world, math, my kitchen, music, anything.

JESSICA: Eugenia, you said that category theory does for math what math does for everything else and you mentioned earlier that what math does for everything else has explained how the world works so just category theory explain how math works?

EUGENIA: I think it does, at least at certain aspects of it. It’s important, I think to remember that math doesn’t explain how everything about the world works. What it does is it illuminate certain aspects of it. Anything that makes a connection between something and something else is a potential place where math can help because it’s really about looking at two different situations and saying what these two situations have in common and that part that they have in common is an abstract thing.

I think that there are times when, for example if we think about how we should treat minorities, then you can think about how we treat one kind of minority and then we can think about, whether that would be appropriate if we did something similar to another minority that maybe we’re more used to treating equally. For example, sometimes people say really stupid stuff about, for example gay people and then people sometimes people try to illuminate that how stupid it is what they said by replacing that with imagine that they’ve said that about African-Americans.

Then maybe they realize that that sounds really stupid if you said it about African-Americans and offensive and dumb. Then you go, “See, then why are you saying it about this other minority when you wouldn’t say about this minority,” and that process is a process of analogy between two different situations. You’ve moved into an abstract world, instead of talking about a specific minority, you’re talking about the concept of minorities and how we should treat them. That is kind of mathematical and that’s making an analogy between two different situations and finding what they have in common. That’s what category theory does for mathematics.

It says, “I’m looking at this situation where something seems to be happening, kind of freely without constraint and I’m looking at this other situation where there’s also something happening freely without constraint,” or the concept of things happening freely without constraint is therefore, something these two different mathematical situations have in common so that’s a more abstract piece of mathematics. Then category theory will produce a theory of things operating freely without constraint. Then we can put that back into algebras working freely without constraint or topological spaces working freely without constraint or logical systems working freely without constraint. Having made the theory, that’s at a different level.

CORALINE: My interaction with category theory came from Hofstadter’s latest book, Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking and I tried to do some research in the category theory and found it impossible to find a starting point. But I did finally find a series of lectures that someone had done. One of the ideas that came, I think from the lectures in part and in part from my own realization and as an expert in category theory, I’m taking advantage of your expertise here, it seemed to me that from the beginning of rational scientific thought, the approach that people were taking starting early on probably with the great philosophers, was the idea of breaking things down into small problems, solving small problems and composing a larger solution from that.

EUGENIA: Yes.

CORALINE: It struck me that category theory does the opposite of that. It doesn’t look at the details. It blurs the details and looks at larger systems in the way that larger systems can be compared to each other so instead of the atomization that we saw in scientific research and I think in mathematics for a long time, it seems to be favoring the abstract over the concrete. Do you think that’s an accurate sort of perception of what’s going on with category theory?

EUGENIA: I think that’s a really interesting observation but I think that that’s two different dimensions. Actually, I think there’s one thing which is splitting things up into small parts, decomposing them into small parts and fitting the parts together. There’s another which is abstraction, which is moving levels. I don’t think it’s about sticking things together to make bigger things. I think it’s about, as you say ignoring details so you get some kind of zoomed out picture. I might call it the bigger picture but I don’t mean that in the sense of sticking small pictures together.

I mean it in the sense of overview and you can do both at the same time so within category theory, there’s still a big focus on decomposing things into small parts, understanding the small parts and then working out how those small parts fit together. Then you can de-abstractify back to the small parts as well.

REIN: I think, one of the good analogy for this is what happened in Google Maps when you zoom them out. They don’t show the streets anymore. They show the highways and things like that.

EUGENIA: Oh, yeah. I think that’s a great analogy because when you zoom out on Google Maps, it still is some small pieces stuck together. You just see more things at once because you zoomed out but with less detail. You could still deconstruct it into small bits stuck together and then when you zoom in, it’s still also small bits stuck together. I think it’s two different points of view on how to understand a problem further. But I think that you’re right that if you start at the very zoomed-in level, then breaking into small parts and zooming out are two different things. I don’t think they’re opposites. I think they’re orthogonal.

CORALINE: Someone who will go into category theory will do both under [inaudible] space?

EUGENIA: Yes, I do that all the time. What I will do and what I do in my own search is that I zoom out to try and find the essential structure. But then after I’ve started thinking about the essential structure, I will break down the essential structure into small parts to try and understand the parts separately before understanding how they fit together and then understanding the relationship between the small parts, the fitting together and the zooming back in again.

CORALINE: Is there a mechanism for detecting which details when you are at the zoomed in level matter and I’m thinking here of like work that I did with categorization using Random Forest algorithm to determine what traits decisions tree made on and which ones they could not be made on. Is there a mechanism like that that you [inaudible]?

EUGENIA: That’s such an interesting question because thinking about it, that’s something that I have to do all the time. It’s really hard because it’s not an automatic process. It’s not an algorithmic process at all. When you’re figuring out what’s important, that’s one of the hardest parts. I think it’s something that is sometimes done quite badly, which is why sometimes people think of, they call it abstract nonsense because abstraction when it’s done just for the sake of abstraction, kind of is pointless. Whereas abstraction when it’s done for the purpose of illuminating what the point really is, is really amazing. But there isn’t a formula for how to figure out what’s really important and I think that —

JESSICA: Oh, you mentioned one earlier.

EUGENIA: I did?

JESSICA: Yeah. You said change the rule and see what happens.

EUGENIA: Yes. Thank you. I did and that is one way of doing it so you can try changing something and seeing if it affects it. When you’re making a good analogy and this happens all the time, when I’m having an argument with someone and I’m trying to be really logical, I will often try and find an analogy. If I think there’s something absurd about their argument, I will try to find an analogous situation that highlights how absurd their argument is by making it really absurd in another situation.

To find a good analogy, what I do is I retreat into the same part of my brain that does mathematics, I think. I play around and I trying to feel for what is really making the absurdity happen. I try ignoring some details of the situation or changing some details to see whether that absurdity still happens. If I find what I think is a really good analogy, usually the person will go, “But the different.” And I’ll go, “Yes, of course, it’s different. It’s an analogy. That’s the whole point of analogy. It’s different but the [inaudible] parts are the same.”

Then you have to convince someone that what’s crucial about the situation has remained the same, even though some surface details have changed. But then sometimes people make analogies because they think that they’re making a really good analogy but I think they’ve changed the crucial aspects of it so they haven’t actually eliminated the situation. There completely changed the situation but it’s very subtle and I think that is a fascinating aspect of how abstraction works and the nuances in our amazing human brains.

CORALINE: It’s interesting you said you went to a mathematical place to from analogies. One of the things that Hofstadter talked about in his book is focuses on analogies and he talked about a mysterious process by which our brains are categorizing things in such a way that we can make analogies. One of the examples he gave was a family who took their son to the Grand Canyon and the mother and father are looking out at the sweeping vista of the Grand Canyon before them and they say to their son — I forget his name like, Chris, “Isn’t this really beautiful?” and looked over and Chris is fascinated with some ants crawling around on the ground.

Chris grows up and he ends up taking a vacation with his parents to Egypt and he discovers that in Egypt, glass soda bottles are prevalent and there are bottle caps everywhere so he decides to start a collection of bottle caps. They’re going to the temple at Karnak and he sees a bottle cap that he hasn’t seen before on the ground. He makes a big deal out of this bottle cap while he’s standing in front of the Temple of Karnak. His father is like, “That’s exactly like when –” It’s really mysterious how our brains can categorize things with enough abstraction that we can even say this situation is analogous to that other situations.

EUGENIA: Yeah and I think that our brains are amazingly naturally wired or something to abstraction, even though a lot of people go, “I can’t do abstract math. I was fine with math until the numbers turn into letters. That’s too abstract,” and the thing is that numbers are already so abstract because numbers aren’t things. Numbers are analogies between groups of objects so you go, “Here’s three books and there’s three cookies and three bananas. What do those things have in common?” It’s the number three. It’s the concept of three. What is three?

When you’re teaching it to small children, you have to show them three of this thing and three of that thing and three of that thing and then you can’t tell them what three is. At some point, they have to make a leap and understand that three is a thing that those groups of objects have in common.

There’s a story I tell in my first book, which I love which is about a mother who I used to help in an elementary school in England. I did it for years. There’s one mother who also helped there and she was complaining. She had a three-year old time and his friends’ mothers they all say, “Oh, my child can count to 20. Oh, my child can count to 30.” She said, “My son can count to three but he knows what three is,” and I thought it was great because when you say that a child can count to 10, mostly you just mean they can recite the words one to ten, which is the start but that’s not what numbers are. Numbers are amazing concepts and somehow we have brains that can do that.

You know, language is already an abstraction from objects because when we say, ‘cat,’ we kind of know that cat is refined to some fluffy animal with four legs and things and we’re able to hold that abstract thing in our brain and know that it’s referring to various concrete things. The fact that we can do language, I think is already a sign that we have innate powers of abstraction inside us.

CORALINE: And I can tell you that trying to marvel that in code is so difficult. I have my AI side project and trying to model things in such a way that you can concretely refer to them using linguistic terms but also understand how they relate to each other in a more abstract way is very, very difficult. When I learned that Leibniz was an alchemist, in addition to being a natural philosopher, that gave me some courage and I actually started exploring different classification systems from different areas of human endeavor, including Kabbalah where people have been working on the problem of classification and categorization for thousands and thousands of years and wasn’t all mathematicians and scientists doing it.

EUGENIA: Yeah and I think classification is so interesting because we humans seemed to be desperate to classify things all the time and really, in order to groups things together so that we don’t have to process so many things in our head. I think that comes from, I’d like to say, laziness but in a way, it’s trying to be efficient, trying to have this so much data in the world around us that we have to process, that if we temporarily consider some of those things to be the same, then there’s just less data to process. I think that’s what analogy is doing in a way and I love the insight that we can get from trying to figure out how to get a computer to do a thing that we do.

Then we start realizing how weird it is, that our brains can do these things and there’s the classic example of how to get computers to recognize handwriting because there are all these things that we recognize as being the letter A, sort of spontaneously but they’re so different physically and the how that we can even say they’re different topologically and we can make an A with a gap in it and we can still know it’s a letter A, it’s just amazing when we realize that somehow the letter A is already abstract but even more abstract than that is the fact that all these different representations of it, we still recognize as being a letter A. Our brains are doing that all the time.

I think that if we couldn’t do that, we would be completely overwhelmed by the amount of information that we have to process all the time. I think the process of becoming an adult, one of the things that we have to learn to do is to do that more because we’re trying to process more and more information all the time so children can get really upset about the difference between that cookie and that cookie because they can see how different this cookie is from that cookie and if you give them up that one, instead of that one, they’ll scream.

Then we grow up and relax a bit and realize that they’re basically the same, those two cookies. They’re both chocolate chip cookies and we accept that some more things count as the same. In a way, what we’re doing all the time is learning how to ignore details that aren’t relevant but we have to make decisions about which details are relevant in the situation and which ones aren’t.

CORALINE: I had an experience like that when I was young, when I was learning to count, apparently I had trouble saying that is two of the same thing because to me there are very distinct. When you said, “Three people,” I was like, “How can you have three of the same thing? It’s impossible.”

EUGENIA: Yeah, that’s fantastic. For other children, they get confused if you say, “If you take one banana and one cookie, then can you add them together? What do you get?” You still get two things but you have to abstract further from the place that you started. Then when numbers turn into letters, you have to abstract even further so that one plus two can become part of the same concept as six plus seven. Then when you do category theory, you abstract even further from that. Every time you go further, some people kind of fall off or hit a ceiling because they’re not comfortable with forgetting even more details.

I sort of love forgetting more and more and more details. Sometimes, I think that there’s two directions that the world is going in, with the human interaction is going in, where on one direction, everyone is trying to show how unique they are and how different they are and how their identity is completely different from everyone else. But on the other hand, because of what I do as a mathematician at category theory, I love seeing how everyone has things in common and what we all have in common and if you get abstract enough, we’re all just people and we’re all really the same. There are different levels of difference that you can find so in a way, everyone is different. Or everyone is the same and everything else, every [inaudible] classification we make is just sort of some arbitrary decision in between those two things.

JESSICA: For me, part of adulthood is being conscious of that, being conscious of what you’re grouping together and where you’re drawing your life with distinction.

EUGENIA: Yes. That is so important. One of the things that category theory does is it says that you should always be clear what context you’re in right now and you can always change context but you shouldn’t mix up contexts. You shouldn’t be in one context but act like you’re being in another. If you’re always aware of what context you’re in, then it just enable you to think more clearly about things.

JESSICA: Eugenia, when I met you at Empire Elixir the other day, you taught me some amazing words. Would you define ingressive and congressive for people?

EUGENIA: I can, yes. It starts with the fact that I think that the words masculine and feminine are redundant and more than that, they’re actually abstractive. It doesn’t make any sense to talk about anything being masculine and feminine, except that a male person is if inherently, they call themselves male, they’re masculine because that’s all pertaining to male. I realized this because I had a narrative about my mathematical life that basically I went like this. When I started as a mathematician, I didn’t want to show any signs of femininity because I didn’t want people to have a chance to say that I wasn’t good at math because I was a woman.

But then when I became established in my career and I have tenure, I felt like it was okay to show some femininity but I only did it outside of work because I’m still afraid and then I gradually started letting in. Then I thought, “This doesn’t make any sense because I am a female,” so everything I do is feminine and why should some aspects of a career to be called feminine and some others not, as if there’s something wrong with me if I don’t show those aspects because I’m female but I’m showing masculine characteristics. I realized that what we really need is new words to talk about the actual character traits and separate them from the questions of gender because it’s really the character traits that may or may not cause people to think about things differently.

This is aside from the prejudice that people apply to people who present different genders. It’s just about character traits that are actually there that are different so I decided that we should have new words to replace masculine and feminine and I brainstorm with an amazing friend of mine for ages about this. We finally came up with ingressive and congressive. Ingressive is to replace masculine and congressive is to replace feminine.

The idea is that ingressive is about going into things and not being waylaid by what people think or by emotions and congressive is about bringing people with you and bringing people together and unifying and making connections between things. Maybe that ingressive behavior is traditionally associated with men and that congressive behavior is traditionally associated with women. But I think that when you make new words, then you can realize that both men and women and all genders of people can be ingressive and congressive at different times and in different situations. It doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong for one person to be one thing or another because of course, the trouble with masculinity and femininity as words is that they sound prescriptive so that it automatically sounds like women as supposed to be feminine and that therefore, if they’re described as showing masculine characteristics, then something is wrong. There’s a dissonance because they’re doing the thing that is associated with the other.

Similarly, if men show feminine characteristics and that this is problematic for all genders of people, there is the fact that male people then feel under pressure to do things like not show emotions and not cry and not worry about people’s feelings. Then female people, if they’re ambitious or powerful or they express opinions or they’re too strong, then people say that they’re being too masculine and there’s something wrong with it. Whereas if you think about ingressive and congressive instead, then you can actually think about which characteristics are good for different situations.

For example, I think that broadly speaking, I’ve come to think that congressive behavior is basically better for society but that ingressive behavior is rewarded more by society because society is based on competition. It’s based on how you present yourself so for things like competing for a job, you have to be ingressive to put yourself forward for promotion and to talk about how great you are. Whereas, when you’re actually doing some work with people, then it’s really helpful to be congressive because then you bring people together, you understand people.

I think that mathematics is usually presented in a very ingressive way so in high school, it’s about getting the right answer. If you’re good at it, then young people are put into competitions, where you have to solve as many problems as possible, as fast as possible and score as many points as possible. If you get it wrong, then you’re lost and you get a big red check mark against your work. Whereas, at research level, it’s congressive because it’s not about getting things right and wrong. It’s about understanding how things work and building structures. I think that sport is quite inherently ingressive because it’s about winning and beating the other people.

I realized this during last fall, I was teaching my art students, as usual and there was that thing that the Cubs won… Some kind of sports, I understand and the whole of Chicago was going nuts about it, except apparently me and all of my art students. We were talking about it and they just said that they were really not interested in it. I realized that I’m not interested in winning. I’m much more interested in learning and understanding and building things together. Not only I am not that interested in sports, I’m kind of put off by it because the whole idea of beating somebody else is something that I find really distasteful. I would much rather we all built something wonderful together.

That’s why I like music because in music, you’re not trying to beat someone else. You’ll all come together and you mix music together. Even in music, the process of getting to that point is often ingressive because you have to win competitions and you have to beat people in a competition in order to be selected to, say go to music school. We have all these ingressive hurdles that we put people through in order to reach things where congressive behavior would be much more beneficial. When I think about it like that, I can think differently about my interactions with other people and I can think differently about my interactions with myself actually and the fact that I am motivated by helping people, I’m not motivated by winning things.

If I try to motivate myself with reward, it doesn’t work. If I motivate myself instead with what I can do to help people, then it does work. I also realized that so many of my most frustrating interactions with other people come because they are being very ingressive. The behavior I have learned by being in the world and wanting to be successful is I have learned to basically fake ingressive characteristics because I know that and I see that that’s what’s rewarded. I have learned in the process of being a mathematician and being an academic, I have learned how to be ingressive right back at people when they’re being ingressive.

What happens when I do that is I’m very good at it and then I go home and I hate myself because I don’t want to be like that. That’s one of the reasons I quit my job because I discovered that, I didn’t have the terminology to say this at the time but now I do realized in retrospect what was happening was that I had to be ingressive in order to be successful. I felt I had to be ingressive to be successful and I didn’t like it. What I realize now is that you don’t have to be ingressive in order to be successful.

There are ways to be congressive and deal with ingressive behavior. It’s just hard and I’m figuring them out as I go along and what I hope is that we can gradually getting more in touch with our congressive side and find a way of diffusing ingressive behavior so that congressive behavior can be more valued because the trouble is that ingressive behavior is kind of louder. It’s like the fact that the loud people are always the loudest. They’re the ones who get heard. While ingressive people aren’t in charge of everything, they will continue to reward ingressive behavior as well. I think that is one of the big reasons why women are underrepresented in politics, in management, in academia, and dare I say it, also in crime because I suspect that ingressive behavior is also related to really, really being focused on winning and not really caring about losing. That’s why ingressive people, I think like playing sport because the idea of winning is really fantastic.

People say, sports teaches you to be a good loser and that’s a general assumption that that’s a good thing. But I think it’s kind of dangerous if taken too far because if you don’t mind losing, then you take risk, because you don’t care about the possibility of failure and people who take big risks will also do things like commit crimes because their idea of being arrested and going to prison doesn’t put them off. The idea of —

JESSICA: Or start businesses.

EUGENIA: Yeah, or start businesses. Or tell lies because the idea there is that they could succeed and they don’t really mind they fan out. But for me, this also includes the idea of being wrong because if somebody shows me that I’m wrong and gloats over it, that’s the crucial thing. I don’t mind if someone shows me I’m wrong and then we all learn something together. That’s a congressive thing. But if an argument is about someone trying to beat me by showing that I’m wrong and they’re right, I hate losing and that’s the only reason that I don’t like being wrong. I think that this is related to why people get put off at math because at a certain point, math becomes about being right and wrong and some people don’t like been wrong and they feel stupid so they go away to something that’s more obviously congressive.

But the ingressive people aren’t put off by being wrong. They’re really spurred on by the joy of being right and that, I think means that there is an accidental filter that puts off congressive people and keeps ingressive people in. I think this could lead to why women are still underrepresented in math. I think that we can change that by presenting math in a congressive way early on, instead of an ingressive way. There’s so many mathematical outreach activities that I look at them and go, “That’s really ingressive and there are ways that you could turn it into something congressive.” But you know, if you said that about boys and girls instead of ingressive and congressive, you would sound ridiculous because then you would end up saying, “This outreach activity appeals to boys and not girls.” Doesn’t that sound stupid? Whereas if you —

JESSICA: It may be true.

EUGENIA: — Ingressive people rather than congressive people. But if you talk about the activities that appeal to boys instead of girls, then you end up with stupid things like pink Lego.

[Laughter]

CORALINE: I think you didn’t mentioned specifically. I’m thinking about things in terms of ingressive and congressive behavior, it makes a lot of sense to me. I just went through an interview process and interviews definitely rewards you for being ingressive.

EUGENIA: Yes.

CORALINE: Even the so-called pairing exercises, there is a power imbalance and you are not truly working together to solve a problem. What you’re actually trying to do is demonstrate your ability and that is competitive and you get a reward for being good at interviewing: you get a job. I remember one of the companies I worked for. I was one of two remote employees so I was already at a disadvantage because this company was not very remote-friendly and I was one of only two women on the team. The team had this approach of strong opinions they usually held which led to lots and lots and lots of argumentation. Argumentation was how decisions are made.

The two of us, first of all, we’re not able to get the same level of body language, cues and so on at the people physically present were able to do and we were not comfortable interrupting. We were not comfortable shouting and we were excluded from those conversations and I actually got dinged in a review for not participating in discussions enough and I was like, “That is not my communication style. I cannot possibly be successful in this role,” and I end up moving on.

EUGENIA: Well, there are so many things to response to that one. One is about interrupting, which I think is really interesting. I heard a segment on NPR the other day. It was the usual thing about how men tend to interrupt women a lot. Someone called in and said, “If someone interrupts and I just say, ‘I’m still speaking, actually.'” I was thinking about it and I thought, I don’t have too much trouble with people interrupting me because if they do, then I can ask them to say that I’m still speaking but what I have noticed is that sometimes men won’t let me interrupt them but they will let men interrupt them. Then, if there’s a group of men who all want to speak, I can’t get a word in because they will only allow interruptions from men. If I wait for them to finish speaking, it never happens because they only stop speaking when they’re interrupted by a male person.

I haven’t thought of it quite like that before but I think in a way, interrupting is very ingressive and a more congressive approach is to hear everybody and to take everyone into account and not be trying to show how clever you are. I think that it is very ingressive to want to demonstrate how clever you are all the time. Whereas, I realized that what I really want to do is to help other people understand things.

There are two kinds of argument — well, there are lots of kind of argument — but there’s an ingressive argument where everyone is trying to win and the way you win is by showing that you’re clever than the other person and that they’re wrong. Whereas, I really like congressive arguments where the aim is to understand something. Then it doesn’t matter who is right and who’s wrong because whatever happens, you learn something and you’ve understood it.

I have realized that I am so much more congressive than I thought because I’ve been trying to emulate ingressive behavior to such a long time. I think a lot of the writing about how women can be successful is about teaching them how to be ingressive so that they can compete with men. That works for some people and I’ve met plenty of really ingressive women who become successful at that and who are proud of themselves for having done it. But I think there’s another way, which is to find ways of congressively dealing with ingressive behavior and I fantasize, and this is a kind of abstract dream again, where I fantasize about not an all-women institution. I’ve worked in all-women institutions and all that happens is there are ingressive and congressive women and the ingressive women take control and that’s that.

What I fantasize about is an all-congressive institution, where everyone is chosen because they’re congressive and everyone works together congressively and though, staff are working at congressive, I’m not quite sure what it would be like because it so far from things that I know. But I’ve tried to set some things up small microcosms like that for myself. For example, any class I teach is very, very congressive. I try to make it explicitly congressive so that it’s all about understanding things.

I say to my students, there are two types of question. There’s the type where it trying to show how clever you are and there’s a type where you’re trying to understand something and I will not accept the first type and I will accept all of the second type so it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to think the question is stupid. If you’re trying to understand something, it’s valid and if you’re trying to show how clever you are, it’s not valid and I won’t have that kind of question.

The other really congressive environment that I’ve set up is the Liederstube and my music saloon where we share music. I really like to think of it as sharing music, rather than performing it because performing is kind of ingressive and there’s a big risk of failure where it might go wrong. Whereas, when we just share it, all we’re trying to do is share our love of something with somebody else. We’re all doing it together. We’re not trying to be better than other people because there are so many performance situations where if you have five people performing in a row, then they’re all trying to be better than the others to show how good they are. No, we’re just all going it together to share something that we love and it’s not about judging how good someone is. It’s about doing something together.

Idealistically, I would love to do more to see more formal research into psychological aspects of this and what happens with these characteristics in education, in business, in politics, in human interaction. I think that I can see how self-help can run along these lines where if ingressive behavior is coming at you, you find ways of diffusing it. But also to think about when ingressive behavior is useful, I can think of a very, very small number of situations. It is, I think that ingressive behavior is better for people-selves. If you are ingressive, then it means that you will not be so upset by things going wrong or people being horrible to you and things like that. There’s that disgusting word, resilience which I really hate and I realized I hate the idea of being resilient because I think that resilient is ingressive. To me, it gives me the image of bad things happening to you and you don’t even care because you’re sort of oblivious.

I know that resilience is as in the common sense, for being really great but I prefer to think of transformation. I don’t want to be resilient to bad stuff. I want to be able to take bad stuff in and transform it into something good, which I think is completely different from resilience. I think it’s a congressive approach to dealing with things, as opposed to resilience, which is like learning how to be a good loser. I don’t want to learn how to be a good loser. I don’t want to just accept failure and defeat. I think first of all, we should get to a situation where there is no failure or defeat and everything is a process of transforming stuff for the better, the how idealistic do I sound.

REIN: As you’ve been talking about this, I have figuratively and literally watched a series of light bulbs go off in my brain and this has been amazing. I thought I’d share a couple of them that may be relevant and may spark some discussion. One is that if you look at this from a game theoretical perspective, ingression wins. Ingression is about the success of the individual over the success of the group and conversely. But look at the frame that what was just presented, if what you care about is the success of the individual, then caring about the success of the individual wins.

Someone on Twitter told me, “Capitalism is math,” was the quote and I had no idea what this means but I’ve figured it out now. If you set up the system so that what you care about is individual success, i.e. Game theory, at least the common presentation of game theory, then the agents in the system that care about individual success will always beat the ones that care about group success. This is a sort of prisoner’s dilemma where the individuals do well at the expense of the group.

EUGENIA: Yes, but then, the fact in the prisoner’s dilemma, the individuals don’t do well either.

REIN: Well, the result, yes, is that the group as a whole does worse so they do worse. But some of them actually succeed so it’s not exactly in all cases. But then —

EUGENIA: Right but the basic prisoner’s dilemma is that ingressive behavior actually causes individual loss as well as group loss and that its congressive behavior that succeed. That’s amazing.

REIN: We’re all going to die because of climate change so in the end, we all lose. The other thing that I was thinking about when you talked about setting up a congressive environment is that the way that you mitigate ingressive behavior is having a power structure or relationship between participants such that you can stop the ingressive behavior. If that ingressive person was in a position of power in the group, they couldn’t be stopped. Or something them would be more difficult. But you are both in a position of power, sort of de facto as a leader, as the teacher and motivated to mitigate ingressive behavior.

JESSICA: Or you set it up so that people can’t succeed individually. They need each other. I read somewhere that a team is defined as the people who can’t move forward without moving forward together. You can set that up in an organization.

REIN: I agree but I also think that it requires maintenance. You can set up a team that way but that team could change to be something else.

JESSICA: Oh, yeah just look at our government.

REIN: Right so it requires both setting up, that framing and maintaining it over time and the people doing the maintaining are those who have the power to do the maintaining.

EUGENIA: Well, the thing that I said about having an entirely congressive institution is that if all the people are congressive themselves, then that happens anyway. There are some tiny situations, I mean my friend Greg, who helps me come up with the words ingressive and congressive is the most spectacularly congressive person. Whenever I’m with him, I just feel like he’s one of the people I know who is explicitly more congressive than me. It’s so illuminating I would learn so much and I always feel so safe in that situation and that, if there were more people like Greg or if there were an entire environment, an institution that was entirely run by people like that, you almost wouldn’t need formal structures in place to make sure it carried on like that because everybody would be doing it anyway.

Of course, in order to try and really transform the world, we have to get more people to do it. But I have a suspicion that a lot of ingressive behavior is learned like mind was and that maybe people aren’t actually as naturally ingressive as that. People, especially little boys and especially in this country are taught to be that way because that’s how men are supposed to be and that —

JESSICA: We’re taught that in math class.

EUGENIA: Yeah, all of the structures of when we were growing up and educated lead towards that. Together with the emphasis on sports, the emphasis on right and wrong subjects. All of those things, children developed the things that are valued because that’s, like you say if you’re in a society that rewards ingressive behavior, then the ingressive behavior will succeed the most so people learn those behaviors. If we can gradually unlearn them and I have been on a really interesting journey of unlearning ingressive behavior in the last couple of years since I got this [inaudible]. I feel like the best things I’m doing in my life at the moment are because of that. I’m so much happier but like a prisoner’s dilemma, it’s not just individual benefit. I think I’m doing more good for the world at the same time, as also being happier. I think that all from unlearning the ingressive behavior and getting really in touch with my natural congressive roots.

I have another friend who I talked to a lot about this, who is an executive coach and she still really thinks that being a hybrid of ingressive and congressive is better but it’s interesting because she interprets some of the things I do as being ingressive. Although what I think she’s doing is she is ascribing ingressive personality to that behavior because most people who do that, do it ingressively. For example, the fact that I quit my job and just struck out by myself might appear to be ingressive because it might appear to be risk taking and it might appear to be doing something for myself. But it was very far from it because it came from a position of going deep inside myself and going, “How can I help more people and myself at the same time?” And it wasn’t a risk at all because I did it so safely. I didn’t just quit and go.

I took sabbatical. I had a one year job at University of Chicago. I wrote a book and it wasn’t until I had a promise from the School of the Art Institute that they wanted to keep me there, that I had my book was doing so well, that I felt secure, that I could earn money with that but I got myself a green card so I knew I could stay in this country. I spent three years transitioning from having a full time academic job to being freelance. I think that was an extremely congressive way of doing it.

She think that ingressive behavior is good because you step out of your comfort zone and that’s how you grow and achieve more things. I say, you can’t claim that I haven’t grown and achieve more things across my whole life but I have never stepped out of my comfort zone. What I have done is I have understood my comfort zone so that I can understand how to stretch it so that I’m always inside it. I never step outside it.

CORALINE: It’s totally interesting that you talked about succeeding in parts by figuring out where your ingressive behaviors and tendencies were and kind of rooting them out, making a deliberate choice to be more congressive and I saw a parallel with that in my own life as a transgender woman before I transition full time. I was living kind of a double and I was trying very hard to present masculine and I tried very hard to be a man and failed spectacularly at it.

When I realized that I needed to transition, I decided I was pressing the big red reset button of my life and I could change whatever the hell I wanted to at the same time because the timing was good. Through the lens that you provided me now, I see that the people that I admired, they were not competitive, they were not people who cared about winning and losing. They were people who cared about other people. I made a deliberate effort to try to reshape myself into a person like that. For me personally, I have been exponentially more successful and more impactful since I took on or normalized the congressive behaviors and tendencies that I had in myself that I had repressed for all those years.

EUGENIA: That is an amazing insight and I have tingles going on down my spine that you share that through the lens of these words that I’ve come up with because I really believe that when you have words for things, you can think about them differently and that opens us up to new ways of thinking. On the one hand, it’s just words but on the other hand, the words are a starting point for how we think. Just like in other languages, there are words or concepts that we don’t have and therefore, it’s hard for us to think about those emotions.

I remember the first time I heard the word, ‘schadenfreude,’ and I just thought, “Oh, my goodness. That’s fantastic,” and that’s not a word that we have so we just have to use the German word. I have always felt that once we have a word for something that we can think about it more clearly and I have not done anything as brave or dramatic as your transition but I have also gone through a small version of that where I wanted to get rid of the ingressive behavior. I realized while I was doing that, that many aspects of my previous life couldn’t continue, including my previous job.

REIN: I just want to share one more thing if I can because I had another light bulb go off that is brighter than all of the other bulbs previously, cumulatively because you’re talking about having a new word, shapes, the thought that you can have. What I just now realized is that I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life working towards this concept that I just now have the words to describe. This is why I have been interested in socialism because for me, the closest thing I’ve found to a philosophy in practice of building congressive organizations.

What I’ve discovered for myself just now is that’s actually the thing that I care about and socialism is a proxy for that for me. It’s a proxy for expressing in terms of how do we build congressive societies. But all of the work that I’ve done, consulting with teams in organization that trying to build good teams, has been trying to shift teams toward to being more congressive so that they work better together. I’ve just now realized that what I’ve been doing my whole career is that. Now, I have the word for it and I am so happy.

EUGENIA: That’s amazing and it reminds me of one of the many amazing things that I heard Jessica say at the EmpEx Conference about if we think linearly, then we get to a point where we think about blame and we blame individuals for things. Whereas, on the way I interpreted it, was if we think ingressively, then we think about blame. But if we think congressively, then we see a system as a whole. Then we realize that it’s a system that we should be thinking about, not the individuals. I think that’s a congressive way of thinking.

REIN: This is why I cared so much about systems thinking. I’ve made that a focus of my career. I’m going to be thinking about this, probably for years.

EUGENIA: I think this is what category theory is. It’s about thinking about the whole systems as units, instead of individual things inside them and that’s what I think about society. I think there’s an ingressive view which is the one that look after themselves and there’s a congressive view which is that society is one whole, that we should always be thinking about that whole.

CORALINE: I think that’s a great place to wrap up. This has been a stunning and transformative conversation. We’re actually going to skip reflections because we sort of arrived at consensus via little chat window while we are recording that we need more time. We need to internalize this more and think about this more so maybe we’ll blog our reflections this time around.

Eugenia, this has been an amazing conversation. You’ve really given me tools for thinking about things in a different way that I hadn’t thought of before. I love your perspective and thank you so much for being with us today.

EUGENIA: Thank you for having me. I think it has been amazing and I have so many things that I want to think about as well and I hope you’ll continue the conversation too.

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