September 27, 2018

Episode 10: Mitchell Hashimoto (Hashicorp)

44 minutes

In this episode, rachel, Kendall, and Mitchell discuss:

Mitchell's first real job working at an Apple retail store, where the employee customer service training made a big impact

How the empathy training from that experience has translated well to most of his subsequent experience in the working world

Digging into why customers are angry, and finding a place to be genuinely empathetic

How this translates to the employee-employer relationship

How we can't not talk about Mitchell's job at a smoothie place

Learning to interact with clients as a software consultant and as a leader via building things in the open source community

Mitchell's origins as a self-taught programmer while his parents limited his time on the computer

Working around that by PRINTING OUT SOURCE CODE TO STUDY IT, WTF?!

Having to level up at management fast after founding HashiCorp via reading a lot of books, hiring experienced, "professional" managers

How hard it is to scale management process beyond 300 or so people, can't personally address every issue

That people are much more complex than computers--computers are much easier to understand

The value of emphasizing shared culture when your company is fully distributed

Wondering why Mitchell is cagey about his answer to whether he'd prefer to fight a crowd of duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck...perhaps this is related to his level of introversion? :)

How leading and understanding extroverted people is harder than you might think, especially when it comes to personnel reviews

The nature of video calls and introversion and how working from home allows you to recharge in between calls

Learning to be responsible with people when you are in an authority position--for example, do not message people on Friday saying you want to talk with them on Monday without any details (when you just need to talk to them about nothing)

How this totally works the other way for Kendall--freaking out about an employee wanting to talk

That someone having authority over you can be comforting if you trust them

The benefits of viewing titles as job descriptions and not "who you're the boss of"

Using (and getting caught using) management techniques with your partner

You can find Mitchell by name on GitHub and Twitter, and you can email him and he'll do his best to respond :)

Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

...more

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By Rachel Perkins and Kendall Miller

4.6

88 ratings