Greater Than Code

00:36 - Panelist Consulting Experience and Backgrounds

10:00 - Marketing, Charging, and Setting Prices

28:34 - GeePawHill Twitter Thread - Impact Consulting

38:43 - Management & Mentorship

52:15 - Explaining Value and Offerings

55:08 - Ideal Clients

Reflections:

Mae: The phrase “indie”.

Casey: Having a Patreon to help inspire yourself.

Chelsea: Tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes to in terms of a person’s needs.

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Transcript:

CHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 267. I'm Chelsea Troy, and I'm here with my co-host, Mae.

MAE: And also with us is Casey.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey.

And today's episode, we are our own guests. We're going to be talking to you about our experiences in consulting.

To get this one started, how about we share what got us into consulting and what we like, don't like about it, just high-level?

Chelsea, would you mind going first?

CHELSEA: Sure.

So I started in consulting, really in a full-time job. So for early in my programming career, I worked for several years for a company called Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Labs is chiefly, or was chiefly at the time, a software engineering consulting organization.

My job was to pair program with folks from client teams, various types of clients, a lot of health insurance companies. At the time, there was a restaurant loyalty app that we did some work for. We did some work for General Motors, various clients, a major airline was also a client, and I would switch projects every three to six months. During that time employed by Labs, I would work for this client, pair programming with other pivots, and also with client developers.

So that was my introduction to consulting and I think that it made the transition to consulting later, a little bit easier because I already had some consulting experience from under the Labs’ umbrella.

After I worked for Labs, I moved on to working at a product company for about 2 years and my experience at that product company burned me out on full-time programming for a little while.

So in my last couple of months at that job, I realized that I was either going to have to take some time off, or I was going to have to find an arrangement that worked better for me for work, at least for the next little while. And for that next little while, what I decided I wanted to try to do was work part-time because I was uncomfortable with the idea of taking time off from programming completely. I felt that I was too early in my career and the skill loss would be too great if I took time off completely, but I knew I needed some space and so, I quit my full-time job.

After I quit the full time—I probably should have done this before I quit the job, but I didn't—I called an organization that I had previously done some volunteer work with, with whom I discussed a job a couple of years prior, but for a couple of different reasons, it didn't work out. I said to them, “I know that you're a grant-funded organization and you rarely have the funding and capacity to bring somebody on, but just so you're aware, I like working with you. I love your product. I love the stuff that you work on. All our time working together, I've really enjoyed. So if you have an opening, I'm going to have some time available.” The director there emailed me that same day and said, “Our mobile developer put in his two weeks’ notice this morning. So if you have time this afternoon, I'd really like to talk to you,” [chuckles] and that was my first client and they were a part-time client.

I still work with them. I love working with them. I would consider them kind of my flagship client. But then from there, I started to kind of pick up more clients and it took off from there after that summer. I spent that summer generally working 3 days a week for that client and then spending 4 days a week lying face down in a park in the sun. That helped me recover a little bit from burnout.

And then after that, I consulted full-time for about 2 years and I still consult on the side of a full-time job. So that's my story.

Is anyone feeling a penchant for going next?

MAE: I can go. I've been trying to think how am I going to say this succinctly. I've had at least two jobs and several club, or organization memberships, or founding, or positions since I was 16. So wherever I go, I've always been saying, “Well, I've done it these 47 ways already [laughs] even since I was a teenager.” So I've sort of always had a consulting orientation to take a broader view and figure out ways in which we can systematize whatever it is that's happening around me.

Specifically for programming, I had been an administrator, like an executive leader, for many years. I just got tired of trying to explain what we as administrators needed and I just wanted to be able to build the things. I was already a really big Microsoft access person and anybody who just got a little [laughs] snarky in there knows I love Microsoft Access. It really allowed me to be able to offer all kinds of things to, for example, I was on the board of directors of my Kiwanis Club and I made a member directory and attendance tracker and all these things.

Anyway, when I quit my executive job and went to code school in 2014, I did it because I knew that I could build something a lot better than this crazy Access database [laughs] that I had, this very involved ETL things going on in. I had a nonprofit that I had been involved with for 15 years at that point and I had also taken a database class where I modeled this large database that I was envisioning.

So I had a bunch of things in order. I quit my full-time job and went to an income of $6,500 my first year and I hung with that flagship customer for a while and tailored my software. So I sort of have this straddling of a SaaS situation and a consulting situation. I embed into whoever I'm working with and help them in many ways. Often, people need lots of different levels of coaching, training, and skills development mixed with just a place to put things that makes sense to them.

I think that's the brief version [laughs] that I can come up with and that is how I got where I am and I've gone in and out of also having a full-time job. Before I quit that I referenced the first year I worked a full-time job plus at least 40 to a 100 hours on my software to get it ready for prime time. So a lot of, a lot of work.

CASEY: Good story. I don't think I ever heard these fuller stories from either of you, even though I know roughly the shape of your past. It's so cool to hear it. Thanks for sharing them.

All right, I'll share about me now.

So I've been a developer, a PM, and I've done a lot of design work. I've done all the roles over my time in tech. I started doing programming 10, 15 years ago, and I'm always getting burnt out everywhere I go because I care so much and we get asked to do things that seem dumb. I'm sure anyone listening can relate to this in some organization and when I say dumb, I don't use that word myself directly. I'm quoting a lot of people who would use that word, but I say either we're being asked to do things that don't make sense, aren't good ideas, or there are things that are we're being asked to do that would make sense if we knew why and it's not being communicated really well. It's poor communication. Either one, the other, or both.

So after a lot of jobs, I end up taking a 3-month sabbatical and I'm like, “Whatever, I got to go. I can't deal with caring so much anymore, and I'm not willing to care less either.”

So most recently, I took a sabbatical and I finished my book, Debugging Your Brain, which takes together psychology ideas, like cognitive behavioral therapy and programming ideas and that, I'm so proud of. If you haven't read it yet, please check it out.

Then I went back to my job and I gave them another month where I was like, “All right, look, these are things need to change for me to be happy to work here.” Nothing changed, then I left. Maybe it's changing very slowly, but too slowly for me to be happy there, or most of these past companies. [laughs]

After I left, this last sabbatical, I spent three to six months working on a board game version of my book. That's a lot of fun. And then I decided I needed more income, I needed to pay the bills, and I can totally be a tech consultant if I just deal with learning marketing and sales. That's been my… probably six months now, I've been working on the marketing in sales part, thinking a lot about it. I have a lot of support from a lot of friends.

Now I consult on ways to make teams happier and more effective and that's my company name, Happy and Effective. I found it really easy to sell workshops, like diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops to HR departments. They're pretty hungry for those kinds of workshops and it's hard to find good, effective facilitators. It's a little bit harder to get companies to pay for coaching for their employees, even though a new EM would love coaching and how to be a good leader.

Companies don't always have the budget for that set aside and I wish they would. I'm working with a lot of companies. I have a couple, but not as many as I'd like. And then the hardest, my favorite kind of client is when I get to embed with the team and really work on seeing what's going on me on the ground with them, and help understand what's going on to tell the executives what's happening and what needs to change and really make a big change. I've done that once, or twice and I'd love to do that more, but it's the hardest. So I'm thinking about easy, medium, hard difficulty of selling things to clients. I would actually make plenty of money is doing workshops, honestly, but I want the impact of embedding. That's my bigger goal is the impact.

MAE: Yeah. I basically have used my software as a Trojan horse for [laughs] offering the consulting and change management services to help them get there because that is something that people already expect to spend some money on. That, though has been a little problematic because a few years in, they start to think that the line item in the budget is only for software and then it looks very expensive to them. Whereas, if they were looking at it as a consultant gig, it's incredibly inexpensive to them.

CASEY: Yeah. It's maybe so inexpensive that it must not be a quality product that they're buying.

MAE: Yes.

CASEY: Put it that way implicitly.

MAE: Definitely, there's also that.

CASEY: When setting prices, this is a good general rule of thumb. It could be too low it looks like it'll be junk, like a dollar store purchase, or it can be too high and they just can't afford it, and then there's the middle sweet spot where it seems very valuable. They barely can afford it, but they know it'll be worth it, and that's a really good range to be in.

MAE: Yeah. Honestly, for the work that I do, it's more of a passion project. I would do it totally for free, but that doesn't work for this reason you're talking about.

CASEY: Yeah.

MAE: Like, it needs to hurt a little bit because it's definitely going to be lots and lots of my time and it's going to be some of their time and it needs to be an investment that not hurt bad [laughs] but just be noticeable as opposed to here's a Kenny’s Candy, or something.

CASEY: I found that works on another scale, on another level. I do career coaching for friends, and friends of friends, and I'm willing to career coach my friends anyway. I've always been. For 10 years, I've reviewed hundreds, thousands of resumes. I've done so many interviews. I'm down to be a career coach, but no one was taking me up on it until I started charging and now friends are coming to me to pay me money to coach them. I think on their side, it feels more equitable. They're more willing to do it now that I'm willing to take money in exchange for it. I felt really bad charging friends until I had the sliding skill. So people who make less, I charge less for, for this personal service. It's kind of weird having a personal service like that, but it works out really well. I'm so happy for so many friends that have gotten jobs they're happy with now from the support. So even charging friends, like charging them nothing means they're not going to sign up for it.

MAE: Yes, and often, there is a bias of like, “Oh, well, that's my friend.” [laughs] so they must not be a BFD.”

CASEY: Yeah. But we are all BFDs.

MAE: Exactly!

How about you Chelsea? How did you start to get to the do the pricing thing?

CHELSEA: Yeah, I think it's interesting to hear y'all's approaches to the marketing and the pricing because mine has been pretty different from that.

But before I get off on that, one thing I do want to mention around getting started with offering personal services at price is that if it seems too large a step to offer a personal service to one person for an amount of money, one thing that I have witnessed folks have success with in starting out in this vein is to set up a Patreon and then have office hours for patrons wherein they spend 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon, or something like that and anyone who is a patron is welcome to join. What often ends up happening for folks in that situation is that people who are friends of theirs support their Patreon and then the friends can show up.

So effectively, folks are paying a monthly fee for access to this office hours, which they might attend, or they might not attend. But there are two nice things about it.

The first thing about it is that you're not – from a psychological perspective, it doesn’t feel like charging your friends for your time with them. It feels more indirect than that in a way that can be helpful for folks who are very new to charging for things and uncomfortable with the idea.

The second thing is that the friends are often much more willing to pay than somebody who's new to charging is willing to charge. So the friends are putting this money into this Patreon, usually not because they're trying to get access to your office hours, but because they want to support you and one of the nice things about Patreon is that it is a monthly amount.

So having a monthly email from Patreon that's like, “Hey, you we're sending you—” it doesn't even have to be a lot. “We're sending you 40 bucks this month.” It is a helpful conditioning exercise for folks who are not used to charging because they are getting this regular monthly income and the amount is not as important as receiving the regular income, which is helpful psychological preparation for charging for things on your own, I think.

That's not the way that I did it, but I have seen people be effective that way. So there's that.

For me, marketing was something that I was very worried about having to do when I started my business. In fact, it was one of those things where my conviction, when I started my consulting business, was I do not want to have to sell my services. I will coast on what clients I can find and when it is no longer easy, I will just get a full-time job because selling traditionally conceptualized is not something that I enjoyed.

I had a head start on the marketing element of things, that is sort of the brand awareness element of things, my reputation and the reason for that is that first of all, I had consulted at Labs for several years, which meant that every client team that I had ever worked with there, the director remembered me, the product owner remember me. So a lot of people who had been clients of Labs – I didn't actually get anybody to be a client of mine who was a client of Labs, but the individuals I had worked with on those projects who had then changed jobs to go to different companies, reached out to me on some occasions. So that was one place that I got clients from.

The other place that I gotten clients from has been my blog. Before I started my business, I had already been writing a tech blog for like 4, or 5 years and my goal with the tech blog has never actually been to get clientele, or make money. My goals for the blog when I started it were to write down what I was learning so that I would remember it and then after that, it was to figure out how to communicate my ideas so that I would have an easier time communicating them in the workplace. After that, it became an external validation source so that I would no longer depend on my individual manager's opinion of me to decide how good I was at programming.

Only very recently has it changed to something like, okay, now I'm good enough at communicating and good enough at tech that I actually have something to teach anybody else. So honestly, for many years, I would see the viewership on my blog and I would be like, “Who are all these people? Why are they in my house?” Like, this is weird, but I would get some credibility from that.

CASEY: They don't expect any tea from me.

CHELSEA: Yeah. I really hope. I don't have enough to go around, [laughs] but it did help and that's where a lot of folks have kind of come from. Such that when I posted on my blog a post about how I'm going to be going indie. I've quit my job. I didn't really expect that to go anywhere, but a few people did reach out from that and I've been lucky insofar is that that has helped me sustain a client load in a way that I didn't really expect to.

There's also, I would be remiss not to mention that what I do is I sling code for money for the majority of my consulting business, at least historically and especially in the beginning was exclusively that, and there's enough of a demand to have somebody come in and write code that that helped. It also helped that as I was taking on clients, I started to niche down specifically what I wanted to work on to a specific type of client and to a specific type problem. So I quickly got to the point where I had enough of a client load that I was going to have to make a choice about which clients to accept, or I was going to have to work over time.

Now, the conventional wisdom in this circumstance is to raise your rates. Vast majority of business development resources will tell you that that's what you're supposed to do in this situation. But part of my goal in creating my consulting business had been to get out of burnout and part of the reason for the burnout was that I did not feel that the work that I was doing was contributing to a cause that made me feel good about what I was doing. It wasn't morally reprehensible, but I just didn't feel like I was contributing to a better future in the way that my self-identity sort of mandated that I did. It was making me irritable and all these kinds of things.

MAE: I had the same thing, yeah.

CHELSEA: Yeah. So it's interesting to hear that that's a common experience, but if I were to raise my rates, the companies that were still going to be able to afford me were going to be companies whose products were not morally reprehensible, but not things that coincided with what I was trying to get out of my consulting business.

So what I did instead was I said, “I'm specifically looking to work with organizations that are contributing to basic scientific research, improving access for underserved communities, and combating the effects of climate change,” and kept my rates effectively the same, but niche down the clientele to that.

That ended up being kind of how I did it. I find that rates vary from client to client in part, because of what you were talking about, Casey, wherein you have to hit the right price in order to even get clients board in certain circumstances.

CASEY: Right.

CHELSEA: I don't know a good way to guess it. My technique for this, which I don't know if this is kosher to say, but my technique for this has been whoever reached out to me, interested in bringing me on as a consultant for that organization, I ask that person to do some research and figure out what rate I'm supposed to pitch. That has helped a lot because a lot of times my expectations have been wildly off in those circumstances.

One time I had somebody say to me, this was for a custom workshop they wanted. I was like, “What should I charge?” And they were like, “I don't know, a few thousand.” I was like, “Is that $1,200? Is that $9,000? I don't know how much money that is,” and so they went back and then they came back and they were able to tell me more specifically a band. There was absolutely no way I would've hit that number accurately without that information.

CASEY: Yeah, and different clients have different numbers. You setting your price standard flat across all customers is not a good strategy either. That's why prices aren't on websites so often.

CHELSEA: Yeah. I find that it does depend a lot. There's similarly, like I said, a lot of my clients are clients who are contributing to basic scientific research are very often grant funded and grants funding is a very particular kind of funding. It can be intermittent. There has to be a skillset on the team for getting the grant funding. A lot of times, to be frank, it doesn't support the kinds of rates that somebody could charge hourly in a for-profit institution.

So for me, it was worth it to make the choice that this is who I want to work with. I know that my rate is effectively capped at this, if I'm going to do that and that was fine by me. Although, I'm lying to say it was completely fine by me. I had to take a long, hard look in the mirror, while I was still in that last full-time job, and realize that I had become a person who gauged her self-worth by the salary that she commanded more than I was comfortable with. More than I wanted to. I had to figure out how to weaken that dependency before I was really able to go off and do my own thing. That was my experience with it.

I'm curious whether y'all, well, in particular, Casey, did you find the same thing?

CASEY: The self-worth by salary?

CHELSEA: Yeah.

CASEY: I felt that over time, yeah. Like I went from private sector big tech to government and I got a pay cut and I was like, “Ugh.” It kind of hurt a little and it wasn't even as much as I was promised. Once I got through the hiring process, it was lower than that and now I'm making way less. When I do my favorite impact thing, the board game, like if I made a board game about mental health for middle schoolers, which is something I really want to do, that makes less than anything else I could with my time. I'll be lucky to make money on that at all. So it's actually inverse. My salary is inversely proportional to how much impact I can have if I'm working anyway.

So my dream is to have enough corporate clients that I can do half-time, or game impact, whatever other impact things I'm thinking about doing. I think of my impact a lot. Impact is my biggest goal, but the thing is salary hurts. If I don't have the salary and I want to live where I'm living and the lifestyle I have, I don't want to cut back on that and I don't need to, hopefully.

CHELSEA: Right.

CASEY: I'm hoping eventually, I'll have a steady stream of clients, I don't need to do the marketing and sales outreach as much and all those hours I kind of recoup. I can invest those in the impact things. I've heard people can do that. I think I'll get there.

CHELSEA: No, I think you absolutely will.

Mae, I'm curious as to your experience, because I know that you have a lot of experience with a similar calculation of determining which things are going to provide more income, which things are probably going to provide less income, and then balancing across a bunch of factors like money, but also impact, time spent, emotional drain, and all that stuff.

MAE: Well, Chelsea.

[laughter]

I am a real merry go round in this arena. So before I became a programmer, I had a state job, I was well paid, and I was pretty set. Then I was a programmer and I took huge pay cut because I quit. I became a programmer when I was 37 years old. So I already had a whole career and to start at the beginning and be parallel with 20-year-old so it's not just like my salary, but also my level and my level of impact on my – and level of the amount of people who wanted to ask me for my advice [laughs] was significantly different.

So like the ego's joking stopped and so when you mentioned the thing about identity. Doing any kind of consulting in your own deal is a major identity reorganization and having the money, the title, the clout, and the engagement. Like a couple years, I have spent largely alone and that is very different than working at a place where I have colleagues, or when I live somewhere and have roommates. But I have found signing up for lots and lots of different social justice and passion project things, and supporting nonprofits that I believe in.

So from my perspective, I'm really offering a capacity building grant out of my own pocket, my own time, and my own heart and that has been deeply rewarding and maybe not feel much about my identity around salary. Except it does make me question myself as an adult. Like these aren't the best financial decisions to be making, [chuckles] but I get enough out of having made them that it's worth it to me.

One of the things probably you were thinking of, Chelsea, we worked together a little bit on this mutual aid project that I took on when the pandemic started and I didn't get paid any dollars for that and I was working 18 hours a day on it, [chuckles] or something.

So I like to really jump in a wholeheartedly and then once I really, really do need some dollars, then I figure something else out. That is kind of how I've ebbed and flowed with it. But mostly, I've done it by reducing my personal overhead so that I'm not wigged about the money and lowering whatever my quality-of-life spending goals [chuckles] are. But that also has had to happen because I have not wanted to and I couldn't get myself to get excited about marketing of myself and my whole deal. Like I legit still don't have a website and I've been in operation now since 2014 so that's a while.

I meet people and I can demonstrate what it is and I get clients and for me, having only a few clients, there's dozens of people that work for each one. So it's more of an organization client than a bunch of individuals and I can't actually handle a ton. I was in a YCombinator thing that wanted me to really be reporting on income, growth rates, and all of these number of new acquisition things, and it just wasn't for me. Those are not my goals. I want to make sure that this nonprofit can help more people this year and that they can get more grant money because they know how many people they helped and that those people are more efficient at their job every day. So those are harder to measure. It's not quite an answer to your question, [laughs] but I took it and ran a little.

CHELSEA: No, I appreciate that. There is a software engineer and a teacher that I follow on Twitter. His name is GeePawHill. Are y'all familiar with GeePawHill?

MAE: No.

CHELSEA: And he did a thread a couple of days ago that this conversation reminds me of and I found it. Is that all right if I read like a piece of it and paraphrase part of it?

MAE: Yes, please.

CHELSEA: Okay.

So this is what he says. He says, “The weirdest thing about being a teacher for young geek minds: I am teaching them things…that their actual first jobs will most likely forbid them to do.

The young'uns I work with are actually nearly all hire-able as is, after 18 months of instruction, without any intervention from me.

The problem they're going to face when they get to The Show isn't technical, or intellectual at all. No language, or framework, or OS, or library, or algorithm is going to daunt them, not for long.

No, the problem they're going to face is how to sustain their connection to the well of geek joy, in a trade that is systematically bent on simultaneously exploiting that connection while denying it exists and refusing any and all access to it.

It is possible, to stick it out, to acquire enough space and power, to re-assert one's path to the well. Many have done it; many are doing it today.

But it is very hard.

Very hard.

Far harder than learning the Visitor pattern, or docker, or, dart, or SQL, or even Haskell.

How do you tell people you've watched “become” as they bathed in the cool clear water that, for some long time, 5 years or more, they must…navigate the horrors of extractive capitalist software development?

The best answer I have, so far, is to try and teach them how and where to find water outside of work.

It is a lousy answer.

I feel horrible giving it. But I'd feel even more horrible if I didn't tell them the truth.”

CASEY: I just saw this thread and I really liked it, too. I'm glad you found it.

MAE: Oh, yeah. I find it honestly pretty inspiring, like people generally who get involved in the kinds of consulting gigs that we three are talking about, which is a little different than just any random consulting, or any random freelancing.

CASEY: Like impact consulting, I might call that.

MAE: Yeah. It's awesome if the money comes, but it's almost irrelevant [chuckles] provided that basic needs are meant. So that's kind of been my angle. We'll see how – talk to me in 20 more years when I'm [chuckles] trying to retire and made a lot of choices that I was happy with at the time.

CASEY: This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who's an executive director of an orchestra in the nonprofit space and he was telling me that so many nonprofits shoot themselves in the foot by not doing enough fundraising, by not raising money, and that comes from not wanting to make money in a way because they're a nonprofit, money is not a motive, and everybody's very clear about that.

That's noble and all, but it ends up hurting them because they don't have the money to do the impactful things they would as a nonprofit. Money is a necessary evil here and a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. Including me a lot of the time. Honestly, I have to tell myself not to. What would I tell a friend? “No, charge more money.” Okay, I guess I'll tell myself to do that now. I have this conversation with myself a lot.

MAE: Yeah. I've been very aware that when I become anti-money, the well dries up. The money well. [laughs]

CASEY: Yeah.

MAE: And when I am respectful of and appreciative of money in the world, more comes my way. There is an internal dousing, I think that happens that one needs to be very careful about for sure.

CASEY: One of the techniques I use with myself and with clients is a matrix where I write out for this approach, this thing that I'm thinking about how much money will it make, how much impact will it have on this goal, and all the different heuristics I would use to make the decision, or columns and all the options arose. I put numbers in it and I might weight my columns because money is less important than impact, but it's still important. It's there. I do all this math.

In the end, the summary column with the averages roughly matches what's in my head, which is the things that are similar in my head are similar on paper, but I can see why and that's very clarifying for me. I really like being able to see it in this matrix form and being able to see that you have to focus on the money some amount. If you just did the high impact one, it wouldn't be on the top of the list. It's like, it's hard to think about so many variables at once, but seeing it helps me.

CHELSEA: It is. GeePaw speaks to that some later in the thread. He says, “You’ve got to feed your family. You’ve got to. That's not negotiable. But you don't got to forget the well. To be any good at all, you have to keep finding the well, keep reaching it, keep noticing it. Doesn't matter whether it's office hours, or after hours. Matters whether you get to it.

The thing you’ve got to watch, when you become a professional geek, isn't the newest tech, and it sure as hell isn't the org's process.

You’ve got to watch whether, or how you're getting to the well.

If you're getting to the well, in whatever way, you'll stay alive and change the world.”

I think I'm curious as to y'all's thoughts on this, but like I mentioned earlier, I have a full-time job and I also do this consulting on the side. I also teach. I teach at the Master's program in computer science at University of Chicago. I do some mentoring with an organization called Emergent Works, which trains formerly incarcerated technologists.

The work situation that I have pieced together for myself, I think manages to get me the income I need and also, the impact that I'm looking for and the ability to work with people and those kinds of things. I think my perspective at this point is that it's probably difficult, if it's realistic at all, to expect any one position to be able to meet all of those needs simultaneously. Maybe they exist, but I suspect that they're relatively few and far between and I think that we probably do ourselves a disservice by propagating this idea that what you need to do is just make yourself so supremely interview-able that everybody wants to hire you and then you get to pick the one position where you get to do that because there's only one in the entirety of tech, it's that rare.

Sure, maybe that's an individualist way to look at it. But when we step back and look more closely, or when we step back and look more broadly at that, it's like, all right, so we have to become hypercompetitive in order to be able to get the position where we can make enough while helping people. Like, the means there seem kind of cutthroat for the ends, right? [laughs]

CASEY: This reminds me of relationships, too and I think there's a lot of great parallels here. Like you shouldn't expect your partner to meet all of your needs, all of them.

MAE: I was thinking the same thing!

CASEY: Uh huh. Social, emotional, spiritual, physical, all your needs cannot possibly by one person and that is so much pressure to put on that person,

CHELSEA: Right.

CASEY: It's like not healthy.

CHELSEA: Right.

CASEY: You can choose some to prioritize over others for your partner, but you're not going to get a 100% of it and you shouldn't.

CHELSEA: Well, and I find that being a conversation fairly regularly in monogamous versus polyamorous circles as well. Like, how much is it appropriate to expect of a partner? But I think it is a valid conversation to have in those circles. But I think that even in the context of a monogamous relationship, a person has other relationships—familial relationships, friend relationships—outside of that single romantic relationship.

CASEY: Co-workers, community people, yeah.

CHELSEA: Right. But even within that monogamous context, it's most realistic and I would argue, the most healthy to not expect any one person to provide for all of your needs and rather to rely on a community. That's what we're supposed to be able to do.

CASEY: Yeah.

MAE: Interdependence, not independence.

CHELSEA: Right.

CASEY: It's more resilient in the face of catastrophe, or change in general, mild, more mild change and you want to be that kind of resilient person for yourself, too. Just like you would do a computer system, or an organization. They should be resilient, too.

MAE: Yes.

CASEY: Your relationship with your job is another one.

MAE: Totally.

CHELSEA: Right. And I think that part of the reason the burnout is so quick – like the amount of time, the median amount of time that somebody spends at a company in tech is 2.2 years.

MAE: I know, it's so weird.

CHELSEA: Very few companies in tech have a large number of lifers, for example, or something like that. There are a number of reasons for that. We don't necessarily have to get into all of them, although, we can if you want. But I think one of them is definitely that we expect to get so much out of a full-time position. Tech is prone. due to circumstances of its origin, to an amount of idealism. We are saving the world. We, as technologists, are saving the world and also, we, as technologists, can expect this salary and we, as technologists, are a family and we play ping pong, and all of these things –

[laughter]

That contribute to an unrealistic expectation of a work environment, which if that is the only place that we are getting fulfillment as programmers, then people become unsatisfied very quickly because how could an organization that's simultaneously trying to accomplish a goal, meet all of these expect for everybody? I think it's rare at best.

CASEY: I want to bring up another example of this kind of thing. Imagine you're an engineer and you have an engineering manager. What's their main job? Is it to get the organization's priorities to be done by the team, like top-down kind of thing? We do need that to happen. Or is it to mentor each individual and coach them and help them grow as an engineer? We need that somewhere, too, yeah. Or is it to make the team – like the team to come together as a team and be very effective together and to represent their needs to the org? That, too, but we don't need one person to do all three of those necessarily. If the person's not technical, you can get someone else in the company to do technical mentorship, like an architect, or just a more senior person on, or off the team somewhere else. But we put a lot of pressure on the engineering managers to do that and this applies to so many roles. That's just one I know that I can define pretty well.

There's an article that explains that pretty well. We'll put in the show notes.

MAE: Yes!

So what I am currently doing is I have a not 40 hours a week job as an engineering manager and especially when I took the gig, I was still doing all of these pandemic charity things and I'm like, “These are more important to me right now and I only have so many hours in the day. So do you need me to code at this place? I can, but do you need me to because all those hours are hours I can go code for all these other things that I'm doing,” and [laughs] it worked. I have been able to do all three of the things that you're talking about, Casey, but certainly able to defer in different places and it's made me – this whole thing of not working full-time makes you optimize in very different ways.

So I sprinkle my Slack check-ins all day, but I didn't have to work all day to be present all day. There's a lot that has been awesome. It's not for everyone, but I also have leaned heavily on technical mentorship happening from tech leads as well.

CASEY: Sounds good.

MAE: But I'm still involved. But this thing about management, especially in tech being whichever programmer seems like the most dominant programmer is probably going to be a good needs to be promoted into management. Just P.S. management is its own discipline, has its own trajectory and when I talk to hiring managers and they only care about my management experience in tech, which is 6 years, right? 8, but I have 25 years of experience in managing. So there's a preciousness of what it is that we are asking for the employees and what the employees are asking of the employer, like you were talking about Chelsea, that is very interesting. It's very privileged, and does lead a lot of people to burnout and disappointment because their ideas got so lofty.

I just want to tie this back a little bit too, something you read in that quote about – I forget the last quote, but it was something about having enough to be able to change the world and it reminded me of Adrienne Maree Brown, pleasure activism, emergent strategy, and all of her work, and largely, generations of Black women have been saying, “Yo, you’ve got to take care [chuckles] of yourself to be able to affect change.” Those people have been the most effective and powerful change makers. So definitely, if you're curious about this topic, I urge you to go listen to some brilliant Black women about it.

CASEY: We'll link that in the show notes, too.

I think a lot about engineering managers and one way that doesn't come up a lot is you can get training for engineering managers to be stronger managers and for some reason, that is not usually an option people reach for. It could happen through HR, or it could happen if you have a training budget and you're a new EM, you could use your training budget to hire coaching from someone. I'm an example. But there's a ton of people out there that offer this kind of thing. If you don't learn the leadership skills when you switch roles, if you don't take time to learn those skills that are totally learnable, you're not going to have them and it's hard to apply them. There's a lot of pressure to magically know them now that you’ve switched hats.

MAE: And how I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have a therapist, [laughs] I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have multiple job coaches at any time. Like why are we not sourcing more ideas and problem-solving strategies, and thinking we need to be the repository of how to handle X, Y, Z situation?

CASEY: For some reason, a lot of people I've talked to think their manager is supposed to do that for them. Their manager is supposed to be their everything; their boss. They think the boss that if they're bad, you quit your job. If they're good, you'll stay. That boss ends up being their career coach for people, unless they're a bad career coach and then you're just stuck. Because we expect it so strongly and that is an assumption I want everyone listening to question. Do you need your manager at work to be that person for you? If they are, that's great. You're very fortunate. If not, how can you find someone? Someone in the community, a friend, family member, a professional coach, there's other options, other mentors in the company. You don't have to depend on that manager who doesn't have time for you to give you that kind of support.

CHELSEA: So to that end, my thinking around management and mentorship changed about the time I hit – hmm. It was a while ago now, I don't know, maybe 6 years as a programmer, or something like that. Because before that, I was very bought into this idea that your manager is your mentor and all these types of things.

There was something that I realized. There were two things that I realized. The first one was that, for me, most of my managers were not well set up to be mentors to me and this is why. Well, the truth is I level up quickly and for many people who are managers in a tech organization, they were technologists for 3 to 5 years before they became managers. They were often early enough in their career that they didn't necessarily know what management entailed, or whether they should say no based on what they were interested in. Many managers in tech figure out what the job is and then try to find as many surreptitious ways as possible to get back into the code.

MAE: Yeah.

CHELSEA: Additionally, many of those managers feel somewhat insecure about their weakening connection to the code base of the company that they manage.

MAE: Yeah.

CHELSEA: And so it can be an emotionally fraught experience for them to be mentor to someone whose knowledge of the code base that they are no longer in makes them feel insecure. So I learned that the most effective mentors for me – well, I learned something about the most effective mentors for me and I learned something of the most effective managers for me.

I learned that the most effective managers for me either got way out ahead of me experience wise before they became managers, I mean 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, because those are not people who got promoted to management because they didn't know to say no. Those are people who got promoted to management after they got tired of writing code and they no longer staked their self-image on whether they're better coders than the people that they manage. That's very, very important.

The other type of person who was a good manager for me was somebody who had never been a software engineer and there are two reasons for that. First of all, they trended higher on raw management experience. Second of all, they were not comparing their technical skillset to my technical skillset in a competitive capacity and that made them better managers for me, honestly. It made things much, much easier.

And then in terms of mentors, I found that I had a lot more luck going outside of the organization I was working for mentors and that's again, for two reasons. The first one is that a lot of people, as they gain experience, go indie. Just a lot of people, like all kinds. Some of my sort of most trusted mentors. Avdi Grimm is somebody I've learned a lot from, indie effectively at this point. GeePawHill, like I mentioned, indie effectively at this point. Kenneth Mayer, indie effectively at this point. And these are all people who had decades of experience and the particular style of programming that I was doing very early in my career for many years. So that's the first reason.

And then the second reason is that at your job, it is in your interest to succeed at everything you try—at most jobs. And jobs will tell you it's okay to fail. Jobs will tell you it's okay to like whatever, not be good at things and to be learning. But because if I'm drawing a paycheck from an organization, I do not feel comfortable not being good at the thing that I am drawing the paycheck for.

MAE: Same.

CHELSEA: And honestly, even if they say that that's the case, when the push comes to shove and there's a deadline, they don't actually want you to be bad at things. Come on! That doesn't make any sense. But I've been able to find ambitious projects that I can contribute to not for pay and in those situations, I'm much more comfortable failing because I can be like, “You know what, if they don't like my work, they can have all their money back.”

And I work on a couple projects like that right now where I get to work with very experienced programmers on projects that are interesting and challenging, and a lot of times, I just absolutely eat dirt. My first PR doesn't work and I don't know what's wrong and the whole description is like somebody please help and I don't feel comfortable doing that on – if I had to do it at work, I would do it, but I'm not comfortable doing it.

I firmly believe that for people to accelerate their learning to their full capacity for accelerating their learning, they must place themselves in situations where they not only might fail, but it's pretty likely. Because that's what's stretching your capacity to the degree that you need to get better and that's just not a comfortable situation for somewhere that you depend on to make a living.

And that ended up being, I ended up approaching my management and my mentorship as effectively mutually exclusive things and it ended up working out really well for me. At this particular point in time, I happened to have a manager who happened to get way out ahead of me technically, and is willing to review PRs and so, that's very nice. But it's a nice-to-have. It's not something that I expect of a manager and it's ended up making me much more happy and manage relationships.

MAE: I agree with all of that. So well said, Chelsea.

CHELSEA: I try, I try. [laughs]

Casey, are there things that you look for specifically in a manager?

CASEY: Hmm. I guess for that question, I want to take the perspective inward, into myself. What do I need support on and who can I get that from? And this is true as also an independent worker as a consultant freelancer, too. I need support for when things are hard and I can be validated from people who have similar experiences, that kind of like emotional support. I need technical support and skills, like the sales I don't have yet and I have support for that, thank goodness. Individuals, I need ideally communities and individuals, both.

They're both really important to me and some of these could be in a manager, but lately, I'm my own manager and I can be none of those things, really. I'm myself. I can't do this external support for myself. Even when I'm typing into a spreadsheet and the computer's trying to be a mirror, it's not as good as talking to another person.

Another perspective that I need support on is how do I know what I'm doing is important and so, I do use spreadsheets as a mirror for that a lot of the time for myself. Like this impact is having this kind of magnitude of impact on this many people and then that calculates to this thing, maybe. Does that match my gut? That's literally what I want to know, too. The numbers aren't telling me, but talking to other people about impact on their projects really kind of solidifies that for me. And it's not always the client directly. It could be someone else who sees the impact I'm having on a client.

Kind of like the manager, I don't want to expect clients to tell me the impact I'm having. In fact, for business reasons, I should know what the impact is myself, to tell them, to upsell them and continue it going anyway. So it really helps me to have peers to talk through about impact. Like that, too types of support.

What other kinds of support do you need as consultants that I didn't just cover?

MAE: I still need – and I have [laughs] hired Casey to help me. I still need a way to explain what it is that I am offering and what the value of that really is in a way that is clear and succinct. Every time I've gone to make a website, or a list of what it is that I offer, I end up in the hundreds of bullet points [laughs] and I just don't – [overtalk]

CASEY: Yeah, yeah.

MAE: Have a way to capture it yet. So often when people go indie, they do have a unique idea, a unique offering so finding a way to summarize what that is can be really challenging.

I loved hearing you two when you were talking about knowing what kinds of work you want to do and who your ideal customer is. Those are things I have a clearer sense of, but how to make that connection is still a little bit of a gap for me.

But you reminded me in that and I just want to mention here this book, The Pumpkin Plan, like a very bro business book situation, [chuckles] but what is in there is so good. I don't want to give it away and also, open up another topic [laughs] that I'll talk too long about. So I won't go into it right now, but definitely recommend it. One of the things is how to call your client list and figure out what is the most optimal situation that's going to lead toward the most impact for everybody.

CASEY: One of the things I think back to a lot is user research and how can we apply that this business discovery process. I basically used the same techniques that were in my human computer interaction class I took 10, or 15 years ago. Like asking open ended questions, trying to get them to say what their problems are, remembering how they said it in their own words and saying it back to them—that's a big, big step.

But then there's a whole lot of techniques I didn't learn from human computer interaction, that are sales techniques, and my favorite resource for that so far is called SPIN selling where SPIN is an acronym and it sounds like a wonky technique that wouldn't work because it's just like a random technique to pull out. I don't know, but it's not.

This book is based on studies and it shows what you need to do to make big ticket sales go through, which is very different than selling those plastic things with the poppy bubbles in the mall stand in the middle of the hallway. Those low-key things they can manipulate people into buying and people aren't going to return it probably. But big-ticket things need a different approach than traditional sales and marketing knowledge and I really like the ideas in SPIN selling. I don't want to go into them today. We'll talk about it later. But those are two of the perspectives I bring to this kind of problem, user research and the SPIN selling techniques.

I want to share what my ideal client would be. I think that's interesting, too. So I really want to help companies be happier and more effective. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective, and that has the impact on the users of the company, or whoever their clients are. It definitely impacts that, which makes it a thing I can sell, thankfully. So an organization usually knows when they're not the most happy, or the most effective. They know it, but my ideal client isn't just one that knows that, but they also have leadership buy-in; they have some leader who really cares and can advocate for making it better and they just don't know how. They don't have enough resources to make it happen in their org. Maybe they have, or don't have experience with it, but they need support. That's where I come in and then my impact really is on the employees. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective. That's the direct impact I want, and then it has the really strong, indirect impact on the business outcomes.

So in that vein, I'm willing to help even large tech companies because if I can help their employees be happier, that is a positive impact. Even if I don't care about large tech companies’ [chuckles] business outcomes, I'm okay with that because my focus is specifically on the employees. That's different than a lot of people I talk to; they really just want to support like nonprofit type, stronger impact of the mission and that totally makes sense to me, too.

MAE: Also, it is possible to have a large and ever growing equitably run company. It is possible. I do want to contribute toward that existing in the world and as much as there's focus on what the ultimate looking out impact is, I care about the experience of employees and individuals on the way to get there. I'm not a utilitarian thinker.

CASEY: Yeah, but we can even frame it in a utilitarian way if we need to. If we're like a stakeholder presentation, if someone leaves the company and it takes six months to replace them and their work is in the meantime off board to other people, what's the financial impact of all that. I saw a paper about it. Maybe I can dig it up and I'll link to it. It's like to replace a person in tech it costs a $100K. So if they can hire a consultant for less than a $100K to save one person from leaving, it pays for itself. If that number is right, or whatever. Maybe it was ten employees for that number. The paper will say much better than I will.

CHELSEA: I think that in mentioning that Casey, you bring up something that businesses I think sometimes don't think about, which is some of the hidden costs that can easily be difficult to predict, or difficult to measure those kinds of things. One of the hidden costs is the turnover costs is the churn cost because there's how much it takes to hire another person and then there's the amount of ramp time before that person gets to where the person who left was.

CASEY: Right, right, right.

CHELSEA: And that's also a thing. There's all the time that developers are spending on forensic software analysis in order to find out all of the context that got dropped when a person left.

CASEY: Yeah. The one person who knew that part of the code base, the last one is gone, uh oh.

CHELSEA: Right.

CASEY: It's a huge trust. And then engineering team is often really interested in conveying that risk. But if they're not empowered enough and don't have enough bandwidth time and energy to make the case, the executive team, or whoever will never hear it and they won't be able to safeguard against it.

MAE: Or using the right language to communicate it.

CASEY: Right, right. And that’s its own skill. That's trainable, too thankfully. But we don't usually train engineers in that, traditionally. Engineers don't receive that training unless they go out of their way for it. PMs and designers, too, honestly. Like the stakeholder communication, everybody can work on.

MAE: Yeah.

CASEY: That's true.

MAE: Communication. Everyone can, or not. Yes. [laughs]

I learned the phrase indie today. I have never heard it and I really like it! It makes me feel cool inside and so love and – [overtalk]

CASEY: Yeah, I have no record label, or I am my own record label, perhaps.

MAE: Yo!

CASEY: I've got one. I like the idea of having a Patreon, not to make money, but to have to help inspire yourself and I know a lot of friends have had Patreons with low income from it and they were actually upset about it. So I want to go back to those friends and say, “Look, this prove some people find value in what you're doing.” Like the social impact. I might make my own even. Thank you.

MAE: I know I might do it too. It's good. That's good.

CHELSEA: Absolutely. Highly recommended.

One thing that I want to take away is the exercise, Casey, that you were talking about of tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes in terms of a person's needs. Because I think that an exercise like that would be extremely helpful for, for example, some of my students who are getting their very first tech jobs. Students receive a very one-dimensional message about the way that tech employment goes. It tends to put set of five companies that show remain unnamed front and center, which whatever, but I would like them to be aware of the other options. And there is a very particular way of gauging the value of a tech position that I believe includes fewer dimensions than people should probably consider for the health of their career long-term and not only the health of their career, but also their health in their career.

CASEY: One more parting thought I want to share for anyone is you need support for your career growth, for your happiness. If you're going to be a consultant, you need support for that. Find support in individuals and communities, you deserve that support and you can be that support for the people who are supporting you! It can be mutual. They need that, too.

Support Greater Than Code

01:48 - Kate’s Superpower: Empathy

10:46 - Words and Narratives Carry Power; Approaching Inclusive Language

21:27 - Approaching Inclusive Language in the Written Word

29:18 - Creating Safe Places, Communities, and Environments

42:34 - Building Kula While Working in Tech

Reflections:

John: The dichotomy between perfectionism and authenticity.

Arty: Words carry power.

Kate: Having an open heart is how you can put any of this into action.

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

To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.

JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Arty Starr.

ARTY: Thanks, John. And I'm here with our guest today, Kate Marshall.

Kate is a copywriter and inclusivity activist living in Denver. Since entering tech 4 years ago, she's toured the marketing org from paid efforts to podcast host, eventually falling in love with the world of copy. With this work, she hopes to make the web a more welcoming place using the power of words. Outside of Webflow, you'll find Kate opening Kula, a donation-based yoga studio, and bopping around the Mile High City with her partner, Leah.

Welcome to the show, Kate.

KATE: Hi, thank you so much!

ARTY: So we always start our shows with our famous first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

KATE: My superpower, I've been thinking about this. My superpower is empathy. It can also be one of my biggest downfalls [laughs], which I actually think happens more often than not with any superpower. I once heard from a child, actually, they always seem to know best that too much of the good, good is bad, bad.

[laughter]

So it turns out sometimes too much empathy can be too overwhelming for my system, but it has really driven everything that I've done in my career and my personal life.

As for how I acquired it, I don't know that you can really acquire empathy. I think it's just something you have, or you don't. I've always been extremely intuitive and if you're going through something, it's likely that I can feel it. So I think I'm just [laughs] I hate to steal Maybelline's line, but I think I was born with it.

JOHN: You talked about having a downside there and I've heard – and I'm curious, because most people talk about empathy as a positive thing and wanting more people to develop more empathy, but I'd to love hear you talk a little bit more about what you see the downsides are.

KATE: Yeah. As someone who struggles with her own mental health issues, it can be really overwhelming for me to really take on whatever it is you're going through. Especially if it's a loved one, you tend to care more about what they're feeling, or what they're going through and an empath truly does absorb the energy of what's happening around them.

So although, it does influence a lot of the work that I do, both in my full-time career and opening my yoga studio and everything in between, it's also hard sometimes to set those boundaries, to set healthy, really energetic boundaries. It's hard enough to voice your boundaries to people, but setting energetic boundaries is a whole other ballgame. So it can tend to feel overwhelming at times and bring you down if the energy around you is lower than what you want it to be.

ARTY: So what kind of things do you do to try and set healthy, energetic boundaries?

KATE: Ah. I do a lot of what some people would call, including myself, woo-woo practices. [chuckles] Obviously, I practice yoga. I teach yoga. I'm super passionate about holistic, or energetic healing so I go to Reiki regularly. I'm in therapy, talk therapy. All of those things combined help me build this essentially an energetic shield that I can psych myself up to use any time I'm leaving the apartment. If it feels a high energy day, or if I'm meeting up with a friend who I know is going through something, I really have to set those boundaries is.

Same thing kind of at work, too. So much of the time that we spend in our lives is spent at work, or interacting with coworkers or colleagues and same thing. Everyone's going through their own journey and battles, and you have to carry that energetic shield around you wherever you go.

JOHN: One way I've often thought about having those sort of boundaries is the more I know who I am, the more what the limits of me are and the barrier between me and the universe is. So the work that I do, which includes therapy and other things, to understand myself better and to feel like I know what's me and what's not me, helps me have those boundaries. Because then I know if there's something going on with someone else and I can relate to it, but not get swept up by it.

KATE: Yeah. It's so funny you say that because I was actually just having a conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago that has really stuck with me. I was kind of feeling like I was messing up, essentially. Like I was not fully able to honor, or notice all of the triggers of the people around me. I think especially at the end of the year and as a queer person who is surrounded by queer community, it can be really tough around the holidays.

So that energy can just be generally more charged and I was finding it difficult to reconcile with my idea of perfection in that I really want to honor every person around me who has triggers, who has boundaries that maybe haven't been communicated, and it almost feels like you're almost always crossing some sort of line, especially when you're putting those perfectionism expectations on yourself.

My friend was like, “I don't think it's as much about being perfect at it as much as it is feeling like you're being authentically yourself and really authentically interacting with those people.” I don't know if I can really voice what the connection is between being able to honor triggers and boundaries of the people around you and feeling like your authentic self, but there's something about it that feels really connected to me. As long as you're trying your best and feeling like you're coming from a place of love, or connection, or compassion, or empathy whatever feels most to you, that's really all we can do, right?

JOHN: Yeah. I feel like that authenticity is such a tricky concept because the thoughts that you're having about wanting to be perfect and take care of everyone and make sure you're not triggering anybody and not stepping on any of your own things, that's also part of you that is authentically you. You may not want it to be that way, but it still is. [laughs].

ARTY: Yeah.

JOHN: So I still don't have a really clear sense in my mind what authenticity really is. I think probably it settles down to being a little bit more in the moment, rather than up in the thinking, the judging, the worrying, and being able to be present rather than – [overtalk]

ARTY: Totally.

JOHN: Those other things, but it is tricky.

KATE: Yeah. It can be tricky. Humans, man.

[laughter]

It really is like being a human and part of the human experience is going to be triggering other people. It’s going to be causing harm. It’s going to be causing trauma to other humans. That's just part of it.

I think the more you can get comfy with that idea and then also just really feeling like you're doing everything you can to stay connected to your core, which usually is in humans is a place of love. You're rooted in love for the people around you. How could you criticize yourself too much when you know that you're coming from that place?

ARTY: I feel like things change, too as you get feedback. In the context of any intimate relationship where you've got emotionally connected relationship with another person where you are more unguarded and you're having conversations about things that are more personal, that have at least the potential to hurt and cause harm. Like sometimes we do things not meaning to and we end up hurting someone else accidentally, but once that happens—and hopefully, you have an open dialogue where you have a conversation about these things and learn about these things and adapt—then I think the thing to do is honor each person as an individual of we're all peoples and then figure out well, what can we do to adapt how we operate in this relationship and look out for both people's best interests and strive for a win-win.

If we don't try and do that, like if we do things that we know we're harming someone else and we're just like, “Well, you should just put up with that,” [laughs], or whatever. I think that's where it becomes problematic is at the same time, we all have our own limitations and sometimes, the best thing to do is this relationship doesn't work. The way that we interact causes mutual harm and we can't this a win-win relationship and the best thing to do sometimes is to separate, even though it hurts because it's not working.

KATE: Yeah. I feel like sometimes it's a classic case of intent versus impact, too. Like what's your intention going into a conversation and then how does that end up actually impacting that person and how can you honor that and learn from that?

That's actually one thing that I love so much about being a writer is that words do carry so much power—written word, spoken word, whatever it is. They hold so much power and they can cause harm whether we want them to, or not. Part of being an empath is caring a lot about people's lived experiences and I really see it as more than putting – being a writer and doing this every day, I see it so much more than just putting words on a page and hoping signs up for the beta, or watches the thing registers, or the conference. It's words can foster connection, words can build worlds for people; they can make people feel like they belong and I believe that I'm on this planet to foster that connection with each other and with ourselves.

So it all connects for me. It all comes back around whether we're talking about being in a romantic relationship, or our relationship with our parents, or our caregivers, or the work that I do every day it all comes back to that connection and really wanting to make people feel more connected to themselves, to each other, and like they have a place with words.

ARTY: Yeah. It's very powerful. Words and narratives, I would say too, just thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that we tell one another that become foundational in our culture. It's all built upon were words. Words shape the ideas in our head. They shape our thoughts. They shape how we reflect on things, how we feel about things, and then when people give us their words, we absorb those and then those become part of our own reflections.

KATE: Yeah.

ARTY: We affect one another a lot. I think that's one of the things I'm just seeing and talking to you is just thinking about how much we affect one another through our everyday interactions.

KATE: Yeah, and I think a lot of this comes down to – there's something you said earlier that resonated in that it's really about the action you take after you cause the harm, or after you say the thing that hurts the other person and it's less about – and that's what made me say intent versus impact because you see the impact, you acknowledge it, and you make a decision to lessen that next time, or to be aware, more aware next time.

This is really at the core of all the work I do for inclusive language as well. It's just the core principle of the words we use carry a lot of power.

And I was actually just chatting with someone in the No-Code space. We connected through Webflow a couple weeks ago and he said, “I think people are so scared to get it wrong when it comes to inclusive language,” and I experience this all the time. People freeze in their tracks because they don't know how address someone and then they're so scared to get it wrong and they're like, “Oh, so sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” and they're so apologetic. And then that makes it worse and it's just a whole thing.

In this conversation, we were talking specifically about misgendering people. My partner is non-binary. They're misgendered every single day when we go to restaurants, when we are just out and about. So this is something that is a part of my life every day. I told him that fear is so real and I carry that fear, too because I don't want to hurt people because I want to like get it right. It comes back to that perfectionism, that expectation that I put on myself, especially as a queer person to get it right all the time.

But so much of the good stuff lies in how you approach it and then how you fix it when you mess it up. Like, it's not so much about the thing, it's about the way that you approach it. If you approach inclusive language with an open mind, an open heart, and a real willingness, like true willingness to learn, that's what's important going into it and then you're already doing the work. You're already an ally. You're already however you want to put it.

And then when you use an ableist word, or you use a racist word, or you misgender someone, your actions for following that speak volumes. I think we can really get caught up in the action itself and it's more about how you go into it and then how you try to fix it.

ARTY: So I'm thinking for listeners that might identify with being in a situation of being in the headlights and not knowing how to respond, or what to do. Other than what you were just talking about with coming at it with an open heart, are there any specific recommendations you might have for how to approach inclusive language?

KATE: Yeah. Yeah, I have a couple really, really good ones. So often, the way to speak more inclusively, or to write more inclusively is just to get more specific about what you're trying to say. So instead of saying, “Oh, that's so crazy,” which is ableist, you can say, “Oh, that's so unheard of.” That's a good example. Or instead of unnecessarily gendering something you're saying like, “Oh, I'm out of wine, call the waitress over.” It's server instead of waiter, or waitress.

You kind of start to essentially practice replacing these words and these concepts that are so ingrained into who we are, into society at large, and really starting to disrupt those systems within us with challenging the way that we've described things in the past. So just essentially getting more specific when we're speaking.

When it comes to misgendering people specifically, it's really important to not be overly apologetic when you misgender someone. I can give an example. If a server, for example, comes up to me and my partner and says, “Can I get you ladies anything else?” And I say, “Oh, actually my partner uses they/them pronouns. They are not a lady,” and they say, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Oh shit!” And then that makes my partner feel bad [chuckles] for putting them in that position and then it's kind of this like ping pong back and forth of just bad feelings.

The ideal scenario, the server would say, “Oh, excuse me, can I get you all anything else?” Or, “Can I get you folks anything else?” Or just, if you're speaking about someone who uses they/them pronouns and you say, “Yeah, and I heard she, I mean, they did this thing.” You just quickly correct it and move on. Don't make it into a production. It's okay. We get it. Moving on. Just try not to overthink it, basically. [laughs] Get more specific, but don't overthink it. Isn't that like, what a dichotomy.

[laughter]

JOHN: That ties back to what you were saying about perfectionism also, right? Like you said, you freeze up if you try and be perfect about it all the time, because you can't always know what someone's pronouns are and so, you have to make a guess at some point and maybe you're going to guess wrong. But it's how you deal with it by not making everybody uncomfortable with the situation. [laughs]

KATE: Yeah.

JOHN: And like you said, ping pong of bad feelings just amplifies, the whole thing blows out of proportion. You can just be like, “Oh, my apologies.” Her, they, whatever it is and then very quickly move on and then it's forgotten the next minute. Everything moves on from that, but you're not weeping and gnashing and –

[laughter]

KATE: Yeah.

JOHN: Well, it means you don't have to keep feeling bad about it for the next 3 days either, like everyone can move on from that point.

KATE: Right. Yeah, and just doing your best to not do it again.

JOHN: Yeah.

KATE: Once you learn, it's important to really let that try to stick. If you're having trouble, I have a friend who really has trouble with they/them pronouns and they practice with their dog. They talk to their dog about this person and they use they/them pronouns in that. Practice really does make perfect in this – not perfect, okay. Practice really does make progress in this kind of scenario and also, normalize sharing pronouns.

JOHN: Yeah.

KATE: It's more than just putting it in your Zoom name. It's more than just putting it in your Instagram bio. A good example of really starting this conversation was during Webflow's No-Code Conf, our yearly conference. It was mostly online and we had a live portion of it and every single time we introduced someone new, or introduced ourselves, we said, “My name is Kate Marshall, my pronouns are she/her, and I'm so happy to be here with you today.” Or just asking if you don't know, or if you're in a space with someone new, you say, “What are your pronouns?” It's really is that easy.

Webflow made some year-round pride mech that we launched over the summer and we have a cute beanie that says “Ask me my pronouns.” It's like, it's cool to ask. It's fine to ask and that's so much better than unintentionally misgendering someone. It's going to take some time to get there, but normalize it.

JOHN: Yeah, and I think there's one key to that that has always stuck out of my mind, which is don't ask pronouns just for the people you think might have different pronouns than you would expect.

KATE: Yes.

JOHN: Make it part of all the conversations so it's not just singling somebody out of a group and saying, “I want to know your pronouns because they're probably different.” That's not good.

KATE: Right, because gender expression does not always equal gender identity.

JOHN: Yeah.

KATE: You can't know someone's gender identity from the way that they express their gender and that's also another huge misconception that I think it's time we talk more about.

JOHN: So we've been talking a lot about conversations and person-to-person interactions and inclusive language there. But a lot of what you do is it on the writing level and I imagine there's some differences there. So I'm curious as to what you see as far as the things that you do to work on that in the written form.

KATE: Yeah. So this is actually a really great resource that I was planning on sharing with whoever's listening, or whoever's following along this podcast. There is a really wonderful inclusive language guidelines that we have published externally at Webflow and I own it, I update it regularly as different things come in and inclusive language is constantly evolving. It will never be at a final resting point and that's also part of why I love it so much because you truly are always growing. I'm always learning something new about inclusive language, or to make someone feel more included with the words that I'm writing.

This table has, or this resource has ableist language, racist language, and sexist language tables with words to avoid, why to avoid them, and some alternatives and just some general principles. I reference it constantly. Like I said, it's always evolving. I actually don't know how many words are on there, but it's a good amount and it's a lot of things have been surfaced to me that I had no idea were racist. For instance, the word gypped. Like if you say, “Oh, they gypped me” is actually racist. It's rooted in the belief that gypsy people are thieves. [chuckles] So it's things like that we really kind of go deep in there and I reference this constantly.

Also, ALS language is a really big consideration, especially in the tech space. So instead of – and this can be avoided most of the time, not all of the time. We do work with a really wonderful accessibility consultant who I run things by constantly. Shout out to Michele. Oh, she was actually on the podcast at one point. Michele Williams, shout out. Lovely human.

So a good example is instead of “watch now,” or “listen now,” it's “explore this thing,” “browse this thing,” “learn more”. Just try not to get so specific about the way that someone might be consuming the information that I'm putting down on the page. Stuff like that. It truly does come down to just getting more specific as just a general principle.

JOHN: So it sounds to me some of the first steps you take are obviously being aware that you have to mold your language to be more accessible and inclusive, then it's informing yourself of what the common pitfalls are. As you said, you have consultants, you've got guides, you've got places where you can gather this information and then once you have that, then you build that into your mental process for writing what you're writing.

KATE: Yeah, and truly just asking questions and this goes for everyone. No one would ever – if I reached out to our head of DEI, Mariah, and said, “Mariah, is this thing offensive?” Or, “How should I phrase this thing to feel more inclusive to more people?” She would never come back at me and say, “Why are you asking me this? You should already know this,” and that is the attitude across the board. I would never fault someone for coming to me and asking me how to phrase something, or how to write something to make it feel better for more people. So it's really a humbling experience [laughs] to be in this position.

Again, words carry so much power and I just never take for granted, the power essentially that I have, even if it is just for a tech company. A lot of people are consuming that and I want to make them feel included.

JOHN: Yeah. The written face of a company is going to tell readers a lot about the culture of the company, the culture of the community around the product.

KATE: Yeah.

JOHN: Whether they're going to be welcome there, like what their experience is going to be like if they invest their time to learn about it. So it's really important to have that language there and woven into everything that's written, not just off the corner on the DEI page.

KATE: Yeah. That's what I was just about to say is especially if you're a company that claims to prioritize DEI, you better be paying close attention to the words that you're using in your product, on your homepage, whatever it is, your customer support. I've worked with the customer support team at Webflow to make sure that the phrasing feels good for people.

It truly does trickle into every single asset of a business and it's ongoing work that does not just end at, like you said, putting it on a DEI page. Like, “We care about this,” and then not actually caring about it. That sucks. [laughs]

JOHN: Oh, the other thing before we move too far on from last topic, you’re talking about asking for advice. I think one of the keys there, a, being humble and just saying, “I would like to know,” and you're very unlikely to get criticized for simply asking how something can be better. But I feel like one of the keys to doing that well is also not arguing with the person you've asked after they give you an answer.

KATE: Right. Yes. Especially if that person is a part of the community that your words are affecting, or that your question is affecting. It's such a tricky balance because it's really not the queer community's job to educate people who are not queer about inclusive language. But when that person is willing to share their knowledge with the you, or willing to share their experience with you, you’ve got to listen. Your opinions about their lived experience don't come into that conversation, or shouldn't come into that conversation.

It's not questioning the information that you're given, but then it's also taking that and doing your own research and asking more people and having conversations with your friends and family trying to widen this breadth of information and knowledge as a community. Like I said, kind of dismantling the things that we're taught growing up by capitalism, by society, everything that kind of unnecessarily separates and then doing better next time.

I've actually had conversations with people who are very curious, who come to me with questions and then the next time I interact with them, they're just back to factory settings. That's so disappointing and just makes me feel like my energy could have been better spent having that conversation with someone who is more receptive. So I think it really is just about being open to hearing someone's experience, not questioning it, and then really taking that in and doing the work on your own.

JOHN: Yeah, and part of that doing the work is also for the things that you can Google for the things where you can look at it from the guide, do that first before asking for someone's time.

KATE: Yeah.

JOHN: So that they're not answering the same 101 questions every time that are just written in 15 different blog posts.

KATE: Yes. Especially if you're asking a marginalized person to do the work for you.

JOHN: Yeah.

KATE: Intersectionality matters and putting more work on the shoulders of people who are already weighed down by so much ain't it. [laughs]

ARTY: Well, I was wanting to go back to your original superpower that you talked about with empathy. We talked a lot about some of these factors that make empathy of a difficult thing of over empathizing and what kind of factors make that hard. But as a superpower, what kind of superpowers does that give you?

KATE: Ah, just being able to really connect to a lot of different people. I mentioned earlier that I believe it's my purpose, it's my life's work on this planet at this time to connect people to themselves and to each other. The more asking I can do and the more absorbing I can do of other people's experiences, the better I am at being able to connect with them and being able to make them feel like they belong in whatever space I'm in. I can't connect with someone if I don't try and get it. Try and get what they're going through, or what their experiences are.

That's why I do so much time just talking to people, and that's why I love yoga and why I want to start this studio and open this space. Because we live in a world where we don't have a lot of spaces, especially marginalized communities don't have a lot of spaces that feel like they're being understood, or they're truly being heard, or seen. Me being an empath, I'm able to access that in people more and therefore, bringing them closer to safer spaces, or safer people, safer communities where they really feel like they can exist and be their full, whole, and complete selves. It's really special.

ARTY: We also touched this concept of authenticity and it seems like that also comes up in this context of creating these safe spaces and safe communities where people can be their whole selves. So when you think about authenticity, we talked about this being a difficult and fuzzy word, but at the same time, it does have some meaning as to what that means, and these challenges with regards to boundaries and things. But I'm curious, what does authenticity mean to you? How does that come into play with this idea of safety and creating these safe spaces for others as well?

KATE: Yeah. I feel like there's so much in there. I think one of the biggest things to accept about the word authenticity, or the concept of authenticity is that it's always changing and it means something different to everyone. We are all authentic to ourselves in different ways and at different times in our lives and I think it's so important to honor the real evolution of feeling authentic.

There are times and days where I'm like who even am. It's like what even, but there's always this sort of core, root part of me that I don't lose, which is what we've been talking about. This ability to connect, this feeling of empathy, of compassion, of wanting to really be a part of the human experience. That, to me, kind of always stays and I feel like that's the authentic, like the real, real, authentic parts of me.

There are layers to it that are always changing and as people, we are also always evolving and always changing. So those different parts of authenticity could be what you wear that make you feel like your most authentic self. It can be how you interact with your friends, or how you interact with the person, getting your popcorn at the movies, or whatever it is. Those can all feel like parts of your authentic self.

That means something different to everyone. But I think that's such a beautiful part about it and about just being human is just how often these things are changing for us and how important it is to honor someone's authenticity, whatever that means for them at that time. Even if it's completely different from what you knew about them, or how you knew them before. It's this constant curiosity of yourself and of others, really getting deeply curious about what feels like you.

ARTY: I was wondering about safety because you were talking about the importance of creating these safe communities and safe environments where people could be their whole, complete selves, which sounds a lot like the authenticity thing, but you trying to create space for that for others.

KATE: Yeah. Well, the reality of safety is that there's no one space that will ever be a “safe space for everyone,” and that's why I like to say safer spaces, or a safer space for people because you can never – I feel like it's all coming full circle where you can never meet every single person exactly where they need to be met in any given moment. You can just do your best to create spaces that feel safer to them and you do that with authentic connection, with getting curious about who they are and what they love, and just making sure that your heart's really in it. [chuckles] Same with inclusive language.

It's all about the way you approach it to make someone feel safer. But I do think it's an I distinction to remember. You're never going to be safe for everyone. A space you create is never going to be safe for everyone. The best you can do is just make it safer for more people.

ARTY: When I think about just the opposite of that, of times that I've gone into a group where I haven't felt safe being myself and then when you talk of about being your complete whole self, it's like bringing a whole another level of yourself to a space that may not really fit that space and that seems like it's okay, too. Like we don't necessarily have to bring our full self to all these different spaces, but whatever space we're a part of, we kind of sync up and adapt to it.

So if I'm in one space and I feel the kind of vibe, energy, context of what's going on, how people are interacting, the energy they put forth when they speak with whatever sorts of words that they use. I'm going to feel that and adapt to that context of what feels safe and then as more people start adapting to that, it creates a norm that other people that then come and see what's going on in this group come to an understanding about what the energy in the room is like.

KATE: Yeah.

ARTY: And all it takes is one person to bring a different energy into that to shift the whole dynamic of things.

KATE: Yeah. The reality is you'll never be able to change every space and I think that's such a good point. It makes me feel like saying you have to be protective of your energy. If you go into a space and it just doesn't feel right, or there's someone who is in the room that doesn't feel safe to you, or that doesn't feel like they're on the same page as you, it's okay to not feel like you need to change the world in that space. Like you don't always have to go into a space and say, “I'm going to change it.” That is how change is made when you feel safe enough. That's why it's so important to foster that energy from the jump.

That's just a foundational thing at a company in a yoga studio, in a home, at a restaurant. It can be changed, but it really should be part of the foundation of making a safer space, or a more inclusive space. Because otherwise, you're asking the people who don't feel safe, who are usually marginalized people, or intersectionally marginalized in some way. You're asking them essentially to put in the work to change what you should have done as the foundation of your space.

So it's a such a delicate balance of being protective of your energy and really being able to feel out the places where you feel okay saying something, or making a change, or just saying, “No, this isn't worth it for me. I'm going to go find a space that actually feels a little bit better, or that I feel more community in.”

ARTY: And it seems like the other people that are in the group, how those people respond to you. If you shift your energy, a lot of times the people that are in the group will shift their energy in kind. Other times, in a different space, you might try to shift energy and then there's a lot of resistance to that where people are going a different way and so, you get pushed out of the group energy wise. These sorts of dynamics, you can feel this stuff going on of just, I just got outcast out of this group.

Those are the kinds of things, though that you need to protect your own energy of even if I'm not included in this group, I can still have a good relationship with me and I can still like me and I can think I'm still pretty awesome and I can find other groups of folks that like me.

It definitely, at least for me, I tend to be someone who's like, I don't know, I get out grouped a lot. [laughs] But at the same time, I've gotten used to that and then I find other places where I've got friends that love me and care about me and stuff. So those are recharge places where I can go and get back to a place where I feel solid and okay with myself, and then I'm much more resilient then going into these other spaces and stuff where I might not be accepted, where I might have to be kind of shielded and guarded and just put up a front, and operate in a way that makes everyone else feel more comfortable.

KATE: Yeah, and isn't it so powerful to feel cared for?

ARTY: I love that.

KATE: Like just to feel cared for by the people around you is everything. It's everything. That's it. Just to feel like you are wanted, or you belong. To feel cared for. It can exist everywhere is the thing. In your Slack group, or whatever, you can make people feel cared for. I have never regretted reaching out to a coworker, or a friend, or whoever an acquaintance and saying, “Hey, I love this thing about you,” or “Congratulations on this rad thing you just launched,” or whatever. It's the care that's so powerful.

ARTY: I feel like this is one of those things where we can learn things from our own pain and these social interactions and stuff. One of the things that I've experienced is you're in a group and you say something and nobody responds. [laughs]

KATE: Yeah.

ARTY: And after doing that for a while, you feel like you're just shouting into the void and nobody hears you and it's just this feeling of like invisibility. In feeling that way myself, one of the things I go out of my way to do is if somebody says something, I at least try and respond, acknowledge them, let them know that they're heard, they're cared about, and that there's somebody there on the other side [chuckles] and they're not shouting into the wind because I hate that feeling. It's an awful feeling to feel invisible like that.

KATE: Awful, yeah.

ARTY: But we can learn from those experiences and then we can use those as opportunities to understand how we can give in ways that are subtle, that are often little things that are kind of ignored, but they're little things that actually make a really big difference.

KATE: Yeah, the little things. It really is the little things, isn't it? [laughs] Like and it’s just, you can learn from your experiences, but you can also say, “I'm not doing this right now.” You can also check out. If you are giving and giving. and find that you're in the void essentially, more often than not, you can decide that that's no longer are worth your time, your energy, your care, and you can redirect that care to somewhere else that's going to reciprocate, or that's going to give you back that same care and that's so important, too.

JOHN: Yeah, and it sounds like starting a yoga studio is not a trivial undertaking and obviously, you're highly motivated to create this kind of an environment in the world. So is there anything more you'd like to say about that because that ties in very closely with what we're talking about?

KATE: Yeah. It’s so weird to work full-time and be so passionate about my tech job and then turn around and be like, “I'm opening a yoga studio.” It's such a weird, but again, it's all connected at the root, at the core of what I'm trying to do in this world.

The thing about Kula is that it's really built on this foundational mutual aid model. So being donation-based, it's really pay what you can, if you can. And what you pay, if you're able to give an extra $10 for the class that you take, that's going to pay for someone else's experience, who is unable to financially contribute to take that class. That's the basis of community care, of mutual aid and it's really this heart-based business model that is really tricky. I’m trying to get a loan right now and [chuckles] it's really hard to prove business financials when you have a donation-based model and you say, “Well, I'm going to guess what people might donate per class on average.”

So it's been a real journey, [laughs] especially with today's famous supply chain issues that you hear about constantly in every single industry. I have an empty space right now. It needs to be completely built out. Construction costs are about triple what they should be.

Again, coming from this real mutual aid community care centered model, it's really hard, but I have to keep coming back. I was just telling my partner about this the other day, I have to keep coming back to this core idea, or this real feeling that I don't need to have a beautifully designed space to create what I'm trying to create.

When I started this, I envisioned just a literal empty room [chuckles] with some people in it and a bathroom and that's it. So of course, once I saw the designs, I was like, “Oh, I love this can lighting that's shining down in front of the bathroom door.” It's like so whatever, stereotypical. Not stereotypical, but surface level stuff.

I really have had to time and time again, return to this longing almost for a space that feels safer for me, for my community, for Black people, for disabled people, for trans people, for Asian people; we don't have a lot of spaces that feel that way and that's just the reality.

So it's a real delicate balance of how do I like – this is a business and I need money, [laughs] but then I really want this to be rooted in mutual aid and community care. It comes back to that car and that inclusivity, creating authentic connections. It's tricky out there for a queer woman entrepreneur with no collateral. [laughs] It's a tricky world out there, but I think we'll flip it someday.

I really think pioneering this idea, or this business model at least where I'm at in Denver, I think it's going to start the conversation in more communities and with more people who want to do similar things and my hope is that that will foster those conversations and make it more accessible to more people.

JOHN: Yeah, and I think every time someone manages to muster up the energy, the capital, and the community effort to put something like this together, it makes it just slightly easier for someone else a, they can learn the lessons and b, they're more examples of this thing operating in the world. So it becomes more possible in people's minds and you can build some of that momentum there.

KATE: Yeah. And of course, it's really important to note and to remember that I come from a place of immense privilege. I have a great job in tech. I'm white. I am upper middle class. Technically, I'm “straight passing,” which is a whole other concept, but it is a thing and this is the way that I'm choosing to use my privilege to hopefully pave the way for more people. I do not take for granted the opportunity that I'm given and like I said, intersectionality matters and all of that, but I still have a lot of privilege going into this that I hope turns into something good for more people.

ARTY: It also takes a special kind of person to be an entrepreneur because you really have to just keep on going. No matter any obstacle that's in your way, you’ve just got to keep on going and have that drive, desire, and dream to go and build something and make it happen and your superpowers probably going to help you out with that, too. It sounds like we've got multiple superpowers because I think you got to have superpowers to be an entrepreneur in itself.

KATE: Yeah. I don't know, man. It's such a weird feeling to have because it just feels like it's what I'm supposed to be doing. That's it. It doesn't feel like I'm like – yes, it's a calling and all of that, but it just feels like the path and that, it feels more, more natural than anything I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

The more people follow that feeling, the more authentic of a world, the more connected of a world we're going to have. I see a lot of people doing this work, similar things, and it makes me so happy to see.

The words of one of my therapists, one of my past therapists told me, “Always stick with me,” and it was right around the time I was kind of – so I'd started planning before COVID hit and then COVID hit and I had to pause for about a year, a little bit less than a year. It was right around the time I was filing my LLC and really starting to move forward. It was actually December 17th of last year that I filed my LLC paperwork. So it's been a little over a year now.

He told me, “How much longer are you willing to wait to give the community this thing that you want to give them? How much are you willing to make them wait for this space?” And I was like, “Yesterday. Yesterday.” Like, “I want to give people this space immediately,” and that has truly carried me through. This supply chain stuff is no joke. [laughs] and it has really carried me through some of the more doubtful moments in this journey. Yeah, and I feel like, man, what powerful words. Like, I just want to keep saying them because they are such powerful words to me. How much longer are you willing to make them wait? And it's like, I don't want to. [chuckles] So I guess I'm going to go do it.

[laughter]

Throw caution to the wind. [laughs]

JOHN: Well, I think that ties back into what you were talking about is as you were thinking about designing the space and what kind of buildout you're going to need, and that can be a guide star for what actually needs to be there. What's the actual MVP for this space? Does it need a perfect coat of paint, or is what's there good enough? Does it need all the things arranged just so in the perfect lighting, or does it just need to exist and have people in the room and you can really focus in on what's going to get you there? And then of course, you iterate like everything else, you improve over time, but.

KATE: Right.

JOHN: I love that concept of just cut out everything that's in the way of this happening right now as much as possible.

KATE: Yeah, and what a concept, I think that can be applied to so many things. Who am I trying to serve with this thing and what do I need to do to get there? It doesn't have to be this shiny, beautiful well-designed creation. It just needs to serve people. The people that you want to serve in the best way possible, and for me, that's getting this space open and actually having it in action.

ARTY: I think once you find something that feels in alignment with you, you seem to have lots of clarity around just your sense of purpose, of what you want to move toward of a deep connection with yourself. One thing I found with that is no matter how much you get rejected by various groups in the world, if you can be congruent and authentic with yourself and follow that arrow, that once you start doing that, you find other people that are in resonance with you. They're out there, but you don't find them until you align with yourself.

KATE: Yeah. Community. Community is so powerful and I love that you just said alignment because that really is truly what it is. It's finding the thing that makes you feel like you're doing something good and that feels authentic to your core, to those core principles of you that never really change. The things that are rooted in love, the things that are rooted in compassion, or whatever it is you care about. Community, that alignment is absolutely key.

It's also, when I say I was born with my superpower of being an empath, this desire to create this space feels, it feels like I was also born with this desire, or born with this alignment. So I feel like so many times it's just going back to the basics of who you are.

ARTY: Like you're actualizing who you are.

KATE: Yeah. Like full alignment, enlightenment, that all kind of falls into place when you're really making the effort to be connected to your core.

ARTY: It seems like a good place to do reflections. So at the end of the show, we usually go around and do final reflections and takeaways, final thoughts that you have and you get to go last, Kate.

JOHN: There are a whole lot of different things that I've been thinking about here, but I think one of the ones that's sticking with me is the dichotomy between perfectionism and authenticity, and how I feel like they really are pulling against one another and that, which isn't to say things can't be perfect and authentic at the same time. But I think perfectionism is usually a negative feeling. Like you should do something, you're putting a lot of pressure, there's a lot of anxiety around perfectionism and that is pretty much an opposition to being authentically yourself. It's hard to be in touch with yourself when you're wrapped up in all those anxieties and so, thinking about the two of them together, I hadn't made that connection before, but I think that's something that's interesting that I'll be thinking about for a while.

ARTY: I think the thing that's going to stick with me, Kate is you said, “Our words carry so much power,” and I think about our conversation today out just vibes in the room and how that shifts with the energy that we bring to the room, all of these subtle undercurrent conversations that we're having, and then how a sort of energy vibe becomes established. And how powerful even these really little tiny things we do are.

We had this conversation around inclusive language and you gave so many great details and specifics around what that means and how we can make little, small alterations to some of these things that are just baked into us because of our culture and the words that we hear, phrasing and things that we hear, that we're just unaware of the impact of things. Just by paying attention and those little subtle details of things and coming at things with an open heart, regardless of how we might stumble, or mess things up, how much of a difference that can make because our words, though carry so much power.

KATE: Yeah. And the thing you just said about having an open heart is truly how you can put any of this into action, how you can remain open to learning about authenticity, or what it feels like to not fall into a trap of perfectionism, or how to speak, or write, or interact more inclusively with other human beings.

I feel like being open, being openminded, being open-hearted, whatever it is, is just really a superpower on its own. Remaining open and vulnerable in today's world is hard work. It does not come naturally to so many people, especially when you're dealing with your own traumas and your own individual interactions and maybe being forced into spaces where you don't feel safe. To remain open is such a tool for making other people feel cared for. So if that's the goal, I would say just being open is truly your superpower.

JOHN: I think that's the quote I'm going to take with me: being open is the key to making people feel cared for.

KATE: Yes. I love that.

ARTY: Well, thank you for joining us on the show, Kate. It's been a pleasure to have you here.

KATE: Thank you so much. This has been just the energy boost I needed.

Special Guest: Kate Marshall.

Sponsored By:

• Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.

Support Greater Than Code

00:54 - Emily’s Superpower: Being a Good Teacher

06:24 - Online College Courses vs In-Person Learning / Emily’s Community College Path

11:58 - Computer Science Curriculums

19:28 - Being A Good Mentor / Mentor, Student Relationships

38:24 - Dungeons & Dragons

Reflections:

Dave: College is what you make of it, not where you went.

Arty: Teaching people better who don’t have a lot of experience yet.

Mandy: “Empowered women, empower women.” Empowered men also empower women.

Emily: Your mentor should have different skills from you and you should seek them out for that reason.

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

To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Transcript:

MANDY: Hey, everybody! Welcome to Episode 265 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here with our guest panelist, Dave Bock.

DAVE: Hi, I'm David Bock and I am here with our usual co-host, Arty Starr.

ARTY: Thank you, Dave. And I'm here today with our guest, Emily Haggard.

Emily is graduating from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science this past December so, congratulations. She has a wide variety of experience in technology from web development to kernel programming, and even network engineering and cybersecurity. She is an active member of her community, having founded a cybersecurity club for middle schoolers. In her free time, she enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons and writing novels.

Welcome to the show, Emily.

EMILY: Thank you.

ARTY: So our first question we always ask is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

EMILY: So I spent some time thinking about this and I would say that my superpower is that I'm a good teacher and what that means is that the people who come to me with questions wanting to learn something number one, my goal is to help them understand and number two, I think it's very important to make sure that whatever gap we have in our experience doesn't matter and that they don't feel that. So that they could be my 6-year-old brother and I'm trying to teach him algebra, or something and he doesn't feel like he is the 6-year-old trying to learn algebra.

DAVE: I'll echo that sentiment about being a good teacher actually on two fronts, Emily. First of all, I am teaching your brother now in high school and just the other day, he credited you towards giving him a lot of background knowledge about the course and the curriculum before we ever started the class. So he seconds that you're a good teacher.

And then listeners might remember, I was on a few weeks ago talking about my nonprofit and Emily was there at the beginning of me starting to volunteer in high schools. In fact, the way I met Emily, it was the fall of 2014.

The first time I was volunteering at Loudoun Valley High School and one morning prior to class, there was going to be a meeting of a cybersecurity club. There were a bunch to the students milling about and there was this sophomore girl sitting in front of a computer, looking at a PowerPoint presentation of networking IP addresses, how the /24 of an IP address resolves and just all that kind of detail. Like very low-level detail about networking stuff and I was like, “Oh, that's interesting.” I wouldn't have expected a sophomore girl to be so interested in the low-level type of details of IP. And then the club started and she got up and started giving that presentation. That was not a slide deck she was reading; it was a slide deck she was creating.

EMILY: Thank you. I actually remember that. [laughs]

ARTY: So how did you acquire that superpower?

EMILY: I think it was out of necessity. So going back to the story that David mentioned in high school, there was a cybersecurity competition called CyberPatriot that I competed in with friends and one year, all of a sudden, they just introduced network engineering to the competition. We had to configure and troubleshoot a simulated network and no one knew how to do that.

So I took it upon myself to just figure it out so that my team could be competitive and win, but then part of the way that I learn actually is being able to teach something like that's how I grasp. I know that I've understood something and I'm ready to move on to the next topic is like, if I could teach this thing.

So actually, I started out building all of that as a way to kind of condense my notes and condense my knowledge so that it’d stick in my head for the competition and I just realized it's already here, I should share this. So that's how I started there. Teaching network engineering to high schoolers that don't have any background knowledge is really hard. It forced me to put it in terms that would make sense and take away the really technical aspects of it and I think that built the teaching skill.

DAVE: That relates to the club you started at the middle school for a CyberPatriot. How did that start?

EMILY: That was initially a desire to have a capstone project and get out of high school a few weeks early. But I was sitting there with my friend and thinking about, “Okay, well, we need to do something that actually helps people. What should we do?” Like some people are going out and they're painting murals in schools, or gardening. It was like, well, we don't really like being outside and we're not really artistic. [chuckles] But what we do have is a lot of technical knowledge from all this work with CyberPatriot and we know that CyberPatriot has a middle school competition.

So we actually approached the middle school. We had a sit down with, I think the dean at our local middle school. We talked about what CyberPatriot was and what we wanted to do with the students, which was have them bust over to the high school so we could teach them as an afterschool program. I guess we convinced him and so, a couple months later they're busing students over for us to teach.

DAVE: Wow. And did they ever participate in competitions as middle schoolers?

EMILY: Yes, they did.

DAVE: Very cool.

EMILY: Yeah.

DAVE: Can you go into what those competitions are like? I don't think most of the audience even knows that exists.

EMILY: Yeah, sure.

So CyberPatriot, it's a cybersecurity competition for predominantly high schoolers that's run by the Air Force and you have a couple rounds throughout the year, I think it’s like five, or so, and at each round you have 6 hours and you're given some virtual machines, which you have to secure and remove viruses from and things, and you get points for doing all of that.

They added on network simulation, which was with some Cisco proprietary software, which would simulate your routers, your firewalls, and everything. So you'd have to configure and troubleshoot that as well and you would get points for the same thing.

It builds a lot of comradery with all of us having to sit there for 6 hours after school and like, we're getting tired. It's a Friday night, everyone's a little bit loopy and all we've eaten is pizza for 6 hours. [laughs]

DAVE: Well, that's a good jumpstart to your career, I think. [laughs]

EMILY: Yes, for sure.

MANDY: So while in college, I'm guessing that – well, I'm assuming that you've been pretty impacted by COVID and doing in-person learning versus online learning. How's that been for you?

EMILY: I've actually found it pushes me to challenge the status quo. Online college classes, for the most part, the lectures aren't that helpful. They're not that great. So I had to pick up a lot of skills, like learning to teach myself, reading books, and figuring out ways to discern if I needed to research something further, if I really understood it yet, or not. That's a really hard question to ask actually is if you don't have the knowledge, how do you know that you don't have that knowledge? That's something I kind of had – it's a skill that you have to work on.

So that is something I developed over the time when we were online and I've actually also done – I worked time for a year after high school and I took mostly online classes at the community college. Those skills started there, too and then I just built on them when I came to Virginia Tech and we had COVID happen.

DAVE: Actually, I'd like to ask about that community college time. I know you had an interesting path into Virginia Tech, one that I'm really interested in for my own kids as well. Can you talk about that?

EMILY: Yeah. So I, out of high school, always thought I'm going to – I'm a first-generation student. My parents did not go to college. They went to the military and grandparents before them. So I had always had it in my head that I am going to go and get that 4-year degree. That's what I want for myself.

At the end of high school, I applied to Virginia Tech. I had a dream school. I wanted to go to Georgia Tech. They rejected me. Oh, well, that dream shot. I need to find something new. So I applied to Virginia Tech thinking it was going to be a safe bet. It's an in-state school, I was a very good student; they would never reject me and so, I applied for the engineering program and I was rejected. They did admit me for the neuroscience program, but it wasn't going to be what I wanted and I was realizing that I did not like either chemistry, or biology, so that would never work.

And then at the same time, because of my work with CyberPatriot, I was able to get an internship in network engineering at a college not too far from where I lived. After I graduated high school, they offered me a job as a network engineer, which I took because my team was fantastic, I really liked my manager, and I was comfortable there. I took this job and I said, “Okay, I'm going to keep working on the college thing because it's what I always wanted for myself.” So I just signed up for community college and that was pretty tough working a full-time and doing community college until 11 o'clock at night and getting up the next day and doing it all over again.

And from there, I decided that Virginia Tech was going to be the best option for me, just from a very logical perspective. I kind of thought Virginia Tech was a bit cult-y. I was never really gung-ho about going, but it made the most sense being an in-state school that's very well-known. I worked through community college and I applied to Virginia Tech again after 1 year at community college and they rejected me again. so I was like, “Oh no, now what do I do I?” And I realized I needed to make use of the guaranteed transfer program.

One of the really cool things in Virginia at least is that a lot of the state schools have agreements with the community college, where if you get an associates with a specific GPA, you can transfer into that program and the university and your transfer's guaranteed, they can't reject you. So I was like, “Aha, they can't get rid of me this time.” Yeah, I did it and it's kind of a messy process.

I actually went into that in a blog post on David has a nonprofit called Loudoun Codes. I wrote a blog post for his website and detailed that entire – being a transfer student is hard because there's a lot of credits that may not get transferred over because Virginia Tech is a little bit – all 4-year colleges are a little bit elitist in their attitude towards community college and they didn't take some of the credits that I had, which put me behind quite far, even though I had that knowledge, they said I didn't. So that added on some extra time and some extra summer semesters while I was at Tech.

ARTY: Yeah. I did something similar with doing community college and then what you're talking about with the whole elitist attitude with the transfer and having a whole bunch of your credits not transferring and I'm definitely familiar with that whole experience.

DAVE: Yeah.

EMILY: And even now that I think about it, I remember community college, too. It's built for one specific type of student, which is great. I think they're really good at helping people who just weren't present, or weren't able to do the work and make the progress in high school. They're really good at helping those types of students. But as someone who did a whole bunch of AP classes, had a crazy GPA, they just didn't really know how to handle me. They said, “Okay, you've tested out of pretty much all of our math classes, but you are still lacking some credits.” So I had to take multi-variable calculus in community college in order to get credit to replace the fact that I tested out of pre-cal and which was kind of silly, but in the long run, it was great because I hear multi-variable calculus at Tech is pretty hard.

But definitely, there's a lot of bureaucratic nonsense about college. Education is important. It's great. I've learned a lot of things, but there's still all these old ways of thinking and people are just not ready for change in college a lot of the time. The people who make decisions that is.

DAVE: Well, I'd like to ask a little bit about the computer science curriculum that you've had and the angle I'm asking from when I worked at LivingSocial, I worked with one of the first group of people that had graduated from our bootcamp program and had transferred from other careers, spent 12 weeks learning software engineering skills, and then were integrated with a group of software engineers at LivingSocial.

We would occasionally get into conversations about, well, if I learned to be a software engineer in 12 weeks, what do you learn in 4 years of college? So we started to do these internal brown bags that were kind of the Discovery Channel version of computer science. A lot of that material I've since recycled into the presentations I do at high school.

But for your typical person who might have sidelined into this career from a different perspective, what's been your curriculum like?

EMILY: I really like the parts of the curriculum that had technical depth because coming into it at my level, that's what I was lacking in certain areas. I had built the foundation really strong, but the details of it, I didn't have.

The classes that Virginia Tech, like the notorious systems class and a cybersecurity class I have taken this semester, that have gone in detail with technology and pushed what I understood, those were my most valuable classes. There was a lot of it that I would've been happy without [laughs] because I'm not sure it will apply so much to my life going forward. I'm a very practical person. Engineer mindset; I don't want to worry about things that can actually be applied to the real world so much.

So for me this semester, actually, it's been really challenging because I've taken a data structures and algorithms class where we're talking about NP complete versus NP hard, and what it would mean if we could solve an NP complete problem in polynomial time. It's really hard to care. It's really hard to see how that [laughs] helps. It's interesting from a pure math perspective, but coming into it as someone who was already in the adult world and very grounded, it feels like bloat.

DAVE: Yeah. That stuff is interesting if you're are designing databases, but most of us are just using databases and that – [overtalk]

EMILY: Right.

DAVE: Stuff is all kind of baked in.

EMILY: Yeah.

DAVE: For the average person on a technical career path, we're far more interested in the business problems than the math problems.

ARTY: I'm curious, too. There's also lots of stuff that seems like it's missing in college curriculum from just really fundamental things that you need to know as a software engineer. So did you have things like source control and continuous integration? I think back to my own college experience and I didn't learn about source control until I got out of college. [laughs] And why is that? Why is that? It seems so backwards because there's these fundamental things that we need to learn and within 4 years, can we not somehow get that in the curriculum?

I'm wondering what your experience has been like.

EMILY: So Virginia Tech, I think the CS department head is actually really good at being reflective because he requires every senior to take a seminar class as they exit. It's a one credit class; it's mostly just feedback for the school and I think it's really cool because he asks all of us to make a presentation, just record ourselves talking over some slides about our experience and the things we would change.

That really impressed me that this guy who gets to make so many decisions is listening to the people who are just kind of peons of the system and what I said was that there are certain classes that they give background knowledge. Like there's one in particular where it's essentially the closest crossover we have with the electrical engineering department and it's really painful, as someone who works with software, to try and put myself in a hardware mindset working with AND gates, OR gates, and all that, and trying to deal with these simulated chips. It's awful and then it never comes back. We never talk about again in the curriculum and it's a prerequisite for the systems class, which has nothing at all to do with that, really.

This segues into another thing. I've had an internship while I've been at Virginia Tech that's a web consultant role, or a development consultant role with a company called Acceleration. They run just a small office in Blacksburg and they have a really cool business model. They take students at Virginia Tech and at Radford, a neighboring school, and they have us work with clients on real software development projects. They pair us with mentors who have 5, 10 years of experiences, software consultants, and we get to learn all those things that school doesn't teach us.

So that's actually how I learned Git, Scrum, and all that stuff that isn't taught in college even now and I went back to the CS department head and I said, “Replace that class with the class that teaches us Git, Scrum, Kanban, and even just a brief overview of Docker, AWS, and the concepts so that people have a foundation when they try to go to work and they're trying to read all this documentation, or they're asked to build a container image and they have no idea what it's talking about, or what it's for.”

Yeah, going back to the original question, no, I didn't learn version control in college, but the weird thing is that I was expected to know it in my classes without ever being taught it because, especially in the upper level like 3,004 level, or 1,000 level classes, they have you work on group projects where Git is essential and some of them, especially the capstone project, are long-term projects and you really need to use Scrum, or use some sort of methodology rather than just the how you would treat a two-week project.

Actually, it's interesting because David was my sponsor on my capstone project in college and he really helped my team with the whole project planning, sprint planning, and just understanding how Scrum and all that works and what it's for.

DAVE: Yeah. I just shared a link that is a series of videos from MIT called The Missing Semester of Your Computer Science Education that talks about Git, version control and command line, using the back shell, stuff about using a database, how to use a debugger; just all that kind of stuff is stuff that you're expected to know, but never formally taught.

ARTY: What about unit testing?

EMILY: Okay. So that's an interesting exception to the rule, but I don't think they really carried it through, through my entire experience at Tech. So in the earlier classes, we were actually forced to write unit tests that was part of our assignments and they would look to see that we had – I think we had to have a 100% testing coverage, or very close to it.

So that was good, but then it kind of dropped away as we went to the upper-level classes and you just had to be a good programmer and you had to know to test small chunks of your code because we'd have these massive projects and there would be a testing framework to see if the entire thing worked, but there was no unit testing, really. Whereas, at work in my internship, unit tests are paramount, like [laughs], we put a huge emphasis on that.

ARTY: So earlier Emily, you had had mentioned teaching people that had no experience at all and the challenge of trying to be able to help and support people and learning to understand regardless of what their gap was in existing experience. So what are some of the ideas, principles, things that you've learned on how to do that effectively?

EMILY: That's a really tough question because I've worked on building intuition rather than a set of rules. But I think a few of the major things probably are thinking about it long enough beforehand, because there's always a lot of background context that they need. Usually, you don't present a solution before you’ve presented the problem and so, it's important to spend time thinking about that and especially how you're going to order concepts.

I've noticed, too with some of the best teachers I've had in college is they were very careful with the order in which they introduced topics to build the necessary context and that's something that's really important with complete beginners.

The thing is sometimes you have to build that context very quickly, which the best trick I have for that is just to create an analogy that has nothing to do with technology at all, create it out of a shared experience that you have, or something that they've probably experienced. Like a lot of times analogies for IP addressing use the mailing service, houses on a street and things like that, things that are common to our experience. I guess, maybe that's the foundation of it is you're trying to figure out what you have in common with this person that can take them from where they are to where you are currently and that requires a lot of social skills, intuition, and practice, so.

DAVE: That’s a really good observation because one of the things I find teaching high school, and this has been a skill I've had to learn, is being able to put my mindset in the point of view of the student that I need to go to where they are and use a good metaphor analogy to bring them up a step. That's a real challenge to be able to strip away all the knowledge I have and be like, “Oh, this must be the understanding of the problem they have” and try to figure out how to walk them forward.

EMILY: Yeah.

DAVE: That's a valuable skill.

EMILY: I think that's really rewarding, though because when I see in their eyes that they've understood it, or I watch them solve the problem, then I know that I did it well and that's really rewarding. It's like, okay, cool. I got them to where I wanted them to be.

ARTY: Reminds me. I was helping out mentoring college students for a while and I hadn’t really been involved with college for a really long time. I was working with folks that knew very, very little and it was just astounding to me one, just realizing how much I actually knew. That's easy to take for granted.

But also, just that if you can dial back and be patient, it's really rewarding I found to just be able to help people, to see that little light go on where they start connecting the dots and they're able to make something appear on the screen for the first time. That experience of “I made that! I made that happen.” I feel like that's one of the most exciting things about software and in programming is that experience of being able to create and make something come to life in that way.

Just mentoring as an experience is something, I think is valuable in a lot of ways beyond just the immediate being able to help someone things, like it's a cool experience being a mentor as well.

EMILY: And I think it's really important, too as a mentor to have good mentors yourself. I was really lucky to have David just show up in my high school one day [laughs] and I've been really lucky consistently with the mentors in my life. In my internship that I mentioned, I worked with fantastic engineers who are really good teachers.

It's difficult to figure out how to good teacher without having first had good teachers yourself and regardless of the level of experience I have, I think I will always want to have that mentor relationship so that I can keep learning. One of the things, too is a lot of my mentors are quite different from mine. Like I am a very quiet introvert person. I would not say I'm very charismatic. I would say David is the opposite of all those things. So wanting to build those skills myself, it's good to have a role model who has them.

DAVE: Well, thank you for that compliment.

EMILY: Yeah.

MANDY: That's really interesting that you said to find mentor that's the opposite of yourself. I literally just heard the same thing said by a different person last week that was like, “Yeah, you should totally find someone who you want to be, or emulate,” and I thought that was really good advice.

EMILY: I agree with that completely.

There's a lot of conversation around diversity in computer science and that's definitely a problem. Women do not have the representation they should, like I've always gone through classes and been 1 of 3 women in the class. [chuckles]

But I think one of the ways in which we can approach this, besides just increasing the enrollment number, is focusing on commonalities—kind of what I mentioned before— from the perspective of mentors who are different than their students. Maybe a male mentor trying to mentor a female student. Focusing on your commonalities rather than naturally gravitating towards people who are like you; trying to find commonalities with people who are different from you. I think that's important.

From the student perspective, it's less about finding commonalities more about, like you said, finding the things you want to emulate. Looking at other groups of people and figuring out what they're good at and what things you would like to take from them. [laughs] So.

DAVE: Yeah, that's been an interesting challenge I've noticed in the school system is that in the elementary school years, boys and girls are equally competent and interested in this material. By the time they get to high school, we have that 70/30 split of males versus females. In the middle school, the numbers are all over place, but in the formal classes, it seems to be at 70/30 split by 7th grade and I can't really find any single root cause that causes that.

Unfortunately, I think I saw some stuff this week with Computer Science Education Week where students as young as first grade are working with small robots in small groups and there always seems to be the extrovert boy that is like, “It's a robot. I'm going to be the one that plays with it,” and he gatekeeps access to girls who are like, “It's my turn.” It's really discouraging to see that behavior ingrained at such a young age.

Any attempt I try to address it at the high school level – well, not any attempt, but I feel like a lot of times I can come off as the creepy old guy trying to encourage high school age girls to be more interested in computer science. It's a hard place for me to be.

EMILY: Yeah. I don't think you're the creepy old guy.

[laughter]

I think this is a larger topic in society right now is it's ingrained in women to be meek and to not be as confident, and that's really hard to overcome. That sounds terrible. I don't think people consciously do that all the time. I don't think men are consciously trying to speak over women all the time, but it it's definitely happened to me all over the place—it's happened at work, it's happened in interviews.

I think getting over that is definitely really tough, but some of the things that have helped me are to see and celebrate women's accomplishments. Like every time I hear about Grace Hopper, it makes me so happy. I know one time in high school, David took a few other female students and I to a celebration of women's accomplishments and the whole thing, there were male allies there, but the topic of the night was women bragging loudly about the things that they've accomplished. Because that's not something that's encouraged for us to do, but it's something that it builds our confidence and also changes how other people see us.

Because the thing is, it's easy to brag and it's saddening that people will just implicitly believe that the more you say you did. So the more frequently you brag about how smart you are, the more inclined people are to believe it because we're pretty suggestible as humans. When women don't do that, that subtly over time changes the perspective of us. We have to, very intently – I can't think of a word I'm trying to say, but be very intentional about bragging about ourselves regardless of how uncomfortable it is, regardless of whether we think we deserve it, or not.

MANDY: I also think it's really important for women to also amplify other women, like empowered women empower women. So when we step up and say, “Look at this thing Emily did, isn't that cool?”

EMILY: Yeah.

MANDY: That's something that we should be doing to highlight and amplify others' accomplishments.

EMILY: For sure. I've been to the Grace Hopper conference virtually because it was during COVID times, but that was a huge component of it was there would be these networking circles where women just talk about the amazing things that they've done and you just meet all these strangers who have done really cool things. It goes in both directions, like you said, you get to raise them up and also be encouraged yourself and have something to look forward to.

ARTY: It sounds like just being exposed to that culture was a powerful experience for you.

EMILY: For sure.

ARTY: I was thinking about our conversation earlier about role models and finding someone to look up to that you're like, “You're a really cool person. I admire you.” Having strong women as role models makes it much easier for us to operate a certain way when we interact with other people, and stay solid within ourself and confident within ourself and not cave in. When all the examples around us of women are backing off, caving in, and just being submissive in the way that they interact with the world, those are the sort of patterns we pick up and learn.

Likewise, the mixed gender conversations and things that happen. We pick up on those play of dynamics, the things that we see, and if we have strong role models, then it helps us shift those other conversations. So if we have exp more experience with these things, like the Grace Hopper conference and being able to go into these other that have a culture built around strong women and supporting being a strong woman, then you can take some of those things back with you in these other environments and then also be a role model for others. Because people see you being strong and standing up for yourself, being confident and they might have the same reaction to you of like, “Wow, I really admire her. She's really cool.” And then they start to emulate those things too.

So these cultural dynamics, they spread and it's this subconscious spreading thing that happens. But maybe if we can get more experiences in these positive environments, we can iteratively take some of those things back with us and influence our other environments that, that maybe aren't so healthy.

EMILY: Yeah. I agree. And I think also, it's important to be honest and open about where you started because it's easy, if you're a really confident woman walking into the room, for people to think you've always been that way. I think it's important to tell the stories about when you weren't, because that's how other people are going to connect with you and see a path forward for themselves. Definitely.

I'll start by telling a story. I think it's just a million small experiences. I was a strong student in high school. I was very good at math. We had study halls where we'd sit in the auditorium and we'd all be doing homework, and students would often go to the guy in my math class who knew less than I did and ask for help. I would just sit there and listen to him poorly help the other students and mostly just brag about himself, and just be quiet and think about how angry it made me, but not really be able to speak up, or say anything.

I'm very different now. Because of the exposure that I've had, I am much more quick to shut that down and to give a different perspective when someone's acting that way.

MANDY: But how cool would it have been if that guy would've been like, “Don't ask me, ask Emily”?

DAVE: That's a really important point because I hear women talk about this problem all the time and I don't think the solution is a 100% in the women's hands. I think that it's men in the room.

My own personal experience, most of my career has been spent in government contracting space and, in that space, the percentage of women to men is much higher. It's still not great, but I think there's a better attempt at inclusion during recruiting. I think that there's a lot of just forces in that environment that are more amenable to that as a career path for women.

And then when I started consultancy with my two business partners, Kim and Karen, that was an unheard-of thing that I had two women business partners and at the time we started it, I didn't think it was that big of a deal at all. But then we were suddenly in the commercial space and people thought it was some scam I was running to be a minority owned company and my partner was my wife, or I'd go into a meeting and somebody thought I brought a secretary and I was like, “No, she's an engineer and she's good, if not better than me.”

It opened my eyes to the assumptions that people make about what the consulting rates even should be for men versus women and it's in that environment I learned that I had to speak up. I had to represent to be a solution to that problem. I think you can get in an argument with other guys where they aren't even convinced there's a problem to solve. They'll start talking about, “Oh, well, women just aren't as interested in this career path.” It's like, I've known plenty that are and end up leaving.

EMILY: I think definitely having support from both sides has been really important because it is typically men in places of authority and to have them be encouraging and not necessarily forcing you into the spotlight, but definitely trying to raise you up and encourage you to speak out means a lot.

ARTY: Yeah. I found most of the teams I've been on, I was the only woman on the team, or one of two maybe and early on, when nobody knows you, people make a lot of assumptions about things. The typical thing I've seen happen is when you've got a woman programmer is often, the bit is flipped pretty early on of that oh, she doesn't know what she's doing and stuff, we don't need to listen to what she says kind of thing and then it becomes those initial conversations and how things are framed, tend to affect a lot of how the relationships on the team are moving forward.

One of the things that I learn as just an adaptive thing is I was really smart. So what I do, the first thing on the team I'd find out what the hardest problem was, that none of the guys could solve and figure it out, and then I would go after that one. My first thing on the team, I would go and tackle the hardest thing. I found that once you kick the ass of the biggest baddy on the yard, respect.

[laughter]

So I ended up not having problems moving forward and that the guys would be more submissive toward me, even as opposed to the other way around. But it's like you come into a culture that is dominated by certain ways of thinking in this masculine hierarchy, alpha male thing going on and if that's the dominant culture, you have to learn to play that game and stake yourself in that game. Generally speaking, in this engineering world, intelligence is fairly respected. So I've at least found that that's been a way for me to operate and be able to reset that playing field anyway.

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ARTY: Well, speaking of games, Arty, one of the things that Emily mentions in her bio is playing Dungeons and Dragons and this is an area where as well as I know Emily from her high school years, this is not something I know much about Emily at all. So I'd like to talk about that. Play, or DM, Emily?

EMILY: Both. But I really enjoy DMing because it's all about creating problems to solve, in my opinion, like you throw out a bunch of story threads. The way I approach things is I try actually, unlike a lot of DMs, I do not do a lot of world building for places my players haven't been. I pretty much, there are bright light at the center of the world and anything the light doesn't touch doesn't exist. I haven't written it and I don't really look at it that often.

So I'm constantly throwing out story threads to try and see what they latch onto and I'll dive into their character backstory to see what they are more predisposed to be interested in. It's like writing a weekly web comic. You don't have necessarily a set beginning and end and you don't really know where you're going to end up in between, but you end up with all these cool threads and you can tie them together in new and interesting ways. Just seeing the connections between those and being able to change what you want something to be on the fly is really cool and just very stimulating mentally for me. So it's like a puzzle exercise the whole time and it is also an interesting social exercise because you're trying to balance the needs of each person.

I feel like D&D allows you to know people on a really deep level, because a lot of times, our characters are just – that we’re playing. I guess, I didn't really explain what D&D is; I just made an assumption that people would know. It's a tabletop role playing game where you make a character. You're usually heroic and you're going about on this adventure trying to help people solve problems and these characters tend to be just naturally an extension of ourselves. So you get to see all the things that subconsciously the person doesn't real about themselves, but that show up in their character. I think that's really cool.

DAVE: So do you have a weekly game, or how often do you play?

EMILY: I try to run a weekly game. College often gets in the way. [laughs]

DAVE: How many players?

EMILY: It ranges from 3 to 4, sometimes 5. It's really cool because it's also, most of them are people that I met during the pandemic. So we've played predominantly online and this is the way we've gotten to know each other. We've become really close in the year, or so since we started playing together through the game that I DM and through the game that one other person in the group DMs and it's cool. It's definitely a way to kind of transcend the boundaries of Zoom and of video calls in general.

DAVE: Hmm.

ARTY: How did you end up getting into that?

EMILY: It was just a friend group in high school. Someone said, “Hey, I would like to run a Dungeon and Dragons game. Do you want to play?” And I said, “Oh, what's that?” I've always loved books and reading so it was kind of a natural progression to go from reading a story to making a story collaboratively with other people. So that just immediately, I had a connection with it and I loved the game and that's been a huge part of my hobbies and my outside of tech life ever since.

DAVE: Yeah. I played D&D as a kid in the late 70s, early 80s, but my mom took all my stuff away from me when that Tom Hanks movie came out that started the whole Satan panic thing. So I didn't play for a long time until my own kids were interested after getting hooked on Magic. Seeing my own kids interested in D&D, the story building, the writing, the math that they had to do, like I don't know why any parent wouldn't encourage their kids to play this game. It's just phenomenal. The collaborative, creative, sharing, math; it's got everything.

EMILY: Yeah. I'm an introverted person so it takes a lot to make me feel motivated to be in a group with other people consistently, but D&D does that and it does it in a way that's not, I guess, prohibitive to people who are naturally shy. Because you're pretending to be someone else and you're not necessarily having to totally be yourself and you're able to explore the world through a lens that you find comfortable.

DAVE: That’s really cool.

EMILY: I guess, also, it kind of goes back to our conversation about teaching. Being a DM, a lot of my players are people who have not played before, or very, very new. Like, maybe they've read a lot about it, maybe they've watched them [43:18] shows, but they maybe haven't necessarily played.

D&D does require a lot of math and there's a lot of optimization, like you can get very into the weeds with your character sheet trying to make the most efficient battle machine, whatever and that's not really always approachable. Especially when I started introducing my younger siblings to D&D, I used versions, D&D like games that were similar, but not quite D&D. Like less math, a very similar amplified character sheets so you're looking at fewer numbers, or fewer calculations involved just to kind of get the essence, because there's a few core concepts in D&D.

You have six statistics about your character that they change a little bit between different types of role-playing games, but they're pretty universal, I think for the most part. It's constitution, strength, dexterity, wisdom, intelligence, and charisma. Once you kind of nail those concepts down and once a person understands what those skills are supposed to mean, that really opens the gates to understanding a lot more about the core mechanics of D&D outside of the spell casting stuff and all the other math that's involved.

I think just simplifying the game down to that makes them fall in love with the narrative and collaborative aspect of the game, and then be more motivated to figure out the math, if they weren't already predisposed to that.

DAVE: So if somebody were interested in picking up a game trying to figure it out, where would they start?

EMILY: It really to depends on the age group. If you're going to play with high school students, I would definitely say if none of you have played before, then pick up a player's handbook, maybe a dungeon master's guide if you're going to DM, you've never DM before because it gives a lot of tips for just dealing with the problems that arise in a collaborative storytelling game. And then probably just a prewritten module so you don't have to worry about building your own story, because these modules are stories that are written by professional game developers and you can take pieces of them and iterate it on yourself so you don't have to start with nothing.

But if you are going for a much younger audience, I can't remember off the top of my head what it was, but it's essentially an animal adventure game. It's very much D&D without using the word D&D because I think it's a different company, it's copyrighted, and whatnot. But you have these little cute dog characters and they're trying to defeat an evil animal overlord who wants to ruin the town festival. It's very family friendly, like there's no death like there is in regular D&D and it's just a chance to engage with the character creation aspect of it.

MANDY: That's really cool.

So we're about heading towards our time, but I really appreciate you coming on the show, Emily and I wanted to just ask you, if you could give any advice to young girls looking to get into tech, or software engineering, what advice would you give them?

EMILY: I think don't be afraid to walk off the path. A lot of my life has been kind of bucking the prewritten path that a lot of people are told is the best one because it didn't work for me, or whatever reason, and I think it's important just to not be afraid of that and to be courageous in making your own path.

MANDY: That's great advice.

So should we head into reflections, everyone? Who wants to start us off?

DAVE: I'll start with one.

I mentioned that when asked Emily about her path into college, that I was interested in a similar path for my own kids. I had a really strange college path that I started out a music major, ended up a computer science major, and had a non-traditional path. I've always believed that college is what you make of it, not where you went. Where you went might help you get your first job, but from then on, it's networking, it's personality, it's how well you did the job.

Talking to Emily about her path, just reinforces that to me and helps me plot a path for what I might have my own children do. I have triplet boys that are in 9th grade. So we're starting to think about that path and not only would a path through Virginia Community College save us a fortune, [laughs] it would also be a guaranteed admission into Virginia Tech, or one of the Virginia schools so it's definitely something worth to consider. So I appreciate that knowledge, Emily.

ARTY: I've been thinking a lot about how we can better teach people that don't have a lot of experience yet. We've got so much stuff going on in this field of software engineering and it's really easy to not realize how far that this plateau of knowledge that we live in and work with every day to do our jobs, and how important it is to bring up new folks that are trying to learn.

One of the things you said, Emily was about teaching is being able to find those shared things where we've got a common understanding about something—you used metaphor of male delivery to talk about IP addresses, for example. But to be thinking in those ways of how do we find something shared and be able to get more involved with mentoring, reaching back, and helping support people to learn because software is super cool. It really is! We can build amazing, amazing things. It'd be awesome if more of us were able to get involved and have that experience and having good mentors, having good role models, all of those things make a big difference.

MANDY: I just love the conversation that we had about men and women in technology and for me, I love to reiterate the fact that empowered women empower women and I even want to take that a step further by saying especially right now in our field, empowered men also empower women.

So I think that that's something that really needs to be said and heard and not perceived as like Dave said oh, he felt like the creepy guy encouraging girls, or women to get involved in tech. I think it's cool. Dave has personally, he's mentored me. He's gotten me more interested. I used to do assistant work and now I'm learning programming and it's because I've been encouraged to do so by a lot of different men in the industry that I've been lucky to know.

DAVE: Well, thank you, Mandy. You certainly have a who's who of mentors.

MANDY: I am very, very lucky to know the people I know.

DAVE: I’m quite honored to even be named on that list of people you know.

[laughter]

EMILY: I think the thought I keep coming back to is one that I've mentioned, but didn't really crystallize in my head until this morning when I was preparing for this recording is, I listened to David's interview and I thought about like, “Oh wow, he did really well on the podcast, all these things that I wish I did.” It really crystallized the idea that your mentor should be different from you and should have skills you don't, and you should seek them out for that reason.

Mentors tend to be the people that I run into and I haven't really thought about it that way before, but that gives me a different perspective to go out and intentionally seek out those people. That definitely gives some food for thought for me. [laughs]

MANDY: I love intentionally seeking out people who are different from myself in general, just to learn and get perspectives that I might have never even thought of before. But with that, I guess we will wrap up.

Emily, it's been so nice having you on the show. Congratulations and best of luck on your exams. I know being – [overtalk]

DAVE: I can’t believe you took the time to do this with your exams coming up.

MANDY: I know!

EMILY: I'm procrastinating as hard as I can.

[laughter]

MANDY: But it's been so nice to have you on the show. Dave, thank you for coming and being a guest panelist and Arty, it's always wonderful to host with you. So I just wish everybody a happy new year and we'll see you next week!

Special Guests: Dave Bock and Emily Haggard.

Sponsored By:

• Compiler (Red Hat): This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small and strange.



Support Greater Than Code

00:54 - Pariss’ Superpower: Being Vocal and Transparent

08:01 - #BlackTechTwitter & Black Tech Pipeline

15:56 - Being Okay with Losing Opportunities

28:57 - UX Design vs Software Engineering (What would you do if you weren’t in tech?)

35:11 - Pariss’ Passion for Acting & Being On Set

43:38 - Growing & Evolving Community

Reflections:

Chanté: Being intentional about community.

John: The impact an individual person can have on culture.

Jamey: Be bothered. Ways that marginalized communities share some things and not other things.

Tim: Having these discussions because people who are not Black do not understand the Black experience; Making sure the Black experience is changed for the better moving forward.

Pariss: Being an ally vs being a coconspirator.

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

To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Transcript:

JOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 264. I'm John Sawers. My pronouns are he/him. And I'm here with Chanté Thurmond.

CHANTÉ: Hey, everyone. My pronouns are she/her and ella. And I'm here today with Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Thanks, Chanté. My pronouns are they/them. And I'd like to also introduce Tim Banks.

TIM: Hey, everybody. My pronouns are he/him. And I would like to introduce today's guest, Pariss Athena.

PARISS: Hey, everyone. I'm Pariss Athena. My pronouns are she/her.

I'm founder and CEO of Black Tech Pipeline and creator of the hashtag movement and community, #BlackTechTwitter.

JOHN: Welcome to the show!

We're going to start off with the question that we ask every guest that we have. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

PARISS: This is such a downer, because I really don't know. I don't have one. I don't have a superpower, I don't think.

JAMEY: Just because you don't know does not mean that you don't have one.

CHANTÉ: One of them that I think is obvious to me, when I found you on Twitter, was your ability to see the problem, see the opportunity, and obviously, to find the talent. So those are three clear distinct talents you got there.

PARISS: Yeah. Okay, I didn't consider them as superpowers, but we can definitely go with that.

CHANTÉ: Sure!

TIM: I will tell you; it was interesting to me because Pariss and I don't interact very often on Twitter, but I've been a follower and a fan for a while. The one thing that I've noticed about you is that you are always unapologetically yourself and I think that is a huge thing that cannot be underestimated. Because your ability to do these things, and your ability to inspire and empower others is because you first inspire and empower yourself. That's something that myself as a Black man, especially as a Black woman, we don't see that a lot and we don't see that a lot in a way that uplift others as well.

So I've always been super, super impressed with your ability to do that and to do it unapologetically, and to stand there against all the people that level hate at all of us just to be there, complete yourself and let it go off. So always been inspired by that and I don't think you should underestimate that as a superpower.

PARISS: Thank you! See, I didn't consider these things superpowers, but I guess, now I do. [laughs]

JOHN: There you go.

PARISS: Thank you. You're making me realize things about myself. [chuckles]

TIM: Oh, yeah. That's one thing; we'll tell you about yourself. Whether it's good, or bad, we'll still tell you.

PARISS: I love it. I love to hear the feedback.

CHANTÉ: The other thing you might want to do now is we can ask #BlackTechTwitter what they think your superpowers are. I'm sure that they'll give you lots of insights of interacting with you over the last few years.

PARISS: Yeah. I think the whole saying kind of what I want to say no matter what will probably be a big one.

JOHN: Yeah.

CHANTÉ: Yeah.

PARISS: For me, I like doing that. I guess, I don't mind losing opportunities because I wanted to be honest, like it just is what it is, but I feel like I've always been that way. Maybe because I've been bullied for so many years and I'm just one day I just had it. I was like, “You know what? I'm fed up.” I'm done trying to appease people and I didn't care if I didn't have any friends, or whatever. I was like, “I was tired being a pushover,” and from there, I've just always been very vocal and transparent.

CHANTÉ: Ah, there it is. It's like the superhero wound that turns into your superpower.

PARISS: Yeah. Some people will say that. Some other people will be like, “Oh, that’s my villain origin story.” But I don’t know, I’m at a breaking point [chuckles] and I was like, “All right, I'm done. This is just whatever.”

TIM: See, I always thought that was interesting because the “villains,” or “heroes;” any character in a story is most sympathetic when you understand where you're coming from. It's interesting that we talk about the villain origin story. It's because my favorite villains would be heroes in a different setting. You take like Magneto and I take Magneto because for me, the X-Men comic books, for those of you don't follow, has always been about civil rights.

PARISS: Yeah.

TIM: Always from the get go. Always about civil rights, always about the marginalized, and always about the people who are different. Sometimes they're different in ways that you can't tell and sometimes there's different in very, very obvious ways.

I think that I always spoke to marginalized folks because some of those mutants had powers that you wouldn't know by looking at them. So some people are marginalized in ways where they're neurodivergent, where they have disabilities that you can't see, and some of them are very, very obvious about what they are.

But the big thing that made the villains sympathetic is you understood why they did what they did. You may not have agreed with the methodology, but you could understand and were sympathetic to those costs. It’s like I said, Magneto from the X-Men was a great one.

The heroes oftentimes had to endure the same kinds of problems that the villains did, but they went about it by a different approach and I think that's what makes a real big difference in our society today. It's not that whether folks are marginalized, or not, it's not whether folks have been bullied, or anything like that. It's how they choose to use that experience to go forward from that.

PARISS: Right.

TIM: So people who haven’t had those kinds of experiences say, “Yeah, it's a choice.” People can simplify it, or oversimplify it and say, “Oh, well they just had a choice to do good, or bad,” and it's like, no, it's never that easy. It's never that easy. In the right circumstances, all of us would probably do something that we would consider and the privilege that we do enjoy now—bad, or wrong, or whatever. But it was a thing that was necessary at the time.

So I think we, as folks, especially as Black people, or other marginalized folks in this industry, need to be able to look back and to reach down and pull folks up and say, “Hey, there's a different way to go about it.” Because sometimes they just don't know that they have options and that's why it's important for us to inspire and empower folks to be that.

PARISS: Yeah, and I feel like there's always that argument of yes, there is this problem, but the way you're going about solving it is not okay. But that's one perspective and then there's another perspective. At the end of the day, you're like, “Who's really right, who's really wrong,” and it's like that type of war. It's hard.

TIM: Yeah. We don't live in an actual right/wrong, like very black and white thing.

PARISS: Mm hm.

TIM: Not to delve too far into it, one of the things I always liked about some of the Sergio and Morricone movies, the spaghetti westerns, was that they were never really heroes. Everybody was just shades of gray and it's like, did they do the right thing this time? Yeah. They may have been despicable people, but they did the right thing and I see that.

We see that when we look through our history, regardless who it is, every “hero” has got some darkness to them and so, they didn't do everything right. That's all of us and none of us has ever done everything. It's just a matter what is our aggregate. So we always try and do the best we can.

But like I said—not to steal the spotlight. I apologize for going off on this. But one of the things I've always looked at you, Pariss for is because you never claim to be always right. You never have said, “Everything I do is right,” or you follow me like that. It's always like, “Hey, look, I'm just doing the best I can.” When we are very open and transparent about that and vulnerable about that, that's what's inspiring.

PARISS: Yeah. It's funny he brought up superheroes. I guess, he says he's not a hero, or a villain, which is why I love him so much, but Deadpool. I absolutely love Deadpool because he doesn't claim one, or the other. He's like, “I'm a guy making my own decisions and that's that.” I love that because you're not asking people to side with you, you're just this one person and you're going about life the way you want to do it, or go about things. I feel like that's just sort of what I do. I'm just doing what I do and like it or not, I don't know. I don't want to claim to be a role model, or like you said, that I'm always right. I'm not. I'm a human and that's that.

CHANTÉ: Pariss, I'd love to take that as our cue to ask you. Let's talk about what you do, how you started #BlackTechTwitter and the Black Tech Pipeline. Tell us about what inspired you, what you were going through at that moment, and give us high level overview of where you've come from and where you are now.

PARISS: I'll start off with #BlackTechTwitter. So I got onto Twitter in September, or August of 2018 because I had just been laid off for my first job as a software engineer and I wanted to just talk about my journey, finding a new role. When I got on there, that's when I noticed that there was a really small community of Black technologists and up until that point, first of all, I was new to tech so it's not like I really knew the industry, but also, I never worked with anyone who looked like me since I entered the industry. So when I saw that there was a community, I was excited about it.

So one day I just posted a tweet asking what does Black Twitter in tech look like. I wasn't trying to start anything. I didn't even have followers. I just posted a tweet. That was it and then that tweet just ended up taking off and it gained so much traction. I didn't expect that. Black technologists from all over the world posted themselves into that tweet and it just created that really long thread with their pictures and captions of what they do in the industry and overnight, it really formed this movement community in #BlackTech Twitter. Again, that was not my intention. It just kind of happened.

Black Tech Pipeline then also fell into my lap pretty much just because that tweet and the traction that it gained; all of these employers were DMing me on Twitter. It was weird to have all these really big-name companies just in my Twitter DMS. I'm like, “Oh, wow.” Like, [chuckles] “[inaudible]. That’s so cool.” And they’re like, “Hey, we saw that. There's no pipeline problem. You brought exposure to this community. We want to hire people. Can you send us candidates?” Now I wasn't a recruiter at all. I didn't have recruiting experience. I didn't know what to do, but I was just like, “You're just connecting people. It's not that hard.”

So what I did was I created a Discord community. I moved a lot of the members from Twitter into there and that's what I used to ask people like, “Hey, are you looking for work? I'm working with this employer.” I wasn't actually working with anyone in terms of having a contract. I was helping people for free. [laughs] So I was like, “Hey, let me connect you to this guy at Amazon, this guy at Google, this guy at Etsy,” that's just what it was.

I was connecting people just like that and people were getting jobs and so, it was working. But I formed this entity, Black Tech Pipeline, after a lot of the candidates that I “recruited”—I'm doing air quotes for people who can't see—recruited into these companies. I started Black Pipeline because they came back to me and let me know that they left the companies that I recruited them into. When I asked why, it was like the typical just, “They weren't actually inclusive. It was very performative. It was a negative environment. They didn't really have any goals for me. It's like I was a diversity hire.”

I felt horrible because I didn't vet these companies. I just was like, “Yeah, sure. I'll bring you candidates,” and that was it. So I felt horrible about that, especially being a Black woman enduring so much negativity within the industry. I was like, “If I'm going to do this type of work, then I want to do it right.”

So I formed Black Tech Pipeline and I created this recruitment model, which was inspired by my bootcamp model. Anytime someone got hired from Black Tech Pipeline, I would stay on the job with them for 90 days and that meant I would biweekly virtual check-ins with those hires just to ask, “Hey, how's it going? What's your experience been like? Do you have the tools and resources that you need?” Those hires would give me feedback on their experience and I’d take that feedback and I'll relay it to the employer. So it was this feedback loop for 90 days to ensure that everyone's being set up for success, they have what they need, and they're happy and healthy in their environment. And then I eventually launched a job board.

CHANTÉ: Yeah. I remember actually when you started off this conversation, because I was a headhunter at the time and looking for tech talent. So I stayed, I followed, watched, and I was so excited.

One of the things that, as you were telling back that story, but I remember now that you're retelling it. Initially, I was like, “I love what Pariss is doing. It's very organic, it's real, it's needed. It's an opportunity that had been long overlooked.” I was so grateful that you were just building this movement, but I was also a little sad that you weren't necessarily getting paid. I know it was a labor of love, but I felt like all of a sudden, people started coming to you.

I remember just all this activity and I was like, “Dang, that's a lot to take on,” and as a person in this industry, too. I feel like I'm oftentimes like, “Let me go help you.” I take on this role of being a Black woman caretaker of my community. I feel like I have this obligation to look out for people, which I think is pretty common in our Black community specifically. But it just feels like this problem that was so pervasive to technology and quite frankly, in a lot of other industries, became now this responsibility of you.

People were like, “Hey, can you –?” They're sliding into your DMS and they're like, Hey, can you connect us with talent?” And then the fact that they didn't say, “And let us compensate you equitably for the labor that you are doing on our behave that we don't even have the capacity to do, or to maintain, sustain.” So just want to say I hope that now, as you're getting into this work and understanding the game of it, the business and the economic model that you are charging what you're worth on behalf of doing this labor.

PARISS: Yeah. So that wasn't even – when I thought about that later on, I did it for free for 2 years. I wasn't thinking about it then, but now that I think about like, wow, I really build these companies up with Black technologists and no one offered to pay me at all. No one mentioned money at all and I'm like, “That's performative within itself.” I had to really think about that and it made me upset.

I've actually even had a few of those companies come back to me after I launched Black Tech Pipeline and they expected work for free again. I was like, it just gives me insight into who's just here for the check the box and who's not. I've had tons of different experiences. I've even had companies – like I said, I do that recruitment model where I stay on the job with people for 90 days. I've even had companies offered to pay me more money to not stay on the job with the hires and just place them and I was like, “That's not, no. That's mandatory. I have to stay on the job.”

JOHN: Yeah. Red flag.

PARISS: Right, and I ended up not working with them anyway, but it's just like, so much is revealed in this work and it's frustrating. It’s emotional all the time.

TIM: I think that underlies the whole problem of around diversity and inclusion in tech is that companies are willing to do it as long as they're not out anything. But as soon as they have to make an investment that's going to determine whether, or not they see the value in it. So if someone else is going to do the work, if someone else is going to do the labor of getting the talent to them, they don't have to pay nothing for it. Great. Well, that's just easy, but when you tell them, they actually have to invest in that, that's when they balk.

PARISS: Right.

TIM: Because it's not actually worth it for them. And the companies that will pay, or offer to pay, the companies that will pay Black speakers, the companies that will pay Black talent equivalent to the other ones, the companies that will pay to go and look for talent out of marginalized folks, those are the ones, they may not always do it right. But they're doing it better than the ones that just – if we happen upon some inclusive, great.

PARISS: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

JAMEY: One thing you said earlier when we were talking about your superpower of saying what you mean all the time was that you're not afraid to lose opportunities because of the things you say and stuff. I thought that that was really interesting because folks from marginalized backgrounds have to think about what they're doing and if it's going to lose them opportunities in a way that other people don't have to think about.

So I guess, I was kind of wondering what your feelings are about that. I know I've talked about this with people in my network and the way I feel about if a company doesn't want to work with me, or an opportunity wants to overlook me because of this, this, or that about myself, then maybe I didn't want to work with them. I'm wondering what your philosophy is on that and how you came to that conclusion about it.

PARISS: Yeah. So for me, I do not judge.

I've had a few candidates who, they got hired at Google, but they were scared to announce it because of all of these issues with Google internally when it comes to their Black and brown hires. I was like, “No, you got hired at Google. That's a big deal. Say it. I know Google has issues. Trust me, even the smallest businesses have these issues and I don't think it's something we can actually escape, but you accomplished something, you got thing that you wanted, you should be proud of that so, say it.” That doesn't mean that you're here claiming like, “Oh, Google is the gods of technology.” No, but you got hired at your dream job and that's great. Announce that.

For me, there are certain things I wouldn't do, but that's just me. Personally, like I said, I'm not scared to lose opportunities and I think that's because I'm so angry, I'm fed up, and I'm tired of needing to think of something before I say it, when people in privilege, they can just say whatever they want with no repercussions.

I understand that other people aren't like that and that's totally fine. If you don't want to say something because you're scared you might lose opportunity, then don't say it. I would hate for someone to be like, “You know what, let me try this,” and then they can't sleep that night because they didn't really want to do it. They felt pressured to. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. If you want to, then do it. But I'm not going to judge you based off of that. You do what you want.

JOHN: Yeah. I think a number of times on the show, we've talked about companies that have less than stellar reputations for the way they treat their people, places like Shopify and Google. Pretty much like you said, any company's going to have some issues like that. Some people have the privilege and the place where they can quit that job on principle based on that sort of thing. But we also don't want to criticize the people that have to stay there, that they need that job. They don't feel like they can just pick up the next one immediately.

So you can criticize the company and all the things, but we want to separate that from criticizing individual workers who are working that job. Like you said, you’re going to be proud of getting a job at Google. That's a hard thing to do. That's something you should be proud of regardless of what other crap they're doing in their other departments, or at various levels.

PARISS: Exactly. Yeah. I feel like the only people I criticize are the employers themselves because they’re the ones making the policies, they’re the ones making these roles and these changes. If they're only benefiting you, or the people in power and people in privilege, then I have no problem just roasting you, it's fine. You'll be fine. You still make your money.

JAMEY: The way I kind of see it sometimes when someone that I care about takes a job with a company, Google is a good example, where I have this simultaneously, “I'm really happy for you that you accomplished this big thing and it's not that I'm judging people, but also, I'm a little worried for you.” Like, “I hope that that works out for you.” [laughs]

PARISS: Well, yeah, same. I feel that way, too all the time, but I don't tell them that.

[laughter]

But I don't want to raid on your parade, but in the back my mind, I'm definitely like, “God, I really hope they do have a really good experience and if not, at least you got Google on your resume, you can go somewhere else.” But I try not to rain on anyone's parade. I think my negative thoughts, but outward, I’m like, “I’m so proud of you. Congrats.”

JAMEY: [laughs] Absolutely.

CHANTÉ: Yeah. As you all were talking, it reminds me, too. I think for the last few days, or week, I've seen some pieces around the great resignation and just people having privilege to quit their job and what that means about your social location and your circumstances. Many times, the people who have the privilege to quit are folks who have other things in the pipeline, or other means to cover their expenses and just the cost of living, or they have opportunities galore.

I'm just curious if you've had any conversations with folks about that in the past several weeks, or months, given all the things we've seen with COVID and just how the economy's being playing out.

PARISS: No, people are not – well, this is only true for me and the conversations I've had. No, people are not leaving their jobs without having another one lined up just because it's not like you need the money, right? You still have to pay your bills whether you have a job, or not.

So no, they're staying and it sucks that you have to stay in a toxic situation. Like it sucks. That's just what you have to do and yet, that's kind of just what I'm seeing and I let them know like, “Obviously, I'll help you out.” Like, “I have a job board. I'm connected to all these employers. I'll help you as much as I can.

I also don't even encourage them. I'm like, “Unless you want to quit, then go ahead and do that, and I'll help you as much as I can. Otherwise, yes, I understand at the end of the day, things still need to be paid. You have to put food on the table and regardless of what your situation is, just kind of hold out for as long as you can.” It sucks. It's like being between a rock and a hard place.

CHANTÉ: Yeah, and it’s hard, especially, I feel like what I've seen is folks who have taken the plunge and broken into tech. They're like, “Well, I work so hard to get here. You think I'm just going to quit?” Like, there's a lot of hype with my tech team right now to quit and the stuff that happened at Netflix, it was a lot of hype and it's like, that's great that people can quit and walk out and do whatever.

And then there are people who just absolutely cannot. They want to fight and they want to be in solidarity with their coworkers on things, but they might not have the privilege, or ability to really do that in such a way. It's not just performative. It's like, this is their livelihood, too. Doesn't mean that they're not in solidarity.

PARISS: Yeah. No, I haven't talked to anyone who's felt comfortable enough to literally just up and quit because they're angry, or something.

CHANTÉ: Right.

PARISS: Like for them, they just got to go with it. It is what it is.

CHANTÉ: Yeah.

TIM: I think, too, there's a certain amount of almost protest, or hate working where it's like, I know some folks, who were civil servants, work for federal state governments that they detest it. Especially our parents’ generations, baby boomers, they worked for the federal government. Even though the federal government was doing them dirty, they were still going to get their money. They were going to get paid. They were going to use the government that they couldn't stand to set them up. They were going to take them for all their work.

I think there's a lot of that sentiment, too among Black tech workers. Like, look, this company may be treating me wrong, but I'm going to soak them. I'm going to get every penny and dye my can out of these people and when I'm driving around in my Jaguar and going on vacation, they can eat it. When I buy that house, when I have something to leave my kids, that is what I'm doing this for. They can detest the company and you see them every day. They get home, they're like, “What’s up, man. Look, I'm just trying to get this paycheck, dog.”

PARISS: Right.

TIM: And that’s legit. That is a very legitimate reason. I've worked for companies whose ethics I didn't necessarily agree with. But you know what, when I came home and I was driving a nice car, I had a big house, and my kids get fed, I'm like, “Look, man, that's all I'm here for.” That’s especially for marginalized folks, especially for folks that don't have generational wealth, never mind the actual privilege of being able to quit myself. But when you are set up with generation of wealth and you know you have something to leave the next generation, it's a whole different story than this is my opportunity for generational wealth. This money that I am making, it's a lot and I can hate the fucking company, but you know what, when I have something to leave my progeny, that's what I'm here for.

PARISS: Oh, yes. I cannot stand when people are like, “If you're not here for passion, you're not going to last. You have to do it because you're passionate.” It's like maybe for you. I think this is really for marginalized communities, but we don't have the luxury of doing something for passion.

I'm passionate about acting. I wish my mom could take care of my bills while I'm out chasing my dreams. But that can't happen for me. I have to work a 9:00 to 5:00, work on my little skits afterwards. That's the reality of my life for me. I can't just quit this company because unfortunately, even if they're just a terrible company, I can't just up and quit because I bills to pay. I have a child to feed. I have family to take care of. I don't have that privilege.

So I think especially just Black people, we're so used to just living like this, it’s like this is just our reality every day. We have to deal with the way the world is and then still grow and thrive. Just going into a company and dealing with that is nothing new for us.

CHANTÉ: Yeah. Real talk and I really appreciate you all talking about this because I actually faced the same situation not too long ago where I had two jobs and people were like, “Oh wow. It must be nice.” I'm like, “Must be nice? You think I'm working two jobs because it's a luxury, yo? Like, “It's actually because I'm making up for lost ground and for time.” This is equitable, this is reparations. In order to actually have a savings account, I have to have two jobs to be able to help my family during COVID. Are you tripping?

I got to the point where I actually did need to make a decision because it was so unhealthy. I was getting so sick at work and I lost my dad. Suddenly, he got really sick and then that kind of forced me. The life circumstances forced me. But I was ready and committed to work two jobs just because my parents both have always worked more than one job. They always have multiple incomes. That's all I know. That's all I know.

It's interesting seeing some of this play out in technology. What I noticed was, as I got into more technologically advanced, or well-funded companies and stuff, talking to people, they're like, “You can just quit,” and I'm like, “What are you talking about?” [laughs] That is not my reality.

PARISS: Right.

TIM: Yeah. It's funny that people talk about the hustle culture, whatever, having this and having that, having this thing on the side. Look, Black people have been doing this from the jump, from the get go. We've been having two, three jobs. We had a side hustle. We've been doing this; we're doing that on the side. We have been doing that forever because that's what we had to do that and then second of all, if we wanted to have anything more than the basics, that's what we needed to do.

Both my parents work two jobs. I had two jobs since the time I was 16, since the time I was 35. I had two jobs and that was my present to me was when I made enough that I could only have one job and I was like, “Man, I can see my kids and stuff like that.” It's crazy, right?

But that thing is the thing that people say, “Oh, well, now you can do things like that.” “That has how our existence has been for a long time. For a long, long time and that's not new to us. So for us, it is a privilege. For us, it's a privilege to just have one job, never mind to be able to quit that job.

People say, “I'm going to go on and fund unemployment. I'm going to take a few months off to figure out what I want to do.” That doesn't register with me. That is not something I could ever do comfortably. That's not never going to see me do. Unless you're going to pay me to be gone. When people say, “Oh, I'm going to quit and I'm going to go take a vacation to Europe and then I'm going to come back in six months.” I'm like, “Bro, that is not a world in which I live.”

PARISS: Sounds amazing, though.

TIM: I know it does. I love that for you.

PARISS: I wish I could do that. [laughs]

MID-ROLL: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.

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TIM: So I guess, Pariss, I want to know when it gets to a point where you get in demand, what people want to hire not just your company, when they want to, “I want to hire Pariss Athena to work for my company.” What role are you going to work? What role do you want to be in?

PARISS: Now? That's hard because I do Black Tech Pipeline full-time and I'm always like, “If this doesn't work out.” Sometimes I feel like I should be in a DEI role, but then I don't want to, because I know what DEI officers go through working at one company and it's just a shitshow. It's really hard. And sometimes, maybe I'll just leave this industry altogether, I don't know, because I don't want to be a software engineer anymore. I think I'd start over and be a UX designer, probably. Literally just start over as a junior in UX design.

CHANTÉ: Tell us more about that because that was actually a question I had. If you weren't doing this, what would you be doing? So tell me more about why UX design instead of software engineering.

PARISS: So I'm a person who loves research a lot, especially with UX because I just think it's cool. You're really thinking about such intricate things to make sure someone's having a good experience and you're thinking of all these different communities, especially the very vulnerable communities. I love that.

You're using that to build a product that people are going to use, whether it's a digital, or a physical product. I think that's amazing. I think it also makes you more empathetic and aware of things and I love that. I just think there's a lot of opportunity to grow as a human. I just really love UX design and so, I would get into that.

JOHN: And what is it about software that you're moving away from?

PARISS: Software engineering is not fun to me when I'm doing it for work, but it's fun if I have a personal project.

When I learned to code, I started coding my own – like I thought I was building this app that was going to make me a billionaire. So I loved coming home from work and building it every day. It was a React native application. Turns out, now that I think about it, it probably would have made me no money at all. The social media platforms would've killed me early. So whatever, but back then, I thought it was this golden egg idea and it just had me excited.

But doing it for work 9:00 to 5:00, I just didn't enjoy it and that could have been because of the companies I was at, or the mentorship that I lacked. I don't know. It could have been a bunch of different reasons, but I've never really had a good experience coding for work.

And then honestly, if I could snap my fingers altogether and be literally anything I wanted, I would definitely work on set of movie films. I wouldn't have to be an actor, or anything. I would really enjoy pulling curtains if I had to. I just like people on set and watching everything come to life, it's like this feeling I can't describe. It makes me very, very happy. I would probably do that, too.

TIM: I think that's interesting. That part, so many people I know have similar things like that.

PARISS: Oh really?

TIM: Whether it’s they want to do lighting, whether it's they want to do the board. For me, I want to be a Foley artist. For those of you don't know, a Foley artist is when you have a scene where somebody's walking through gravel. Well, they don't actually have a microphone at the feet of the person walking through gravel, they have somebody out there who's taking a block and smashing it in gravel in the place where they walk so, they make those sounds. That's what Foley artist does.

PARISS: Oh.

TIM: But so many people in tech that I know that have super diverse sets of interests, always come back to that portion of working behind the scenes.

PARISS: Yeah.

TIM: To make something that's very visible. People enjoy it. Whether it's music, or whether it's movies, that kind of same emotional things. I love that answer. I think is really cool.

PARISS: That's so interesting. I didn't even know that.

I feel like what's funny. A lot of software engineers that I've met, they didn't start off wanting to be a software engineer. They did start off with going to art school and stuff. I'm like, “What happened?”

JAMEY: I went to art school.

[laughter]

TIM: I'm a musician by trade. I started off, when I joined the Marine Corps, I joined the Marine Corps to be a musician and play a bunch of music.

PARISS: Oh wow.

JAMEY: That's really interesting.

PARISS: Right?

TIM: Yeah.

PARISS: What happened?

CHANTÉ: Yeah. That's a story you don't hear every day.

[laughter]

PARISS: Like, did we all grow up and realized that we have bills? Like, why did we stop?

TIM: Oh. So I stopped because the Marine Corps that I was too smart to be a musician and made me an avionics tech instead.

[laughter]

PARISS: Oh my God.

TIM: They changed my MOS in bootcamp.

PARISS: Wow.

JAMEY: I stopped because I realized that if I wanted to do big film movie kind of stuff, I would have to move to either New York, or LA and I didn't want to do that. [chuckles]

JOHN: I did actually a lot of dance in college, but I also did software and then obviously, software pays a lot more than dance so I kept doing it. But I think unlike everyone here, I actually enjoy the software for the software and then so that's what's kept me in it for so long. Although, now I'm doing management. I'm not actually writing much software these days.

But I feel like software is great because like you said, you can do it, make a ton of money, and then go do something else that you enjoy more, or that you really want to do. So it's nice in that respect, but it's also interesting that there's so many people in it that are doing it 9:00 to 5:00 and then they go do the thing they really enjoy afterwards.

PARISS: Yeah, no, it pays well and it pays to support your actual dream. So it works out.

CHANTÉ: Right. And I do think that a lot of the people in tech that I – as a recruiter, one of the things I always enjoy is well, how did you get into this field. I think that the trend is that most people don't actually to get into software engineering, but they have all this array of skill, talent, interests that actually make them much better at their jobs, or make it feel like I can come here, do this work, pick it up, put it down, and then I have the emotional and the bandwidth to go do the things that I really love. Whereas, if I was doing that other thing I love, that might get burnt out.

So I always find that that's an interesting – specifically, it seems like in tech that I admire about people that they have that ability to do that.

JAMEY: Pariss, you've mentioned a couple of times about acting and being on set. I can tell how much you love it because the tone of voice that you have when you talk about it. Now we're talking, getting into people's real passions and how tech supports that and stuff. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about what got you into acting and what you love about it.

PARISS: Yeah. So I'm going to say it started with home videos. My mom has so many home videos of just doing what I do and I was always part of the drama class ever since middle school. I was always in the plays. I was always main character. I was doing that. And then high school came and I really got into YouTube. So I was doing videos and I don’t know, I always really loved it.

Once high school came, that's actually when I started getting bullied a lot and then I was like, “Oh, I'm going to show them. Once I graduate, I'm going to get into my top university and become an actress.”

I did get into my top university in New York. I moved there to become an actress and then that's where – no, I didn't, I lied. I went there for film and screen studies. I lied, but I wanted to be an actress, too. But when I went to New York, that's when I realized everybody wants to be famous. Everyone wants to do this work.

I was like, “Okay, let me go to LA.” Go to LA, it's even worse. First of all, I saw 80 people who looked just like me. I was like, “Okay, it's going to be really hard to make it in this industry.” It killed my dream a little bit, but I have still always really loved it, but I don't think it's one of those things I want to pursue whole time to get in front of the camera and that's when I started loving just simply being on set.

I was like, “Oh my God.” I love just watching because I just think it's so cool. I really enjoyed being a background actor on set because you get to see the actors walk by and how they build these things. It's just like this vibe.

Another thing I loved was watching – I would go on YouTube and I would buy the extra DVDs for movies. They don't do that anymore. I don't think. But DVDs for movies, they would come with watch the bloopers and how we put all this together. I'd watch that more than the actual movie. I'd watch it for hours and hours. I'd go on YouTube and watch behind the scenes of all my favorite movies. Everything was just so amazing behind scenes.

It's just so fun seeing humans in this amazing job and that's what I fell in love with it, really. I also realized I don't think I want to do acting. I just like be there.

JAMEY: I relate to that a lot about watching the behind-the-scenes stuff. I totally get it.

PARISS: Yeah.

[laughter]

JOHN: Yeah. I always like that feeling that sense of knowing what's going – for example, if you work at a theme park and you know what all the trails are behind the scenes and how they set up the things, even then when you're attending, or whatever, you still know all the stuff that's going on as part of supporting the façade of the experience. I really always have enjoyed having that experience.

I can even remember that back in high school, because my parents were faculty at the school, so I got to go into the places that most of the students never got to go and talk to people in a different way. So I always had that sense of being on the inside a little bit.

PARISS: Right.

JOHN: And that knowledge of more about how things operate and that's always very satisfying to me.

PARISS: Yeah. Yeah.

JAMEY: It's really interesting because I've had people ask me before like, “Oh, you know a lot about –” I was going to do film editing was what I was studying in school and they're like, “Oh, you know a lot about cinematography and editing and how that stuff gets done. Doesn't that ruin watching movies for you because that's what you're thinking about when you're watching them?” I guess, I get why people ask that, but I'm like, “Not at all.” Like, it's great. [laughs]

PARISS: Yeah, I do that, too. I'm like, “Oh.” I'll point things out and I'm sure it's really annoying to people, but I'm like, “But I never did that!”

[laughter]

I even do that now. As someone who used to be a software engineer, I'd be like, “Oh, I know what they use. Oh, they use these –.” I just know all these things and I know it's annoying to people.

JAMEY: I got a GraphQL error in the wild on Facebook the other day and I was like, “Look at this GraphQL error,” and all my friends were like, “I don't care about that at all.” [laughs]

PARISS: That’s [inaudible].

TIM: I think it's interesting though, because as we're talking about these things, about understanding how the sauce is made and understanding what goes into the things increases our enjoyment on it.

To bring this back a little bit, it's like when I see marginalized people, especially Black folks, succeed in tech—I'm happy for my friends and they do well—but I am over the moon for my Black friends, for Black women, for Black transwomen for anything like that when they succeed. Because I know what all it took. I understand the things they had to go through to get there and it's not the same as everybody else.

So me having understand, because I have that common experience to understand that what it took to get there, I am like, “Yes.” So if you do get that high paid job at Google like, “Yeah man, fuck Google, but yes, get that bag.”

PARISS: Right.

TIM: Because I know what it took to get to that point and a lot of people don't appreciate that. Especially if they don't have the common experience because they don't understand it's not just about knowing the code. It's not just about getting the interview. It's so much more to even get to that point to get that. If you go to the Google, if you go to even Facebook, whatever they call themselves now, and you get that bag, I'm happy. You get that bag because I understood what it took to get there.

PARISS: Right. Yeah, and you understand how it's going to change your lives dramatically and that's the most exciting. Anytime I see someone just got their first – someone from #BlackTechTwitter, anytime I see that they just got their first job, or whatever it is, I'm like, “I am so excited that you're about to start this life-changing journey,” because I was on it, too. I know.

It’s like ah, it's so exciting and you know they're going to have these super amazing experiences that they probably wouldn't have and been able to have had they got a job like a 9:00 to 5:00, I don't know, as an administration person, or something. It’s the financial aspect of it is life-changing. It's exciting.

TIM: Yeah. It's like, I remember the first time I ever flew first class.

PARISS: I still have to do that!

TIM: First person in my family, in my whole family, to ever fly first class.

PARISS: Yeah.

TIM: And I remember texting my parents and my parents cried because their kid got to fly first class and people don't understand what all goes into that. They're like, “Oh, you're in first class.” Somebody on Twitter, they came at me sideways for mentioning I was in first class. I'm like, “You know what, I am going to talk about being in first class.”

PARISS: Right.

TIM: “Because ain't a lot of people like me in first class, you go hear about it and I don't care it bothers you. You're just going to have to be bothered.”

PARISS: Yeah. people are like, “Get over it.” People don't realize that, it is. It's a big deal. Again, these are experiences that we might not have ever been able to have. But luckily, we got into this industry and we became successful in it. Like I said, it's life-changing and we might be the first ones in our family to experience these sort of things and I would hope we're not the last, but that's a big possibility, unfortunately. So it is a big one and I think you should talk about it. Who cares?

JAMEY: Can I tell you how much I love, “You're just going to have to be bothered”? I'm like, [laughs] “I'm keeping that one.”

TIM: Oh no, it's funny because I've had to read somebody in-person and it's like, you're just going to have to be bothered and it goes like –

[laughter]

If I could turn that into a t-shirt, or whatever, it’s be bothered.

JAMEY: I would wear that t-shirt.

[laughter]

PARISS: Have it into a – [overtalk]

CHANTÉ: I want that t-shirt.

PARISS: Go for a gift, whatever.

TIM: Yeah. Because I mean, that's the way we do people come at us sideways for all kinds of stuff like that whether it's been our hair, whether it's been the way we dress, whether it's because the codeswitch to back to how we really talk instead of having to codeswitch to that white professional talk, whatever it is. We say y'all, we eat spice, whatever it is, people come at sideways and I'm not apologizing anymore.

CHANTÉ: Good for you. Don't.

TIM: And again, that's something I've always appreciated about you, Pariss is that you don't apologize to that. You’re just like, “You don't like it. I'm not even sorry. You're just going to have to be bothered by it.”

PARISS: Yeah. I just tell people to unfollow me, or block me. It's fine.

[laughter]

CHANTÉ: Yeah, Pariss. One of the questions I have for you is just in this journey, what has been the most surprising thing you've learned?

PARISS: It's not really something I learned because there's a lot of things I already knew. Especially just working with employers, really teaching white people about diversity, equity, inclusion. Certain responses I've gotten, it's not surprising to me, or anything. Maybe things within my own community, but that doesn't really surprise me either. I think it's maybe the experiences I've had, but coming from my own community. Anything happening within my own community is more shocking, or I just feel more when it's from my own people, but I'm also like this happens in every community. It doesn't matter. But of course, this is my community so it affects me more.

CHANTÉ: And then the other question that maybe this will help to prompt that, too. But for me, it's been a lot to experience and to hold and sometimes I feel like I don't want to do it anymore, but I look for things that sustain me, or things that inspire me. So I'm curious, what are those things for you right now in this season?

PARISS: So I follow, I think it's called @BotBlackTech. It's a Twitter account and they retweet all these hashtags, including the #BlackTechTwitter one. So I get to see every – and anytime someone hashtags #BlackTwitter, I see what that announcement is and I get happy seeing that people are just asking questions to #BlackTechTwitter. “Hey, how should I build this?” “Hey, I did that.” I love seeing that. I just love seeing that the community has grown.

I love knowing that people don't know how #BlackTechTwitter started, because that shows the progress. It means that community has grown a ton and that’s the whole point. You want it to continue standing and later on people find out the origin story of it. That’s not the priory.

The priority is there are just more people here now and that's what's most exciting and I think that's just what really keeps me doing this work because I never wanted to do – what I'm doing now, I never wanted to do it. I actually promised myself I wouldn't do this work. Yet I'm here. But seeing all the good that's come from it, I'm like, “Wow, this is really, really dope.” I feel really blessed and lucky and it just makes me very happy.

CHANTÉ: That's dope. And do you ever give thought about if you ever want to step away, or you need to step away, how this would proliferate, how it would continue to grow, and evolve with, or without you? Have you given any consideration to that?

PARISS: Oh yeah. I don't know if I would want to do this forever, but I know I'd want it to stay around forever even if I'm not the one running it. I'd love to hand it off to someone else. That's something we're thinking about now, because I think the issue with Black Tech Pipeline is that the business – if I were to die, or something, that would be it for Black Tech Pipeline and that's not a good business model. It needs to be able to run with, or without me. So that's something we're currently figuring out right now, how to make that happen.

As for the community on Twitter and the just social media period, it's fine. There's no face to #BlackTechTwitter. It's just a community and it's good. It's set for life.

CHANTÉ: I'm glad you have given that a consideration. I thought about the same thing and I'm always here if you ever want to chat about it, or just have a jam session about it. I'd love to be in community with you and help you explore what that would be.

PARISS: That'd be awesome. Thank you.

CHANTÉ: Of course.

JAMEY: There's something really beautiful about doing something that you care so much about that you feel like you want to worry about what will happen to it, even if you weren't there for it.

PARISS: Yeah, no, this is necessary. Again, #BlackTechTwitter and Black Tech Pipeline have created an immense impact. It has to continue, especially for the Black community. It has to continue, no matter what. Whoever's turning that wheel, it shouldn't matter like that. Like I said, there shouldn't be a face, or just one person, or one designated area. It just needs to be decentralized. In any community.

There's so many different communities and companies that have grown out of the #BlackTechTwitter movement and I hope they're thinking of the same thing. It has to run forever. This is extremely important, especially digitally, perfect. Must continue forever.

TIM: So I guess with that in mind, what are you going to say to the next generation? Let's say, somebody calls on you to give the commencement speech at Howard and there's always that quota. What do you tell the up-and-coming folks, the folks who are going to take up your work?

PARISS: That this cannot ever be personal.

I think the number one most important thing to me is not being afraid to say no and not being afraid to, again, lose opportunity. I think that is so important because so many people can be swayed by money and we cannot—I cannot stress this enough—this cannot happen in the Black community period.

We cannot be swayed by money. I don't want to take money and then need to be silenced, or follow someone else's rules that don't benefit my community, or impact it negatively. We can't be swayed by that. We have to do what's best for our community and that's number one and money, or just that benefit even if, I don't know if it's monetary, or not, you can't be swayed by that. And that takes hiring really good humans, really genuine, good, strong humans, which is really, really hard. But I think for me, that's the most important thing.

CHANTÉ: I really appreciate that. I'm having a reflective thing, but I actually want to save it.

So I want to prompt us to move to reflections, if it's okay and I'm willing to go first, because what you just said really elicited something in the end.

What I heard you say, Pariss is that we need one, as a Black community, a Black and brown community, solidarity, and also, shared values and vision. We have to be on the same page about what we care about and also, what we want people to understand about our experience and why we're so valued and why we are that token of the month, or year, or era. I think that means that we need to be intentional about community and just building a container and having culture around what we are now and who we want to be in the future.

I've been giving myself a lot of time and space to really think about time as a spiral, connecting with my ancestors, connecting with the present, and connecting with the future and just remembering that I can heal all of those parts if I'm present. I'm in community with people who understand that, that we have an opportunity together.

So again, extending the olive branch and just saying I'm hoping that we can be intentional about building community and anybody who might catch this episode today, let's build community intentionally.

JOHN: So what's something to me is the rather remarkable impact that an individual person can have on the culture, really. Like you started this organically out of just what you were seeing and the way you were talking and then now you've built this into a company that you're running and now you're working on how to make sure this company is perpetuates itself even without your work. So you're creating an institution here that's generating all this opportunity for your community.

I think that's an amazing amount of power that you've harnessed there just with your own caring, that you've put this time in to build something and that you're going to eventually build something that can run for however long it needs to run. That's absolutely amazing, absolutely remarkable that one person can start that and bring more people in. It's not just you doing the work, but you're guiding that work. Collecting, focusing it in, and making it into something that’s going to have this fantastic impact. So it’s amazing to see one person can do that.

PARISS: Thank you. I’m telling my community none of this would have happened if each individual in this community didn’t really bring exposure to it, care about it, and bring awareness to it the way that they did. So it's a collective effort, and a collective care and love for the community and its members.

JOHN: Yeah.

JAMEY: I keep coming back to this, my brain keeps coming back to this, “You're just going to have to be bothered,” because I love that so much.

But it's got me thinking, this whole conversation has gotten me thinking about it's really meaningful to be able to listen to you all talk about your experiences in the Black community in tech. It's striking to me how some aspects of it resonate with me as someone in the trans community. Like what Tim was saying about people will come at me and I feel that.

But then there's other aspects of it that are not the same and I hadn't thought about in the way of generationally. My parents aren't trans and they didn't have this experience and it's not this pathway of time where that kind of marginalization is happening.

So I think it's interesting and important to think about the ways that different marginalized communities share some things and not other things. Because I think that's what we really have to understand and internalize if we're going to have different intersectionalities of marginalized folks like coming together to build community together and I think that that's really important.

TIM: So I think it's important for us to have these conversations because people who are not Black do not understand the Black experience and the Black experience in America has always been difficult. The doors have not always been open to us. We have not had warm welcomes. We've had our time, our freedom, our money, and our land stolen from us from the jump.

We are getting now to a point where we can establish ourselves a little bit and we've got forces and powers in this country who are trying to cover their tracks on what they've done to us so that they can do it again. It's important for us to have these discussions so that people understand same with the Black experiences and it's important for folks like Pariss to do that work so that we can become established. So that we're not only just citizens, but we have influence with our money, our power, and our position so that the we, as the fruits of the Black experience, can make sure that the Black experience has changed for the better in this country going forward.

That is going to take us, as Black people, helping each other and relying on, unfortunately – I don’t want to say not unfortunately relying on, but relying on folks who are not marginalized to recognize that we do need your assistance and your allyship and your being an accomplice to changing the Black experience for the better in this country. Because if we don't the people who want to change the Black experience back to what it used to be will win and I'm not here for that.

JAMEY: I love accomplice instead of ally, I have to say it. That's so good. That's such a good way to describe the mindset that you want people to be in in a more descriptive way.

PARISS: Yeah.

CHANTÉ: Yes. Thank you for that, Tim.

PARISS: I like that. There's what is it, co-conspirator. There's being an ally and a co-conspirator. My mom does DEI work full-time. She's done it her whole life. So from what I've learned from her, she's for an ally, they're saying like, “Yes, Black lives matter.” They're doing very subtle work. For a co-conspirator, they're getting in front of the Black person when a cop has a gun to their face. They're like, “Do not pull that trigger.” Like, “This is wrong.” You’re really in it actively. So I always prefer a co-conspirator, or accomplice.

TIM: An ally will film it; an accomplice will jump in front.

PARISS: Mm hm. Yes.

CHANTÉ: Yes. Yeah, for sure. And it's important, we need all of them. Everyone does play a part, but if we're going to dismantle systemic and institutionalized racism and oppression, then that is what it takes is to have multiple people willing to play multiple roles and you don't have to stay in one. You can change as your privilege, power, and your resource changes, or maybe it increases over time because you do gain strength and understanding by being in community with people, or maybe you have more money and opportunities. So you're like, “Yeah, I can fund this.”

But Pariss, I'd love to hear your reflection. Bring us on home.

PARISS: This conversation right here about accomplice, co-conspirator, and ally just because I think that conversation was really talked about when George Floyd was murdered, especially on Twitter. There were just so many different expectations coming from the Black tech community, then you have tech Twitter, which is kind of the more white tech community, and just wishing that more things were being done, or people not understanding their role, or not understanding what to say and things like that.

I like what you said about people being able to play their part and then maybe learning more and then growing into other roles. I think that's really important. For me, I always want people to jump right in. Because that's what I have to do, period. It doesn't really matter. That's what I'm forced to do because I am Black.

So for me, I'm always like, “Oh, I respect the people who are just like, ‘Fuck you. This is what it is and whatever.’” For me, I'm more so like, I didn't like when people were coming into my DMs like, “Hey, I don't know if I should say this. Should I say this?” I'm like, “I don't have time to educate you. Just do what you want to do. Just say it.” But sometimes, I have to – not that I have to educate them, or take time to respond to them. But for me, I have to understand that people need to learn how to play which roles because maybe they're good at some versus others and you're right.

They can grow into other roles and it's not something I've really thought about just because like I said, I'm one of those people who wants to jump right in. So I'm just reflecting on that. It's something I'll continue talking about and thinking about and becoming more understanding of.

CHANTÉ: Thank you. That's a perfect endcap to our conversation. I'll look for some, unless you have a favorite resource, but I'll share some so that folks can have more learning to learn about the difference between what it means to be an ally, an accomplice, and a co-conspirator because I think this is just beautiful and definitely needed.

JOHN: Yeah.

CHANTÉ: Pariss, thanks again for joining us today. We can continue the conversation so we welcome you back if you want to come and have part 2. But really appreciate all that you have said and of course, all that you're building and doing for the Black and actually, the BIPOC tech community, but specifically the Black folks. Thank you so much.

Special Guest: Pariss Athena.

Sponsored By:

• Compiler (Red Hat): This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small and strange.



Support Greater Than Code

02:01 - Kat’s Superpower: Terrible Puns!

08:07 - Security Awareness Education & Accessibility

20:58 - Making the Safe Thing Easy

22:43 - Awareness; Security Motivation; Behavior and Culture (ABC)

33:34 - Dietary Accessibility; Harm Reduction and Threat Monitoring

Reflections:

John: Internal teams relating to other internal teams as a marketing issue.

Casey: Phishing emails cause harm.

Kat: AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action

Unconscious Bias Training That Works

The Responsible Communication Style Guide

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

To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.

JOHN: Welcome to Episode 263 of Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey! And we're both here with our guest today, Kat Sweet.

Hi, Kat.

KAT: Hi, John! Hi, Casey!

CASEY: Well, Kat Sweet is a security professional who specializes in security education and engagement. She currently works at HubSpot building out their employee security awareness program, and is also active in their disability ERG, Employee Resource Group. Since 2017, she has served on the staff of the security conference BSides Las Vegas, co-leading their lockpick village. Her other superpower is terrible puns, or, if they're printed on paper—she gave me this one—tearable puns.

[laughter]

KAT: Like written paper.

CASEY: Anyway. Welcome, Kat. So glad to have you.

KAT: Thanks! I'm happy to be here.

CASEY: Let's kick it off with our question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

KAT: [chuckles] Well, as I was saying to both of y’all before this show started, I was thinking I'm going to do a really serious skillful superpower that makes me sound smart because that's what a lot of other people did in theirs. I don't know, something like I'm a connector, or I am good at crosspollination. Then I realized no, [chuckles] like it, or not, terrible puns are my actual superpower.

[laughter]

Might as well just embrace it.

I think as far as where I acquired it, probably a mix of forces. Having a dad who was the king of dad puns certainly helped and actually, my dad's whole extended family is really into terrible puns as well. We have biweekly Zoom calls and they just turn into everyone telling bad jokes sometimes.

[laughter]

But I think it also probably helps that, I don't know, having ADHD, my brain hops around a lot and so, sometimes makes connections in weird places. Sometimes that happens with language and there were probably also some amount of influences just growing up, I don't know, listening to Weird Al, gets puns in his parodies. Oh, and Carlos from The Magic School Bus.

CASEY: Mm hmm. Role models. I agree. Me too.

[laughter]

KAT: Indeed. So now I'm a pundit.

CASEY: I got a pun counter going in my head. It just went ding!

KAT: Ding!

[laughter]

CASEY: I never got – [overtalk]

KAT: They've only gotten worse during the pandemic.

CASEY: Oh! Ding!

[laughter]

Maybe we'll keep it up. We'll see.

I never thought of the overlap of puns and ADHD. I wonder if there's any study showing if it does correlate. It sounds right. It sounds right to me.

KAT: Yeah, that sounds like a thing. I have absolutely no idea, but I don't know, something to do with divergent thinking.

CASEY: Yeah.

JOHN: Yeah. I’m on board with that.

CASEY: Sometimes I hang out in the channels on Slack that are like #puns, or #dadjokes. Are you in any of those? What's the first one that comes to mind for you, your pun community online?

KAT: Oh yeah. So actually at work, I joined my current role in August and during the first week, aside from my regular team channels, I had three orders of business. I found the queer ERG Slack channel, I found the disability ERG Slack channel, and I found the dad jokes channel.

[laughter]

That was a couple of jobs ago when I worked at Duo Security. I've been told that some of them who are still there are still talking about my puns because we would get [laughs] pretty bad pun threads going in the Slack channels there.

CASEY: What a good reputation.

KAT: Good, bad, whatever. [laughs]

CASEY: Yeah.

KAT: I don't know. Decent as a form of humor that's safe for work goes, too because it's generally hard to, I guess, punch down with them other than the fact that everyone's getting punched with a really bad pun, but they're generally an equalizing force. [chuckles]

CASEY: Yeah. I love that concept. Can you explain to our listeners, punching down?

KAT: So this is now the Great British Bake Off and we're talking about bread. No, just kidding.

[laughter]

No, I think in humor a lot of times, sometimes people talk about punching up versus punching down in terms of who is actually in on the joke. When you're trying to be funny, are you poking fun at people who are more marginalized than you, or are you poking at the people with a ton of privilege? And I know it's not always an even concept because obviously, intersectionality is a thing and it's not just a – privilege isn't a linear thing. But generally, what comes to mind a lot is, I don't know, white comedians making fun of how Black people talk, or men comedians making rape jokes at women's expense, or something like that. Like who's actually being punched? [chuckles]

CASEY: Yeah.

KAT: Obviously, ideally, you don't want to punch anyone, but that whole concept of where's the humor directed and is it contributing to marginalization?

CASEY: Right, right. And I guess puns aren't really punching at all.

KAT: Yeah.

CASEY: Ding!

KAT: Ding! There goes the pun counter.

Yeah, the only thing I have to mindful of, too is not over relying on them in my – my current role is in a very global company so even though all employees speak English to some extent, English isn't everyone's first language and there are going to be some things that fly over people's heads. So I don't want to use that exclusively as a way to connect with people.

CASEY: Right, right.

JOHN: Yeah. It is so specific to culture even, right. Because I would imagine even UK English would have a whole gray area where the puns may not land and vice versa.

KAT: Oh, totally. Just humor in general is so different in every single culture. Yeah, it's really interesting.

JOHN: Yeah, that reminds me. Actually, just today, I started becoming weirdly aware as I was typing something to one of my Indian colleagues and I'm not sure what triggered it, but I started being aware of all the idioms that I was using and what I was typing. I was like, “Well, this is what I would normally say to an American,” and I'm just like, “Wait, is this all going to come through?”

I think that way might lead to madness, though if you start trying to analyze every idiom you use as you're speaking. But it was something that just suddenly popped into my mind that I'm going to try and keep being a little bit more aware of because there's so many ways to miss with communication when you rely on obscure idioms, or certain ways of saying things that aren't nearly as clear as they could be. [chuckles]

KAT: Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure that's definitely a thing in all the corporate speak about doubling down, circling back, parking lots, and just all the clicking, all of those things.

[laughter]

But yeah, that's actually something that was on my run recently, too with revamping one of the general security awareness courses that everyone gets is that in the way we talk about how to look for a phishing – spot a phishing email. First of all, one of the things that at least they didn't do was say, “Oh, look for poor grammar, or misspelled words,” because that's automatically really exclusive to people whose first language isn’t English, or people who have dyslexia.

But I was also thinking we talk about things like subtle language cues in suspicious emails around a sense of urgency, like a request being made trying to prey on your emotion and I'm like, “How accessible is that, I guess, for people whose first language is English to try and spot a phishing email based on those kind of things?” Like how much – [chuckles] how much is too much to ask of…? Like opinions about phishing emails, or the phishing training anyway being too much to ask of people to some degree, but I don't know. There's so much subtlety in it that just is really easy for people to lose.

JOHN: Yeah. I mean, I would imagine that even American English speakers – [overtalk]

KAT: Yeah.

JOHN: With a lot of experience still have trouble. Like actually, [chuckles] I just got apparently caught by one of them, the test phishing emails, but they notified me by sending me an email and saying, “You were phished, click here to go to the training.” And I'm like, “I'm not going to click on that!”

[laughter]

I just got phished!

KAT: Yeah.

JOHN: But I think my larger point is again, you're talking about so many subtleties of language and interpretations to try and tease these things out. I'm sure there are a lot of people with a range of non-typical neurologies where that sort of thing isn't going to be obvious, even if they are native English speakers.

KAT: Exactly. Myself included having ADHD. [laughs]

JOHN: Yeah.

KAT: Yeah. It's been interesting trying to think through building out security awareness stuff in my current role and in past roles, and having ADHD and just thinking about how ADHD unfriendly a lot of the [laughs] traditional approaches are to all this.

Even like you were just saying, “You got phished, take this training.” It seems like the wrong sequence of events because if you're trying to teach someone a concept, you need to not really delay the amount of time in between presenting somebody with a piece of information and giving them a chance to commit it to memory.

ADHD-ers have less working memory than neurotypical people to begin with, but that concept goes for everyone. So when you're giving someone training that they might not actually use in practice for several more months until they potentially get phished again, then it becomes just information overload. So that's something that I think about.

Another way that I see this playing out in phishing training in particular, but other security awareness stuff is motivation and reward because we have a less amount of intrinsic motivation. Something like, I don't know, motivation and reward system just works differently with people who have trouble hanging onto dopamine. ADHD-ers and other people's various executive dysfunction stuff.

So when you're sitting through security training that's not engaging, that's not particular lead novel, or challenging, or of personal interest, or is going to have a very delayed sense of reward rather than something that immediately gratifying, there's going to be a limitation to how much people will actually learn, be engaged, and can actually be detrimental. So I definitely think about stuff like that.

CASEY: That reminds me of a paper I read recently about—I said this on a previous episode, too. I guess, maybe I should find the paper, dig it up, and share.

KAT: Cool.

[laughter]

CASEY: Oh, but it said, “Implicit bias awareness training doesn't work at all ever” was an original paper. No, that's not what it said of course, but that's how people read it and then a follow-up said, “No, boring! PowerPoint slide presentations that aren't interactive aren’t interactive.”

[laughter]

“But the interactive ones are.” Surprise!

KAT: Right. That's the thing. That's the thing.

Yeah, and I think there's also just, I don't know. I remember when I was first getting into security, people were in offices more and security awareness posters were a big thing. Who is going to remember that? Who's going to need to know that they need to email security at when they're in the bathroom? [laughs] Stuff like that that's not particularly engaging nor particularly useful in the moment. But that DEI paper is an interesting one, too. I'll have to read that.

CASEY: Do you have experience making some of these trainings more interactive and getting the quicker reward that's not delayed and what does that look like for something like phishing, or another example?

KAT: It's a mixed bag and it's something that I'm still kind of – there's something that I'm figuring out just as we're scaling up because in past roles, mostly been in smaller companies. But one thing that I think people, who are building security awareness and security education content for employees, miss is the fact that there's a certain amount of baseline level of interaction and context that you can't really automate a way, especially for new hires.

I know having just gone through process that onboarding weeks are always kind of information overload. But people are going to at least remember more, or be more engaged if they're getting some kind of actual human contact with somebody who they're going to be working with; they’ve got the face, they've got some context for who their security team is, what they do, and they won't just be clicking through a training that's got canned information that is no context to where they're working and really no narrative and nowhere for them to ask questions. Because I always get really interesting questions every time I give some kind of live security education stuff; people are curious.

I think it's important that security education and engagement is really an enhancer to a security program. It can't be carrying all the weight of relationships between the security team and the rest of the company. You're going to get dividends by having ongoing positive relationships with your colleagues that aren't just contact the security team once a year during training.

CASEY: And even John's email, like the sample test email, which I think is better than not doing it for sure. But that's like a ha ha got you. That's not really [chuckles] relationship building. Barely. You’ve got to already have the relationship for it to – [overtalk]

KAT: No, it's not and that's – yeah. And that's why I think phishing campaigns are so tricky. I think they're required by some compliance frameworks and by cyber insurance frameworks. So some places just have to have them. You can't just say we're not going to run internal phishing campaigns, unfortunately, regardless of whether that's actually the right thing for businesses.

But I think the angle should always be familiarizing people with how to report email like that to the security team and reinforcing psychological safety. Not making people feel judged, not making people feel bad, and also not making them sit through training if they get caught because that's not psychological safety either and it really doesn't pay attention to results.

It’s very interesting, I remember I listened to your episode with Eli Holderness and at some point, one of the hosts mentioned something about human factors and safety science on the evolving nature of how people management happens in the workplace. How there was this old model of humans being a problem to be managed, supervised, and well, just controlled and how the new view of organizational psychology and people management is more humans are your source of success so you need to enable their growth and build them up.

I think a lot of security education approaches are kind of still stuck in that old model, almost. I've seen progress, but I think a lot of them have a lot of work to do in still being, even if they're not necessarily as antagonistic, or punitive, they still feel sometimes paternalistic. Humans are like, “If I hear the phrase, ‘Humans are the weakest link one more time,’ I'm going to table flip.” First of all, humans are all the links, but also – [overtalk]

JOHN: Yeah.

KAT: It's saying like, we need to save humans, which are somehow the security team is not humans. We need to save humans from themselves because they're too incompetent to know what to do. So we need, yeah – which is a terrible attitude.

CASEY: Yeah.

KAT: And I think it misses the point that first of all, not everyone is going to become a security expert, or hypervigilant all the time and that's okay. But what we can do is focus on the good relationships, focus on making the training we have and need to do somewhat interactive and personal and contextual, and let go of the things you can't control. [chuckles]

JOHN: Yeah, I think Taylorism is the name for that management style. I think it came around in the 40s and – [overtalk]

KAT: Really?

JOHN: Yeah, ruined a lot of lives. [laughs] Yeah, and I think your point about actually accepting the individual humanity of the people you're trying to influence and work with rather than as some sort of big amorphous group of fuckups, [laughs] for lack of a better word. Giving them some credit, giving them, like you said, something that's not punitive, somewhere where they don't get punished for their security lapses, or forgetting a thing, or clicking the link is going to be a lot more rewarding than, like you said, just making someone sit through training.

Like for me, the training I want from whatever it was I clicked on is show me the email I clicked on, I will figure out how it tricked me and then I will learn. I don't need a whole – [overtalk]

KAT: Yes.

JOHN: 3 hours of video courses, or whatever. I will see the video, [chuckles] I will see the email, and that is a much more organic thing than here's the training for you.

KAT: Exactly. Yeah, you have to again, give some people a way to actually commit it to memory. Get it out of RAM and into SSD.

JOHN: Yeah.

[laughter]

KAT: But yeah, I love that and fortunately, I think some other places are starting to do interesting, innovative approaches. My former colleague, Kim Burton, who was the Security Education Lead at Duo when I was there and just moved to Texas, gave a webinar recently on doing the annuals security training as a choose your own adventure so that it could be replicated among a wide group of people, but that people could take various security education stuff that was specific to their own role and to their own threat model. I really liked that.

I like being able to give people some amount of personalization and get them actually thinking about what they're specifically interacting with.

JOHN: Yeah, yeah. That's great and it also makes me think about there are undoubtedly things I'm pretty well informed in security and other things that I'm completely ignorant about. I'd rather not sit through a training that covers both of those things. Like if there's a way for me to choose my own adventure through it so that I go to the parts where I'm actually learning useful things. Again, a, it saves everybody time and b, it means I'm not fast forwarding through the video, hoping it'll just end, and then possibly missing things that are actually useful to me.

CASEY: I'm thinking of a concrete example, I always remember and think of and that's links and emails. I always hover and look at the URL except when I'm on my phone and you can't do that. Oh, I don't know. It has never come up in a training I've seen.

KAT: Yeah, you can click and hold, but it's harder and I think that speaks to the fact that security teams should lead into putting protections around email security more so than relying entirely on their user base to hover every single link, or click and hold on their phone, or just do nothing when it comes to reporting suspicious emails.

There's a lot of decision fatigue that, I think security teams still put on people whose job is not security and I hope that that continues to shift over time.

JOHN: Yeah. I mean, you're bringing up the talking about management and safety theory that probably came from Rein Henrichs, who is one of our other hosts.

But one of the things he also has talked about on, I think probably multiple shows is about setting the environment for the people that makes the safe thing easy.

KAT: Right.

JOHN: So that all the defaults roll downhill into safety and security rather than well, here's a level playing field you have to navigate yourself through and there's some potholes and da, da, da, and you have to be aware of them and constantly on alert and all those things. Whereas, if you tilt the field a little bit, you make sure everything runs in the right direction, then the right thing becomes the easy thing and then you win.

KAT: Exactly, exactly. I think it's important to put that not only in the technical defaults – [overtalk]

JOHN: Yeah, yeah.

KAT: But also process defaults to some degree.

One of my colleagues just showed me a talk that was, I think from perhaps at AppSec Cali. I'll have to dig it up. But there was somebody talking about making I guess, threat modeling and anti-abuse mindsets more of a default in product development teams and how they added one single line to their sprint planning—how could this feature potentially be misused by a user—and that alone just got people thinking just that little process change.

JOHN: Yeah. That's beautiful. But such a small thing, but constantly repeated at a low level. It's not yelling at anyone to…

KAT: Yeah.

JOHN: Yeah.

KAT: Yeah. And even if the developers and product designers themselves weren't security experts, or anti-abuse experts, it would just get them thinking, “Oh hey, we should reach out to the trust and safety team.”

CASEY: Yeah. I'm thinking about so many steps and so many of these steps could be hard. The next one here is the security team responsive and that has a lot to do with are they well-staffed and is this a priority for them? Oh my goodness.

KAT: Yeah. [laughs] So many things.

CASEY: It's layers. But I'm sure you've heard of this, Kat. The Swiss cheese model of error prevention?

KAT: Yeah. Defense in depth.

CASEY: Yeah.

[chuckles]

I like to bring it up on the podcast, too because a lot of engineers and a lot of non-security people don't know about it.

KAT: Hmm.

CASEY: Do you want to explain it? I don't mind. I can.

KAT: Oh, yeah. Basically that there are going to be holes in every step of the process, or the tech and so, that's why it's important to have this layered approach. Because over time, even if something gets through the first set of holes, it may not get through a second set where the holes are in different spots. So you end up with a giant stack of Swiss cheese, which is delicious, and you come out with something that's hopefully pretty same.

[laughter]

CASEY: Yeah, and it's the layers that are – the mind-blowing thing here is that there can be more than one layer. We don't just need one layer of Swiss cheese on this sandwich, which is everybody pay attention and don't ever get phished, or it's your fault. You can have so many layers than that. It can be like a grilled cheese, really, really thick, grilled cheese.

[laughter]

KAT: Yes. A grilled cheese where the bread is also cheese.

CASEY: Yes! [laughs]

MID-ROLL: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.

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CASEY: Earlier, you mentioned awareness, Kat as something interesting. You want to talk about awareness more as a term and how it relates to this?

KAT: Oh, yeah. So I – and technically, my job title has security awareness in it, but the more I've worked in the security space doing employee security education stuff as part of all my job. I know language isn't perfect, but I'm kind of the mindset that awareness isn't a good capture of what a role like mine actually should be doing because awareness without behavior change, or action is just noise. It's just we're all very aware of things, but if we don't have an environment that's friendly to us putting that awareness into some kind of action, or engagement, or response, we are just aware and scared. [laughs]

CASEY: Yeah, awareness alone just makes us feel bad. We need more than that.

KAT: Yeah. So I think security awareness is sometimes just a product of a term that got standardized over several years as it's in all of the compliance control frameworks, security awareness is a part of it. I don't know it's the best practice thing. I hope over time it will continue to evolve.

CASEY: Yeah.

KAT: As with any other kind of domains.

JOHN: Yeah. I think that maybe security motivation might be a better term for it.

KAT: I've seen a bunch of different ones used. So I end up speaking in terms of, I don't know, security education and engagement is what I'm working on. Security culture is my vision. I've seen things like security awareness, behavior, and culture, ABC, things like that. But all this to say security awareness not being in a vacuum.

CASEY: I like those. This reminds me of a framework I've been thinking about a lot and I use in some of my DEI workshops. AIDA is an acronym. A-I-D-A. The first one's Awareness, the last one is Action, and in the middle is Interest and Desire.

KAT: Nice.

CASEY: So the questions I use to frame is like, are they aware of, for example, if they're misgendering someone? That's the context I'm using this in a lot. Are they aware of this person's pronouns in the first place? Are they interested in caring about this person and do they want to do anything about it and did they do it? Did they use their proper pronouns? Did they correct their actions? It's like 4 stages – [overtalk]

KAT: I like that.

CASEY: AIDA. It's used in marketing a lot for like a sales funnel, but I apply it to all sorts of how do you get someone from aware to action?

KAT: I like that a lot.

It's been interesting working at a place that makes a product that's more in the sales and marketing space. Definitely learned a lot because a couple of previous roles I've had been with security vendors. I think one of the interesting ideas that was a new concept to me when I started was this idea of inbound marketing, where instead of just cold contacting people and telling them, “Be interested in us, be interested in us, buy our stuff,” you generate this reputation as being of good service by putting out useful free nuggets of content, like blog posts, webinars, and things. Then you get people who are interested based on them knowing that you've got this, that you offer a good perspective, and then they all their friend. They are satisfied customers, and they go promote it to people.

I think about this as it applies to security teams and the services they provide, because even though corporate security teams are internal, they've still got internal customers. They've still got services that they provide for people. So by making sure that the security team is visible, accessible, and that the good services that they provide are known and you've got satisfied customers, they become promoters to the rest of their teams. Think about like security can definitely learn a lot from [chuckles] these sales and marketing models.

CASEY: I can totally imagine the security team being the fun team, the one you want to go work with and do workshops with because they make it so engaging and you want to. You can afford to spend your time on this thing.

[laughter]

KAT: Oh yes.

CASEY: You might do it.

[laughter]

JOHN: Yeah, and I think marketing's a great model for that. Marketing sort of has a bad reputation, I think amongst a lot of people because it's done badly and evilly by a lot of people. But it's certainly possible and I think inbound market is one of those ways that you're engaging, you're spreading awareness, you're letting people select themselves into your service, and bring their interest to you. If you can develop that kind of rapport with the employees at your company as a security team, everybody wins.

KAT: Yeah, absolutely, and it can absolutely be done.

When I was working at Duo a couple jobs ago, I was on their security operations team and we were responsible, among other things, for both, the employee security education and being the point of intake; being the people that our colleagues would reach out to with security concerns to security and it definitely could see those relationships pay off by being visible and being of good service.

CASEY: So now I'm getting my product manager hat on, like team management.

KAT: Yeah.

CASEY: I will want to choose the right metrics for a security team that incentivizes letting this marketing kind of approach happen and being the fun team people want to reach out to have the bigger impact and probably the highest metric is like nobody gets a security breach. But that can't be the only one because maybe you'll have a lucky year and maybe you'll have an unlucky that's not the best one. What other metrics are you thinking of?

KAT: That's the thing, there's a lot more that goes into not getting pwned than how aware of security people are. There's just way too many factors to that. But – [overtalk]

CASEY: Yeah. I guess, I'm especially interested in the human ones, like how come – [overtalk]

KAT: Oh, yeah. And I mean like – [overtalk]

CASEY: The department allowed to do the things that would be effective, like incentivized and measured in a sense.

KAT: Yeah, and I think a lot of security education metrics often have a bit of a longer tail, but I think about not – I don't really care so much about the click rates for internal phishing campaigns, because again, anyone can fall for a phish if it's crafted correctly enough. If it's subtle enough, or if just somebody's distracted, or having a bad day, which we never have. It's not like there's a pandemic, or anything.

But for things that are sort of numbers wise, I think about how much are people engaging with security teams not just in terms of reporting suspicious emails, but how often are they reporting ones that aren't a phishing simulation? How much are they working with security teams when they're building new features and what's the impact of that baseline level before there's, I don't know, formal process for security reviews, code reviews, threat modeling stuff in place? What does that story look like over time for the product and for product security?

So I think there's quite a bit of narrative data involved in security education metrics.

JOHN: Yeah. I mean you could look at inbound interests, like how often are you consulted out of the blue by another team, or even of the materials you've produced, what's the engagement rates on that? I think that's a lower quality one, but I think inbound interest would be fantastic.

CASEY: Yeah.

KAT: Yeah, exactly. I was thinking to some degree about well, what kinds of vulnerabilities are you shipping in your code? Because I think there's never 100% secure code. But I think if you catch some of the low-hanging fruits earlier on, then sometimes you get an interesting picture of like, okay, security is being infused into the SDLC at all of these various Swiss cheese checkpoints.

So think about that to some degree and that's often more of a process thing than a purely an education thing, but getting an education is an enhancer to all of these other parts of the security programs.

JOHN: So in the topics for the show that you had suggested to us, one of the things that stood out to me was something you called dietary accessibility. So can you tell me a little bit more about what that means?

KAT: So earlier in this year, in the middle of all of this pandemic ridiculousness, I got diagnosed with celiac disease. Fortunately, I guess, if there was a time to be diagnosed with that, it’s I'm working remotely and nobody's going out to eat really. Oh, I should back up. I think a lot of people know what it is, but just in case, it's an autoimmune disorder where my body attacks itself when I eat gluten. I've described it in the past as my body thinks that gluten is a nation state adversary named fancy beer.

[laughter]

Ding, one more for the pun counter. I don't know how many we're up to now. [laughs]

CASEY: I have a random story about a diet I had to do for a while for my health.

I have irritable bowel syndrome in my family and that means we have to follow over really strict diet called the low FODMAP diet. If your tummy hurts a lot, it's something you might look into because it's underdiagnosed. That meant I couldn't have wheat, but not because I had celiac disease; I was not allergic to the protein in wheat flour. I was intolerant to the starch and wheat flour. So it would bother me a lot.

People said, “Do you have celiac, or?” And I was like, “No, but I cannot have wheat because the doctor told me so, but no, it's not an allergy.” I don’t know, my logical brain did not like that question.

[laughter]

That was an invalid question. No, it's not a preference. I prefer to eat bread, but I cannot, or it hurts my body according to my doctor.

KAT: [chuckles] So you can't have the starch and I can't have the protein. So together, we can just – [overtalk]

CASEY: Separate it!

KAT: Split all of the wheat molecules in the world and eat that. [laughs]

CASEY: That's fair. I literally made gluten-free bread with gluten. [laughs] I got all the gluten-free starches and then the gluten from the wheat and I didn't have the starch in the wheat and it did not upset my stomach.

KAT: Oh man.

JOHN: Yeah. I've got a dairy sensitivity, but it's not lactose. It's casein so it's the protein in the dairy.

CASEY: Protein, uh huh.

KAT: Oh, interesting.

CASEY: I apologize on behalf of all the Casey.

[laughter]

Casey in.

KAT: Who let Casey in?

CASEY: Ding!

KAT: Ding!

No, but it’s made me think a lot about as I was – first of all, it's just I didn't fully appreciate until I was going through it firsthand, the amount of cognitive overload that just goes into living with it every day. [laughs]

Speaking of constant state of hypervigilance, it took a while for that to make it through – I don't know, me to operationalize to my new life that's going to be my reality for the [laughs] rest of my life now because it was just like, “Oh, can I eat this? Can I eat that?” All of that.

Something that at least helped ease me out of this initial overwhelm and grieving period was tying some of the stuff that I was dealing with back to how would I do this in my – how would I approach this if this were a security education and security awareness kind of thing?

CASEY: Oh, yeah.

KAT: Because it's a new concept and it's a thing that is unfamiliar and not everyone is an expert in it. so I’m like, “How would I treat myself as the person who's not an expert in it yet?” I, again, tried to get myself back to some of those same concepts of okay, let's not get stuck in thud mode, let's think about what are some of the actual facts versus what’s scaremongering. I don't need to know how much my risk of colon cancer is increased, because that's not how helpful for me to actually be able to go about my day. I need to know what are the gluten-free brands of chips? That's critical infrastructure.

CASEY: I love this parallel. This is so cool.

KAT: And so I thought about to – I've mentioned earlier, decision fatigue as a security issue. I thought about how can I reduce the decision fatigue and not get stuck just reading all the labels on foods and stuff? What are the shortcuts I can take? Some of those were like okay, let me learn to recognize the labels of what the labels mean of a certified gluten-free logo and also just eat a lot of things that would never have touch gluten to begin with, like plain and raw meat, plain potatoes, plain vegetables, things like that. So just anything to take the cognitive load down a little bit, because it was never going to be zero.

It's interesting. Sometimes, I don't know, I have tons of different interests and I've always interested in people's perspective outside of security. A lot of that stuff influences the way I think about security, but sometimes the way I think about security also ends up influencing other stuff in my life, so.

CASEY: Yeah. I think that's brilliant. Use – [overtalk]

KAT: And interesting to connect with those.

CASEY: The patterns and you're comfortable with, and apply them.

KAT: Exactly.

CASEY: A lot of really cool ideas come from technology.

KAT: Yeah, and go for harm reduction, not nothing because we don't live in a gluten-free world. It’s like I can try to make myself as safe as possible, but at some point, my gut may suffer a data breach and [laughs] when I do, should be blameless and just work on getting myself recovered and trying – [overtalk]

JOHN: Yeah. I mean, thinking about it as a threat model. There's this gluten out there and some of it's obvious, some of it's not obvious. What am I putting in place so that I get that 95th percentile, or whatever it is that you can think of it that way? I like that.

KAT: Exactly. It's an interesting tie to threat modeling how the same people – even if people have the same thing that they can't eat, they may still have a different threat model. They may, like how we both had to avoid wheat, but for different reasons and with different side effects, if we eat it and things like that.

CASEY: I love these parallels. I imagine you went into some of these in that talk at DisInfoSec. Is that right?

KAT: Yeah. A little bit.

So DisInfoSec, it's a virtual conference in its second year of existence, specifically highlighting disabled speakers in the InfoSec community run by Kim Crawley, who's a blogger for Hack the Box. There was a really interesting lineup of talks this year. Some people, I think about half of them touched on neurodiversity and various aspects of security through lenses of being autistic and ADHD, which is really cool.

For mine, I focused on those of us who have disability-related dietary restrictions and how that affects our life in the tech workplace, where compared to a lot of other places I've worked, there's a lot of free food on the company dime hanging around and there's a lot of use of food as a way to build connection and build community.

CASEY: Yeah, and a lot of stuff, a lot of people can't eat. I'm with you, uh huh.

KAT: Yeah. I just took stock of all of the times that I would take people up for lunch interviews, go out to dinner with colleagues when they're in town, all of these things. Like snacks in the office. Just there not being a bathroom on the same floor as me for multiple jobs where I worked. [laughs] Things like that.

So I really wanted to – the thing that I wanted to highlight in that talk in general was systemic level accommodations to be made for people with be they celiac IBS, food allergies, diabetes rather than relying on people individually requesting accommodations.

This universal design model where you've got to make sure that your workplace is by default set up to accommodate people with a wide range of disabilities including dietary needs and a lot of times it doesn't come down to even feeding them. It comes down to making sure their health insurance is good, making sure people can work remotely, making sure that – [overtalk]

CASEY: Higher levels of Swiss cheese on that. They are various levels.

KAT: Yeah, the levels of Swiss cheese. A lot of stuff cascades from lunch interviews, making sure that if you do them at all, that you're really flexible about them.

JOHN: Yeah. I can definitely relate to the being able to work from home, which I've done for the last decade, or more, has been huge for being able to have a solid control of my diet. Because it's really easy to have all the right things around for lunch rather than oh, I've only got half an hour, I can run out to the sub shop and I'll just deal with the consequences. Because that's what's nearby versus, or trying to bring food into the office and keep it in the fridge, or the free – that's a whole mess.

So just like you said, good health insurance, working from home, these are things that allow for all sorts of different disabilities to be taken care of so well that you don't – that's the base, that's table stakes to formatting kind of inclusion.

KAT: Exactly, exactly.

CASEY: Yeah.

KAT: Exactly. Yeah, and I think what sometimes gets missed is that even there are other things that I need to – the ability to just sometimes lay down, the ability to be close to a bathroom, and things that are not food related, but definitely are my reality. [laughs]

CASEY: And companies went out, too. By accommodating you, they get all of your expertise and skills and puns. In exchange for flexibility, they get puns.

KAT: [laughs] And I still make puns about gluten, wheat, rye, and barley even though I can I eat them anymore. That will never go away.

CASEY: They just keep rising.

KAT: Wheat for it. Wait for it.

[laughter]

CASEY: Ding!

KAT: That's just my wry sense of humor.

CASEY: All right. We're getting near end of time for today. This point, let's talk about reflections and plugs.

JOHN: I can go first.

I think the thing that's definitely sticking with me is thinking about the internal teams relating to other internal teams at a company as a marketing issue. Security is obviously one where you need to have that relationship with pretty much every team. But I'm thinking all sorts of all the way around development, DevOps, tech QA. Everyone can think this way and probably gain something from it as a what are we presenting to the rest of the company, what is our interface, and how do we bring more things to it such that people like working with our interface a lot so that we have great relationships with the rest of the team? I think I’m going to keep thinking about that for a while.

CASEY: I'll share a reflection.

I liked noticing that those phish emails can cause harm to people—they can feel bad and then make them less receptive. I've always been a fan of them overall. But thinking about that impact, I might have even been the one to say that, but it was still surprising to me when that came out of my mouth. Say, oh yeah, it hurts people in a way, too. We don't have to have that painful experience to teach people. It can be done in a safer environment.

I wonder what else we can do for training of things like that to make it more positive and less negative. I'm going to be thinking on that.

KAT: Yeah. And I wrote down AIDA. Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Did I get that right?

CASEY: Yeah.

KAT: I'm definitely going to look into that. I think that's a great model for education of all kinds.

CASEY: Yeah. If you want to go even deeper, there's like 6 and 7 tier models on the Wikipedia page links to a bunch of them. That's just the most common.

KAT: Awesome.

CASEY: For plugs, I just want to plug some homework for you all.

Everyone listening, there's this Unconscious Bias Training That Works article that I've mentioned twice now. I hope you get to read that. And I guess, the AIDA – It'll be in the show notes for sure. And then the Wikipedia page for AIDA marketing just so you have a spot to look it up, if you forget about it. Try to apply that to situations, that's your homework.

KAT: I think something I plugged on Twitter quite a bit over the years and a lot when we were talking about the language that we use earlier, I'm a huge fan of the Responsible Communication Style Guide, which was put out by the Recompiler, which is a feminist activist hacker publication. So they've got guides on words to avoid, words to use instead for when talking about race, gender, class, health, disability status. It's written for a tech audience and I really like that as a resource for using inclusive language.

JOHN: Yeah. It's great stuff.

CASEY: I love it. All right, thanks so much for are coming on our show today, Kat.

Special Guest: Kat Sweet.

Support Greater Than Code

00:59 - Evans’s Superpower: Talking about topics that aren’t interesting to whomever he’s talking to at the time

12:45 - Debugging Oneself, Neuroscience, Meditation

21:57 - The Limitations of Science

24:54 - The Spiritual Side, Mindfulness, and Meditation

32:03 - Psychological Safety

49:28 - Faith and Science

01:04:08 - Words!

Reflections:

Damien: The value of being vulnerable.

Evan: Disagreement leading to deeper discussion. Cultivating more empathy.

Casey: We can’t usually know what is true, but we can know when something’s false.

Mae: Think about the ways you are biased and have healing to do. Talking about ways we are not awesome to each other will help us actually be awesome to each other.

Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute

Greater Than Code Episode 248: Developing Team Culture with Andrew Dunkman

Happy and Effective

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Nonviolent Communication

Conversations For Action

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Transcript:

DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 262 of Greater Than Code. I’m Damien Burke and I'm joined by Mae Beale.

MAE: And I'm here with Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. We're all here with our guest this week, Evan Light.

EVAN: Hi, I'm Evan Light.

CASEY: Welcome, Evan.

Evan has been in the tech field for over 25 years, and has the grey hairs to show for it. Evan was searching for the term “psychological safety” long before it became mainstream — just wishes he had it sooner! Evan prizes growing teams and people by creating empowering environments where people feel free to share their ideas and disagree constructively. He lives in the crunchiest part of the DC area, Tacoma Park, Maryland.

So glad to have you here, Evan.

EVAN: Thank you. Glad to be here.

CASEY: All right, we're going to ask our question we always ask, what is your superpower, Evan and how did you acquire it?

EVAN: Well, the first thing that came to mind is talking ad nauseam about topics that aren't all that interesting to whoever I'm talking to at the time. And the way I acquired it was being born probably a little bit different with ADHD and I say probably because I still need to prove it concretely that I have ADHD, but I'm working on it.

DAMIEN: Well, that sounds like a very useful superpower for a podcast guest.

[laughter]

EVAN: Well, if you want that guest to take up the whole show, then sure. [laughs]

MAE: Yes, please. We want – [overtalk]

DAMIEN: Yeah, that's why you're here.

EVAN: Well, I do like conversation, that's the funny part. I like give and takes. Just sometimes I lose track of how long I've been talking.

MAE: I do that, too, Evan.

CASEY: Fair.

EVAN: Yeah. I wonder how many of you have ADHD, too. [laughs]

MAE: I do – there is a statistically significant portion of programmers, for sure.

EVAN: I don't know that there've been scientific studies of it, but the currently reported number of, I think 4 and a half percent of the population is well-acknowledged to be significantly under reported. At least among adults. And that's because one people say ADHD goes away with age it, in fact, doesn't. We just look – and I kind of hate that word 4-letter word.

People with ADHD often tend to find ways to compensate for it, those of us who don't get diagnoses later in life, if we don't have it already. And two, how many people do you know who seek out mental health evaluations and counseling? So I'm sure it's massively under reported.

DAMIEN: Which brings up my question. How does one diagnose an adult with ADHD?

EVAN: Yeah, that's a fun one.

So I know of – well, I guess three ways now. One, you are talking to a doctor who themselves has ADHD and has some idea, or a person who has ADHD, not necessarily a doctor, who has a pretty good idea of what to look for usually because they have it. You tell them about some problems you're having and they say, “Huh. Well, I know this problem can sometimes be caused by comorbidity, which is medical term that's often thrown about, this other problem, ADHD.”

That's how I found out about it and frankly, I was trying to figure out how to—after having dealt with so many other problems in my life—lose the excess weight, talking to a weight loss medical specialist in D.C., and also has ADHD. He said, “Huh, this all sounds like ADHD. Fill out this really simple test,” that I'll be glad to share with you all. It's just a PDF and you can share it with listeners and you can pretty quickly see for yourself how likely you are based on how you respond. That's one way.

Another way is sit down and talk with a psychologist, or a psychiatrist who has some special background in ADHD, who they can just sort of evaluate you.

And the third way is coupled sometimes with the second one, which is what I did this early this morning. There is a test called QbCheck letter—Q letter, b, check. It's an online test that uses your camera and eye tracking, so I guess that uses computer vision as part of it—which I thought found intriguing—to test your attention, apparently how much your eyes are moving, and how quickly and correctly you respond to prompts on the screen.

I think QbCheck, you're not supposed to take directly from the – maybe you can, but in my case, I'm going through a psychologist who's going to evaluate that test with me and then talk to me about it. However, I'm really, really curious for the results. I kind of wish I was talking to y'all in a week, because I'll get them tomorrow morning.

I've been a meditator most of my life, I can focus my attention when I well, deliberately concentrate. So I deliberately concentrated taking that test. I wonder if I skewed the test results that way.

[laughter]

I'm really eager to find out.

[laughter]

Because I very naturally sort of slipped into a meditative state with focus on the space on the screen, hit the Space bar when you see a pattern, repeat it, and then just stay there. Okay. It's really hard for me to do this with a lot of distractive noises. All right, I'm just going to be aware of distracting noises, but I'm going to stay with the thing on the screen. That's meditation. Instead of focusing on my breath, I focused on the object on the screen. So I'm dying the know. [laughs] I'll find out tomorrow.

DAMIEN: So then I have a follow-up question. Why seek a medical diagnosis for ADHD as an adult?

EVAN: Ohm yeah. So first off, it's how do I debug myself and if I want to speak nerdy about it, but I guess, that's how I approach a lot of things, trying to fix a problem in myself that I've been trying to fix for well, now 48 years, the time 47 years, this was last October with my weight. Okay, now 47 technically. This would've been 40 years and well, nothing else worked then if I have a new potential cause, that gives me another lever I didn't have before. So when the doctor says, “Oh, ADHD might be a contributing factor.” Huh, I need to know more about that. So that's part of it.

Some of it is I wouldn't say post hoc rationalization, more like post hoc understanding and even self-compassion. I've never really felt like I belonged among most people.

I was a pariah a lot of my life and there might be an explanation that really, if fairly concrete one of, well, here's why you didn't belong this because your brain is different, and then I'm really interested in exploring that because that gives me a whole different way to evaluate my life.

Why did I make some of the decisions that I made? Because I don't like some of them. Why did I have some of the problems that I had? How could I do it differently that it's not just understand the past better and have more compassion, it's how can I live a better life? And that's where I can say, “Oh,” a camera, which you all can't see, I'm holding up my Adderall at this point. Thanks to this gem and is this the other one? No, wrong bottle. Thanks to Adderall and Vyvanse, I'm a much happier, less anxious person on a regular basis. Anxiety and depression used to eat me alive for a lot of my life and I don't have that problem nearly as much, that I get maybe one bad day a month now and it used to be a lot more often than that.

I wrote a blog post about it because it mattered such so much to me, I wanted people to know. I've always been very pro discussing mental health, normalizing mental health, because I had struggles earlier in my life, too where—this is a whole other tangent—I was a caregiver for 10 years and that really put me through an emotional ringer and a lot of mental healthcare. So I wanted other people to feel comfortable talking about it, partly because I wanted to feel comfortable talking about it.

So I want to normalize it also because I know I work with a lot of people who have undiagnosed conditions, where if they just explored them and if they work with me, they've got pretty good insurance. They could. Then, oh my God, why wouldn't you? Okay and I say that there's grief associated with the knowledge.

When you find out you've lived a large chunk of your life in a way with these suffering you didn't have to have, it hurts to realize that. Because on one hand, yay, my life can be better, but oh fuck, everything that came before that if I'd known this, it didn't have to be that bad. That maybe I wouldn't have had those experiences, or maybe they just wouldn't have hurt so much because I had to not take my meds for 24 hours to take that test this morning. I was really unhappy last night. [laughs]

I wasn't depressed. It was just, I was really irritable, lots of things were making me stabby, and I don't take a big dose of Adderall. It's not like I'm a junkie. I take 7 and a half milligrams, which for most people with ADHD, that's a tiny dose. But I've played with my dosage and that's right about my sweet spot that that's just enough stimulant where I don't feel stimulated, where I don't feel uncomfortable, but I also don't feel irritable and before the meds, irritable, anxious frequently. That was just my normal life; I didn't know that, that I didn't know it could be different, can be different. So that's why you want to know.

MAE: What an amazing answer, Evan.

CASEY: Yeah.

EVAN: Long one, which again, that's superpower. [laughs]

MAE: Love it. We’re with you.

I would add to your superpowers, the ability and willingness to be vulnerable. Having known you awhile, someone who is willing to just say the things, answer the real answer, and the answer below that answer. There's nothing I like more than talking to people about where they're really, really, really at. I'm just so grateful about how you always do that and there was a couple things in your sharing about not feeling like you belong. It really struck me because you are someone who is always creating opportunities for belonging.

EVAN: That's a reason for that.

MAE: Yeah, exactly. It's like a super, very classic tears of a clown that most of the people, myself included, who work to make spaces for people, it's usually because they have experienced that other thing. So I am sorry that you have had such challenge to be so different, but I can say speaking personally and on behalf of many, how grateful I am and we are for what you have done with that.

EVAN: Thanks. That was something prior to a lot of therapy and medication, I would've cringed at hearing because I wasn't at all comfortable receiving gratitude. I say receiving it, I mean internalizing it. I would hear it and I would wince. I'm not worthy. [laughs] That was what would come to mind. No, thank you.

But there really was a selfish – there's always a selfish component to it and that’s, I create spaces for belonging because I want to belong there. That if I don't feel like I belong in other places, then maybe I can create a place I belong and other people can belong to who feel like they don't either. So again, I can help myself, but I can help other people at the same time.

MAE: Totally.

You said a second thing that stuck out to me about debugging oneself and it reminds me of our co-host’s book called Debugging your Brain.

[laughter]

And I'm curious, Casey, if you have anything that you might want to say about that topic.

CASEY: Yeah. Evan and I talked a lot about this ideas that are in the book before I published it, before I had to talk about it and I would bounce ideas off of him. He knows very well all the stuff in my book. [laughs]

EVAN: I've read some parts of it multiple times over a few different drafts. I was always bothering Casey with what was less CBT, more self-awareness, more emphasis on self-discovery and meditation. I've softened somewhat in that respect that I used to take a more, or a less generous perspective to meditation versus CBT. That I told Casey before you need to have at least a certain level of self-awareness to be able to be able to CBT and that what I see is a lot of people lack that fundamental self-awareness they need in order to CBT effectively. I don't think that that's true anymore. I think it's just like meditation that you peel layers of the onion, potentially and having more than one tool to do that can be effective, but having too many could be exhausting.

So I see a therapist, he doesn't use CBT. He uses – oh geez. Short-term. I always get it wrong. I'll have to look it up, or I'll remember it later in the podcast. It's a 5-letter acronym that's a little convoluted and it's not as common. CBT is about – [overtalk]

MAE: Speaking of acronyms, Evan. Would you be willing to say for listeners what CBT is just in case that –?

EVAN: Oh, cognitive behavioral therapy. Sorry. Cognitive behavioral therapy is where you identify thought, or thoughts that cause the stories and feelings that we're reacting to. The therapy that I have is sort of the inverse it's you start with the feelings, and you go and look at how those show up in the thoughts, stories, and physical manifestations in the body.

I've seen some intro to philosophy courses; where does thought begin, or where does feeling begin, and which comes first. I don't know that neuroscience has successfully answered this question, but philosophy sure hasn't. [laughs]

DAMIEN: Well, I can tell you with some confidence that neuroscience science is not capable of answering that question. I don't know if it ever will be.

MAE: Ooh!

EVAN: That’s interesting. I don't know that – you're saying science won't ever be able to prove a thing?

DAMIEN: Do say more, do say more.

EVAN: Yeah, that's an absolute, I don't believe in too many of those.

DAMIEN: [laughs] Well, we're talking about internal conscious thought, internal experiences. Like I don't think that that's a scientific concept. The best you can get is self-reporting on it, I suppose.

EVAN: The best we can now. That can change.

DAMIEN: Sure. And you can measure neurons and interneurons potentials, and serotonin and dopamine levels. But translating that to thought is not a scientific concept.

EVAN: Not yet. I say not yet, but we keep developing technologies at smaller and smaller scales and if we can develop technologies – we have nanotechnology already. We have complicated enough systems that we can inject into the body that can measure this information and send telemetry on it and you would probably end up with massive amounts of telemetry. But if you could correlate that with honest self-reported thought, maybe you end up with a Rosetta Stone of sorts, or really, really heavily data loaded Rosetta Stone.

DAMIEN: I mean, and that's as close as you're going to get in biological telemetry coupled with self-reporting.

EVAN: Yeah.

DAMIEN: Which is what we have now.

EVAN: But except not at that level of fidelity that if you get a high enough fidelity, maybe you can approximate what people are actually thinking with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

MAE: Oh my gosh.

DAMIEN: We can do that.

CASEY: Let's talk about this fidelity. This is my background, neuroscience.

MAE: Yeah.

EVAN: Right. I know. And a little bit of mine now.

CASEY: So my favorite types of studies, when I was studying this at Yale were the single neuron studies, because then you really know the electrical, what's going on over time for single cell. And I always wish there were more studies that did 1 million cell study—I don't know how many neurons are in the brain—but every single neuron in the brain I want to measure at the same time without the needles affecting anything about how it works, which – [overtalk]

EVAN: Right.

CASEY: Another problem.

EVAN: Yeah.

CASEY: And then that's just the electrical part, but you can't – from that measure, the epigenetic modifications to each gene over time in each neuron and oh my God, it's so complicated to truly represent everything that's going on at the lowest level that I would want to do. So that's why there's some studies on single neurons in organisms with only one neuron, or very few neurons. They just have 6, some model organisms do. But then a human brain, oh. Our best – [overtalk]

EVAN: Let’s say, but at 6 neurons – [overtalk]

CASEY: [inaudible] proxy for neuronal activation. That's an MRI. And I would love to get a full [chuckles] download of everything going on in the brain in every way whatsoever. But that is so sci-fi, I can't imagine what it would look like today.

DAMIEN: I think the focus on the neurological system is completely misplaced. Like I can tell what people are thinking by their respiration rate.

MAE: Yeah.

DAMIEN: By the pupil dilation stuff, I can see it. You can see people's heart rate by the change in color and their face.

EVAN: But there are so many indicators. And so, you see now we're getting into another topic that's interesting to me, too. Because I've been learning to teach the Search Inside Yourself program, which came out of Google from over 10 years ago, which is a combination of neuroscience backed by about 20 different neuroscience studies and neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness to develop leadership skills and to increase performance.

There are a lot of things you're saying, Damien that neuroscience has been able to prove already, that we can prove that – neuroscience has demonstrated for example, that habits, or that behaviors that we repeat, the brain optimizes for those habits. That's neuroplasticity that the brain alters its structure based on the activities we perform. In Search Inside Yourself, we cite a study where experienced meditators versus unexperienced meditators, and experienced meditator's brain is substantially different that they –

So for example, that we can see in FMRIs, for example, that they experience less anticipatory stress before pain than someone who is not an experienced meditator, that they spend less time in distress after that pain. After the pain is applied to mentioned anticipatory so they know it's coming. It's not anxiety, it's they know it's going to happen, then they experience it and then the time after, they recover faster.

So this is proven under FMRI. There are a lot of things like that, where we have that at kind of the macro level, we got really into the weeds, because I do that with the ADHD, I think. But talking about what if we could model, if we could record every neuron, every electrical transaction, every electrical exchange in the brain, but then there's also the biochemical exchanges, too, the neurotransmitters. Casey's point.

Honestly, I didn't think of the actual genetic modifications that occur, but that's I guess, also a manifestation of the neuroplasticity itself perhaps.

My point is—because I got a little into the sci-fi land again—we have these studies that show that the brain can be intentionally altered, that we do this all the time when we practice any skill, we’re altering our brain.

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MAE: I wanted to get back to the thing that Damien opened up about, the limitations of science. My undergrad is biochem and what I realized is most inquiry, most scientific inquiry, is fundamentally a result of a discomfort with the unknown.

EVAN: Hmm.

MAE: And I went to massage school for a little while and I lived at Kripalu the yoga retreat center. So I've been around some of these same circles, Evan and what I find is a lot of times, those folks will use a lot of scientific words and rationale [laughter] to basically justify the fact that they are supporting people, deepening their spirituality. To use science as a validity tool about anything to do with one's spirit, [laughs] I have a lot of feelings about that. It grates on my ears when I start to hear people trying to quantify and justify. I want some mystery, I'm okay with it and I think there's a piece in there.

I agree, though, with all of your opening statements, Evan, about knowing more about one's self and what you can do with that. But I don't dream of every neuron being measured because I think it will actually shroud our ability to understand the things we need and want to as humankind. I don't know.

EVAN: So – [overtalk]

CASEY: I see a pattern, that bothers me a lot, that's very related. Some people take the science to the extreme and they say, “I will only believe the things that have been proven.”

MAE: Yeah.

CASEY: “I will not believe things that have not been proven. Even if they haven't been disproven either, the unknown things, I just won't believe in them at all.” Like meditation wasn't respected by a lot of science thinkers until now there's more studies saying it – [overtalk]

MAE: Totally.

CASEY: Does things. But we knew it worked for a very, very long time.

[laughter]

EVAN: See. And because of the ADHD, I literally have to take notes because I don't want to lose topics.

CASEY: Oh, me too.

EVAN: I'm not even kidding. I'm not even kidding. Ah.

MAE: It's quite why – [overtalk]

CASEY: I wonder – [overtalk]

MAE: I'm an interrupter in life, Evan too is because I'll forget about it if I don't say it right then.

EVAN: Me too. Hey, that's ADHD possibly.

MAE: Oh yeah. I'm in the group.

CASEY: Yeah. I relate to that.

EVAN: Okay.

CASEY: I relate to almost every ADHD meme I see and I wonder if I have it sometimes, but I don't have a diagnosis and I don't feel like it would help me that much because I'm not looking for the med part and I am already doing the coping mechanisms part, like the non-medication therapies for ADHD. I just read everything I can about every mental illness in case there are any nuggets that help improve my life.

EVAN: Mae, what I'd say first is I don't think I brought the spiritual side into anything I said.

MAE: You didn't.

EVAN: Yet, yet.

[laughter]

CASEY: Yet.

EVAN: Yet. I say yet. I mean, sure, I'll just come out and say, “Okay, by the way, I'm a Buddhist.” I didn't start there, though, or I suppose in a weird kind of way maybe I did. I just didn't mean to. No, I started with meditation at age 17 because I was an angry teenager and I kind of accidentally fell into it.

DAMIEN: How does an angry teenager get started with meditation? That’s a key for me.

MAE: Yes.

EVAN: Yeah. Well, it wasn't intentional. It was my mother didn't want to pay for Kung Fu lessons, which is what I wanted because I wanted to beat the crap out of things to take my anger out on them. Come on, that seems obvious, right? Physically, I don't know, punishing inanimate objects. But there was this really nice aikido dōjō nearby and “Why don't you try that? That's cheaper.” “Oh, okay. Fine.”

I didn't know anything about aikido at the time. It also turned out that I found myself in one of the most internal, if not the most internally focused aikido schools of aikido that exists in the world. It's called Shinshin Toitsu Aikido. I’ll provide a link to it. Also known globally as the Ki Society, not K-E-Y, but K-I.

Every Sunday, there was this lovely woman named Mary K who started with a meditation, an hour-long meditation set, and I found that I had so much more peace that. I just fell in love with it and I didn't continue to practice rigorously after going –when I started in college, I tried to. They have a dōjō in Charlottesville where they did.

But it stayed with me and then when my first wife was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease—huge tangent there—I remembered before I went to University of Virginia, they gave me this reading list and they said, “Here are all these books we want you to read.” I didn't know that I wasn't going to be tested on any of the stuff, but I felt obligated to read it. One of those was Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which is a story – [overtalk]

MAE: So good.

EVAN: Absolutely excellent book.

MAE: Yeah.

EVAN: Yeah, okay. So I remembered Siddhartha. Buddhism. Yeah, there is this whole religion that says life hurts. Hmm, maybe I should explore that. That's not really what it says, but that suffering is unavoidable and the whole religion, such as it is, religion is about how do we engage with that, or at least the philosophy of it. And I found a website and a podcast that is currently defunct called Zencasts, which is ironic considered we are using an app called Zencastr, and that comes from the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. I've been listening to them ever since 2006 to the Dharma Talks, which is a talk given by a person who is usually an ordained priest of Buddhism.

Now they have a podcast called Audio Dharma that's still running. That's recordings of their meditations and their Dharma Talks and I followed that for years and years and years telling myself I don't do this religion thing and I gave up in religion decades before, but mindfulness. Okay, that’s secular version. So that mindfulness, I'll do that. It turns out, I guess when you get into that enough, you're going to be exposed and you listen to enough talks, you're eventually going to be exposed to some ideas that aren't just mindfulness, that are Buddhist related and quickly realize okay, fine. Maybe I can self-describe I did of, I can maybe there is an identity of secular Buddhism. It turns out that's most Western Buddhism. Most people don't buy into the reincarnation thing, karma, and all of that but the philosophy.

MAE: I'm a huge Pema Chödrön fan.

EVAN: Yeah. I've read some of hers. ADHD makes it really hard for me to take in any book that's non-fiction in its entirety, but I've read some Pema Chödrön and I've read some of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Some people object to the “his holiness” part. Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gil Fronsdal, who is the lead teacher at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City and a few others. I just got a huge soft spot for Gil because his was the first Dharma Talk I ever listened to and now I just find his voice so soothing. Let’s say I'm a Gill fanboy.

MAE: Love it.

EVAN: But the mystical versus scientific part that I feel you. The analogy that comes to mind; I got really pissed at George Lucas when he started explaining the Force away with Midi-Chlorians.

[laughter]

It's like, “God damn it, George, take that back.”

DAMIEN: [inaudible].

EVAN: The Force is supposed to be magic. Don't take magic from the world. That just makes me upset. On one hand, I feel what you're saying, Mae. On the other hand, I subscribe to the notion that I'm a biological machine and with adequate science, I'm probably fully deterministic. At the same time, I wouldn't want people to be able to read my mind and with businesses out there like Meta AKA Facebook. No, fuck that.

MAE: Yo!

DAMIEN: I want to say these are not contradicting philosophies. You can believe in a clockwork universe that absolutely is deterministic. While at the same time, knowing that there are things that science cannot prove that are true. Like that's a scientific fact. There are things that are true, that science cannot prove and then there are things that are literally not scientific. My favorite color is blue. That's a fact. That's not a scientific fact. There is no science that's going to prove that. The closer you’re going to get – [overtalk]

EVAN: I wonder if that's really true that no science currently they could prove that. Still, I question whether it's universally true no science could ever prove that.

DAMIEN: The best you can get is correlation between a physical response and a particular wavelength of light.

EVAN: Again, currently. I still – I think there's a chain of causality there that you might be able to connect with enough really, really deep telemetry, which we do not have nor seem likely to have any time at all in our lifetime.

MAE: I'm still on the I don't care how many stats there are, there's still more. And to your thing, Damien – [overtalk][

EVAN: I hope so.

MAE: The definition that I learned in school, in college of scientific fact is not yet then proven false. Like that's the best that we can do.

EVAN: Yeah.

MAE: And this is pretty limited.

DAMIEN: Yeah, absolutely.

MAE: Also, when you look at the history of scientific thought, which I have taught before, it's fascinating what we used to think were facts.

[laughter].

EVAN: Yeah.

MAE: And when we just like – we are constantly talking about it like it's just this aggregation of facts over time and really, it's just constantly rehabbing everything that we got attached to. So all of the things that we even are referring to as facts are things we now know, or whatever, or things we will find out later. Yeah, and most everything we think right now is the probability of it being told is very high.

EVAN: Well, that's why science calls them theories, right.

MAE: Yeah.

EVAN: Because fair theory means this has been demonstrated to be true, given the information we have available, but theories can also be proven false.

DAMIEN: Yeah. And I love that word, non-falsifiability, like scientific facts are falsifiable.

EVAN: Yeah.

MAE: Yeah.

DAMIEN: And scientific theories are falsifiable and if you work really hard to falsify them and you fail, then it probably true.

[laughter]

EVAN: I mean, if –

DAMIEN: That's what we call true.

EVAN: This is where we can get down to what's the definition of facts, scientific facts. You could call measurements, facts, but even a measurement is going to be some degree of approximation because you are always rounding at some point. [laughs] Right?

DAMIEN: I agree.

EVAN: Yeah.

MAE: Oh my gosh. I'm starting have so much fun right now.

[laughter]

Okay, but there's also generally not like truth, capital T, is usually very – includes a lot of contradictions and if it is one way and everybody answers that same thing, that's probably fallible. [laughs] Like when you start to get the contradictions and see a richer picture, that's when I feel closer to whatever truth that is.

So when people tell me that there's such and such kind of person and they think this kind of way, or a scientific fact, it's the only one truth. This is when I definitely don't believe whatever it is. So that's also why I like to include the – [overtalk]

CASEY: Yeah, group think.

MAE: Mystery magical option in there too, because unless you're including that, you're not getting the success of approximation to the truth in my book.

EVAN: See, this is where I start – Casey was going there, too. This is when I start thinking about human dynamics and teams that as a leader, or as a manager—because there is a difference between management and leadership, frankly—I tend to be my most uncomfortable when no one disagrees with me.

[laughter]

That if I'm – [overtalk]

MAE: Yes!

EVAN: Or I should say if I'm putting an idea out there that is fairly obvious, that we're all breathing in oxygen, that I'm not too concerned about if people disagree with me. When I'm putting an idea out there that's fairly novel and there's some risk associated with it and no one says anything to disagree, I get nervous. “Wait a minute. No one has a problem with this at all. Do you feel safe enough to respond? What's going on here?” [chuckles]

DAMIEN: Yeah. What's more likely: everybody agrees, or people don't feel unsafe disagreeing?

MAE: Yo!

EVAN: Right? Whoa. No, nom and you just used one of the most painful things you could use with me: double negative.

[laughter]

Ow. No, don't do that. It's like using unless in a Ruby statement, it hurts my brain.

[laughter]

MAE: Oh my gosh, Damien. It's so true. It is hard to foster environments where disagreement is welcomed, acceptable, encouraged, sustained. [laughs]

EVAN: I know what I do, and I know to try to do that. I also know it's not universally successful was I was given a little dose of much needed humility in that regard recently with a team member of mine.

I think, Mae, Casey, you've seen this with me before that I tend to be one of the earlier people to deliberately be vulnerable, to admit some shortcoming, or some mistake. That I try to establish, “Hey I'm okay admitting I'm wrong, or I've been wrong and if it's okay for me, if you see me as an authority figure, this is me trying to tell you I want you to feel okay doing it, too.” That I'm up here saying, “Hey, I have to –” Well, that time I chose not to swear for whatever reason. I think I'm in a little bit more of the work context, I'm talking about teams and no one's throwing stones at me yet. So maybe it's safe for you to do it, too.

That works for some people. I – [overtalk]

DAMIEN: That's so important. It's so important to come from people at the top, near the top.

MAE: Exactly.

DAMIEN: Like when your boss is like, “Oh, I was wrong about this.” When the CTO was like, “Oh yeah, last week, I knocked off production. Ooh, my bad.” [laughs]

MAE: Yes.

EVAN: But when you say that, I tried to think about the counterpoint because I've seen this not succeed. Sometimes I've been confused by it. There's well, what happened after you made that mistake? Was there an accountability conversation? What did that look like? Were you taking a risk, or did you just make a “dumb mistake?” Was it really bad judgment? That there's a difference between being vulnerable and creating psychological safety and having accountability, and that can be a kind of fuzzy boundary.

But what I found is holding accountability, you got to do that in private, because that disrupts psychological safety and you have to think about, when you're holding accountability well, who's going to hear about the repercussions and what will that do to psychological safety? I won't go into details, but I can think of a situation where I saw someone perhaps have a severe lapse in judgment, get fired over it and then having a chilling response on an organization as a result, causing a severe reduction in psychological safety.

I'll say, I had no part of this. [chuckles] Just want to be clear. I do not reach for the fire button when it comes to people making mistakes. It's okay, how do we learn from this and get better is my preference That when someone makes a mistake, I think of it usually as okay, you made the mistake. How did the system allow for this in the first place?

DAMIEN: Bingo.

CASEY: Yes, first place.

EVAN: And how can we prevent this in the future such that the system puts you in a position where you are able to make that mistake? Can we put in guardrails and checks and does the danger, the magic red button, does it need to have a safety cover on it, for example? That how many different protections can we put in place and are there enough of them?

MAE: And I try to do that. I'm an engineer manager, also Evan, and similarly, try to demonstrate vulnerability and publicly share mistakes. There are ways in which that impacts some people positively. There are ways in which that me as a white person admitting mistake is a different deal and me as a woman admitting a mistake is a different deal. And like – [overtalk]

EVAN: Totally.

MAE: there's just so much in there about, I appreciated that you were going into the what happens after, because we can get people to say things. But then if the system does not actually hold what it is that people are saying, and if the system does not hold accountable to the people who are most marginalized in the system, that's who gets to define whether, or not accountability is real, whether, or not if there is psychological safety, et cetera. It's not for the people with the most power to assess.

EVAN: Yeah. This really resonates with me, particularly because of a conversation I had with one of my directors at work lately. But I found it really profound when this one director of mine was very open about their experience as someone more diverse than me, let's just say, because I at least appear to be about as non-diverse as you get at least on the outside.

Their very real concerns because of the diversity, how that might impact their career, how people perceive them, and how they're perceived impacts their career growth. I was really grateful and humbled that they shared that with me and so, I took all that in and everything that they were telling me about the concerns, thought about it some, and that I received that sharing has impacted my management on my team, that I don't talk to others on the team about this person's diversity, but I am trying to get them to reflect further as a way of trying to you check for bias with other people.

MAE: Yeah. That's been my main mission. [laughs] I feel like most of my life is like, can we just say and see when we are biased because we are of a culture that is incredibly biased and unjust, and there is no way to be separate from it.

One of my very favorite quotes from Diane di Prima, this beat poet, is, “For every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy.”

EVAN: God, I feel that.

MAE: As much as we can be change agents and social justice advocates, ultimately, we are still of the thing.

EVAN: Yeah. And yes.

MAE: And I try to go on record all the time. I am definitely racist, sexist, [chuckles] homophobic, atheist, and ageist; I am all of the things. I catch myself all of the time. And – [overtalk]

EVAN: And then there are the times you don't catch yourself, too, probably – [overtalk]

MAE: Fair.

EVAN: Which is unconscious bias, because that's why I try to make other people aware by approaching it indirectly is unconscious bias can creep in so many different ways and okay, so all I can do is kind of explore this person's surface area and see, well, what is it you are really, what story are you telling yourself here? What data are you operating on? Is this congruent when you look at all of it together, or do you see gaps for yourself?

I haven't had anyone's light bulb go off just yet, but I'm still working on some people and maybe it's possible that there are legitimate concerns, too. That can be accompanied by unconscious bias and that can get really hard to deal with.

CASEY: I read a paper recently about unconscious bias training being not effective at all ever. And then I read another paper saying – [overtalk]

MAE: What!

CASEY: It's not effective when it's done very poorly, like in our [inaudible] – [overtalk]

And it is effective when you have people talk about it with each other, actually apply it, and think about it.

EVAN: It's not effective?

CASEY: And that’s not so – no, no one was surprised.

EVAN: Yeah.

CASEY: Put it on my feed on Twitter and everyone was like, “Duh. But now we have science.”

EVAN: When it's done poorly, does it work. Hello? [laughs]

DAMIEN: But the addition to that is most of the time it's done poorly.

EVAN: Yeah.

MAE: Yeah.

CASEY: That's true, too. Yeah.

DAMIEN: And I'll give you my personal opinion. I didn't come up with this myself. If you're comfortable doing it, it's not being done well. [laughs]

EVAN: That's the truth.

MAE: Yes!

CASEY: Well said.

MAE: Yes.

EVAN: Yeah. This is where I'll go back to meditation and mindfulness training, that with mindfulness, you become more aware. I've become more aware of the passing thoughts that I have; they're automatic thoughts. Buddhism has this idea of monkey mind that the mind is a machine that shatters like a monkey. It's a machine for creating thought and we have metacognition if we're aware of our thoughts, if we're paying attention to our thoughts.

I have noticed more of that chatter and oh, whoa, whoa. I didn't – I thought that? What? Okay, let's slow down here for a moment and explore that because that made me really uncomfortable that that went through my head in that moment about that person whether it's racist, sexist, whatever. I'm human, these thoughts come up and now I'm never getting a job again. [laughs]

MAE: Well, I went first so.

EVAN: I know you did so, you were vulnerable. Thank you. [laughs]

MAE: Do you all know about Resmaa Menakem?

EVAN: No.

CASEY: No.

MAE: Oh my gosh. Okay, so check it out. This guy says he wrote this book called My Grandmother's Hands and he's saying that trauma is passed down physiologically.

EVAN: I've heard this.

MAE: And part of the reason why we have not been able to deal with bias and all of this is because we are trying to do it through the mind – [overtalk]

EVAN: Really?

MAE: And that is not the place to go. It's actually physiological healing that we all are responsible to do as part of contributing toward creating a different world is like it's within us.

So his premises that the white-on-white trauma in the Middle Ages got passed down and that is part of how white people have been [chuckles] passing along a lot more trauma, I'll say that.

Anyway, the book is fascinating and the first time I've heard a non-brain thought focused way to approach social change.

DAMIEN: I feel this very, very strongly, like there's such a focus and this is why I bristled at our neuroscience experts here [laughs] and their lovely focus on neurology. Like there's so much focus on neurons, the neurological system, and the cognitive mind and the cognitive mind is such a tiny, tiny part of what we are.

EVAN: Yeah, true.

MAE: Yes.

EVAN: We're a whole system. So no, I was going to say something, not double negative, not all that dissimilar.

[laughter]

You said closer to the mic to be ironic. That they're interconnected. Casey was talking to it, too that thought creates physiological changes, creates chromosomal changes so, genetic changes.

MAE: And vice versa.

DAMIEN: Yeah, and you can tell this vice versa. That the most obvious way to do this is next time you're angry, breathe slowly. It's literally impossible to be angry and breathing peacefully.

MAE: Hmm. Oh my gosh. This is such a good challenge.

EVAN: Yeah, pretty much.

MAE: I know this is what Casey is going to quote at the end.

EVAN: I mean, when you say breathe peacefully, let's be clear. You can slow your breathing down, but not be breathing peacefully when you're slowing your breathing down. But now it's how do we define peacefully?

DAMIEN: Sure.

CASEY: Cognition!

EVAN: That makes you really pedantic here. But as a meditator? Yeah. Mae, you meditate, too, though? Don't you? I thought.

MAE: I’m a dabbler in all of the things.

EVAN: So what is breathing peacefully that deep breaths will tend to encourage the parasympathetic nervous system to kick in and over that encouragement, the parasympathetic nervous system, the so-called rest and digest. So it's hard to sustain deep breathing for a long time and not calm down, but I'm sure it's possible. I've had some experiences where I've been so emotionally activated—you could use the word triggered. Take your pick, some people don't like it. But at that point, if there's a trauma involvement, then it can be really hard to use the physiological to tamp down the emotional.

DAMIEN: Well, what I will say is just on a more fundamental level. Your thoughts, your emotions, they're physical, and they're embodied.

EVAN: Yeah, totally.

DAMIEN: They are literally in your body and so, they change your body and your body changes them, and they're not a separate thing.

EVAN: So you thought we were disagreeing? That's neuroscience, too. Sorry. Eh, you failed.

[laughter]

DAMIEN: I failed at disagreeing.

MAE: Ah!

DAMIEN: I will never make it on cable television now.

EVAN: No, I think this is what you call violent agreement.

CASEY: Yes!

[laughter]

Yeah, for a lot of these things we're talking about, I quickly go to like, “Yes, there's even a science that supports it.”

[laughter]

Even if we don't have the science to support it yet because there's so much we don't know about everything.

EVAN: I feel like we've kind of got to meet the press table here because we've got the two on two of the people who want to say, “No, it's not science,” and the people on the other side were saying, “Hey, this thing you're not saying is science, there's science for this!”

[laughter]

CASEY: I was saying it about the audience.

MAE: I’m just saying I don’t want to have to use science in order to be able to have faith. That's what I'm saying.

EVAN: Ah.

CASEY: Mm hmm.

EVAN: Well, I would argue that even for those of us who don't really want to have faith, that there's always something we're taking on faith.

MAE: Totally.

EVAN: Because there's a lot of it, because even those of us who think we know science so well, there are plenty of things we're ignorant of that we have, that we operate with very large assumptions on. We essentially take on faith because we don't understand them.

DAMIEN: The scientific method is taken on faith.

MAE: Mm!

EVAN: Oh, oh god.

MAE: Yes!

EVAN: Someone get Gödel, Escher, Bach; I think we’re hitting recursion.

MAE: Oh my gosh, I’m having so much fun!

EVAN: Another book I’ve read some of. [laughs]

CASEY: I always think about the audience we're talking to. So I'm well-equipped to talk to people who really want to hear some science because I can bring up some like, “Well we don't know this part over here,” and I'm very happy to be the person to talk to those people. I am much less well-equipped to talk to someone more spiritual, who doesn't want to think about science things at all. I'm not well-equipped to talk – [overtalk]

EVAN: No, I've loved doing that.

CASEY: Some people are fluent in both, but I specialize in the science part.

EVAN: I’m fluent in it but I – [overtalk]

CASEY: Conversational, perhaps.

EVAN: I like areas of disagreement and this really makes some people very uncomfortable. In student government in college, I prized the people who thought very differently for me because I often learned from them and had insights that wouldn't have otherwise. I've made my in-law super uncomfortable because they're deeply religious. I am so not. And when I asked them challenging questions, I think they thought I was trying to start a fight and said, “No, I was trying to start a discussion to explore and learn,” but they got upset. [laughs]

MAE: Yes, I have this, too, Evan.

DAMIEN: A lot of people don't want to explore and learn because they're afraid of what they'll find, and I think – I know that's true for me in certain areas.

EVAN: I don't know that that's accurate, but I also don’t think – I'll be frank, I don't think it's all that generous either.

DAMIEN: No, it's not generous. Of course.

EVAN: Yeah, and I've been tested on this a lot, because my wife is really quite religious and I'm not. So we're a really interesting pair that way, that I think it's instead that they're projecting negative intent on me because they're more accustomed to people challenging their belief from an aggressive and a hostile place.

DAMIEN: That's also fair.

EVAN: Where frankly, I probably had some of that unintentionally, but my true intent was—and this goes back to something you were saying earlier, Mae that I wanted to say and I forgot because of ADHD probably—that my vulnerability, my discussions with people, it's because I'm a little obsessed with truth. And one doesn't find truth through constant agreement. One finds truth by taking your truth, comparing it to other people's truths that are different, testing them, and the exploring, which I think that's where we get the assignment – [overtalk]

MAE: And then combining them enzymatically. Let’s just use a science word to prove this approach.

EVAN: Yeah. You look for the yes ands, but then you also look for the oh, these don't connect here, here, here, and here and the person with more faith might just say, “We have to just agree to disagree here,” and I might just have to, “Okay, fine. You're saying you don't want to talk about that part is what I hear then.”

[chuckles]

One of my best friends when I lived in Eastern shore of Maryland, devoutly religious evangelical and… also in the computers. When we met, we would often go out to lunch and just have these really strong disagreements that I always found fascinating. We would just talk and talk and talk and inevitably, it would get into religion and God, and he would get down to “Because God has a plan for every one of us,” and I'd say, “Yeah, I don't believe it.” [laughs]

DAMIEN: Well, that's unfalsifiable.

EVAN: Right, so we’re back to those I can't prove it's false thing; you can’t prove it – [overtalk]

MAE: Oh my gosh, now we're just having fun. And then – [overtalk]

EVAN: Yeah, I can't prove the non-existence of God, ooh, I'm done. That's the Godwin's law of talking about religion. That’s what's Godwin's love every conversation on the internet inevitably becomes about Hitler. Boom.

MAE: Wow.

[laughter]

DAMIEN: But it's an important point. Like when you even as a person who – [overtalk]

EVAN: I just mentioned Hitler, sorry. [laughs]

DAMIEN: Even as a person who has taken on faith, this shared objective, external reality exists, [chuckles] there are still things that are unfalsifiable and so you have to – well, what I like to do is I get to choose. I get to choose what I believe. [laughs]

EVAN: We all do.

DAMIEN: I choose the beliefs that serve me the best.

EVAN: Or we all think we do. We might – [overtalk]

DAMIEN: Well, I believe that, too.

MAE: Ah!

EVAN: We might add a free will, but you might believe we do and I'm not so sure. I suspect we don't.

DAMIEN: Well, that's also non-falsifiable. [chuckles]

EVAN: I know.

DAMIEN: And so, it's another opportunity for me to choose a belief that there – [overtalk]

EVAN: Right. Currently, I'm falsifiable and as I said earlier, closing another loop, I'm not sure I want to live in the world where we can prove it because it'll get misused.

MAE: Mm yeah. There's no deal there, too.

A loop piece, too, that I wanted to say is, Evan on the thing about being interpreted as being consternatious, or content – like trying to create conflict. Disagreement to me is not conflict. [chuckles] Like you can disagree and not be in conflict, but I am from upstate New York and the way that I talk –

EVAN: [laughs] Wait, Upstate, not Manhattan.

MAE: Correct.

EVAN: So there's different. [laughs]

MAE: Correct. I can sound like I am having a problem with someone because I'm challenging a thing they said and those are just very different to me; challenging a thing that someone said versus having a problem with a person and what they think. My coined phrase I made up is “conflict is care.” So if they're really in conflict, it's because there's emotion involved. Somebody has to care for there to be actual conflict.

DAMIEN: Otherwise, you walk away.

MAE: Yeah.

EVAN: Yeah.

MAE: So like, whatever. That was weird.

EVAN: So few things. First, conflicting disagreement to me, they can mean the same thing. Conflict doesn't have to imply hostility, or violence. Two different books come to mind based on what you just said.

One, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I love that book because one example, you know it's a management book because it has a four-quadrant diagram in it and – [laughs] Mae’s laughing. That's not on the audio.

But I love that book and there's the top left quadrant, I can't remember what it's called. I always forget these, which is the you're just not contributing because you don't care enough. So there's the whole right side of the diagram is you care enough to intervene. I think the bottom right is can't forget, but basically, you're saying the truth but you're just a jerk about it. It's the I'm sharing and I'm just being blunt and I'm not addressing your feelings on the matter at all, I'm just sharing. And the top right, the radical candor is I care and I'm sharing to try to help so it speaks to compassion in the sense of, I see a problem. I'm offering because I care and I'm trying to, I'm taking action because I have empathy.

By the way, I'm almost literally borrowing from a Search Inside Yourself program when I say that, when I describe compassion that way.

The other book that came to mind… Oh, yeah was Nonviolent Communication. I think that's – [overtalk]

DAMIEN: Another excellent book.

EVAN: Daniel Rosenberg. Yeah, that has been a hugely impactful book on me. Some people have a lot of difficulty with the notion that speech can be violent. But it comes down to what does the word violence mean because if you think of violence in the form of violation, if you are saying things that are unwelcome to another person, that is a violation.

DAMIEN: Well, also the author breaks that down, clears that up in the very beginning. What they mean by violence is causes harm.

EVAN: And then quantifying harm.

DAMIEN: Yeah.

EVAN: There's not just physical harm. Although, then we get to the neuroscience and physiological part, emotional harm is physical harm because – [overtalk]

MAE: Yes.

EVAN: These things we call feelings—I'm going to Search Inside Yourself again here, these things we call feelings, they are felt sensations in the body. They are manifestations of emotions that are in the brain.

DAMIEN: I just want to say that again. Feelings are felt sensations.

EVAN: Bingo. So when I feel bad, it's I literally feel bad.

I was telling my therapist yesterday when I was having a bad day, I said, “I reached right for the pain relief that day,” and he said, “Oh yeah, I totally do that, too.” Because the felt sensations in the body are hurt and hey, guess what? Pain relief medication can treat the physical hurt and if you treat the physical hurt, that can help with the emotional and mental hurt, too a little because you don't have that exacerbating the emotional hurt. You don't have that exacerbate – [overtalk]

CASEY: This is not just true. It's studied.

[laughter]

EVAN: Casey, blow people's minds and go to the study in the show notes.

CASEY: Yeah.

EVAN: I bet you can find it. I hope it's public.

CASEY: Yeah.

EVAN: This is something that drove me nuts in the Search Inside Yourself program. That I'm that guy that when I'm looking at the neuroscience, it's okay, I see this study. I'm reading through this study. Cool. I want to know something about some of the other studies that are referred to you in here because I have more questions. Wait, this shit’s behind a pay wall? Fuck this.

CASEY: Ah, yeah.

EVAN: There are so many studies behind the pay wall unless you're associated with the university. You can't get them. Oh my God. I hate them.

DAMIEN: Pro tip, scientific authors love sharing their work and they own the copyright to it. [chuckles] Email them, they'll send it to you.

EVAN: Oh, you can't see my huge O face. [laughs] I am totally doing it.

MAE: But – [overtalk]

EVAN: Thank you.

MAE: As someone who worked in higher ed for many years, that is consistently being defunded. Scientific inquiry happening in higher ed is like the places where the money goes and what research is allowed to happen is a pretty murky water. And so, paying the distribution place to help there be some peer reviewed studies out there that are not only and solely funded by big industry [chuckles] no names that I'll give them my 3 bucks.

EVAN: I wish it was just 3 bucks, though.

MAE: I know, yes.

EVAN: I'm looking at wait, you want to purchase this journal so you can – some of them you can rent, I think they said, but – [overtalk]

DAMIEN: Also – [overtalk]

EVAN: [inaudible] journal is like 250 bucks for a single journal.

MAE: Oh no.

DAMIEN: And do the journals pay the – do they pay the authors? Do they pay the peer reviewers?

MAE: Yeah. You get – [overtalk]

DAMIEN: Oh, okay

MAE: Well, it depends on the journal, on the industry, but there is a whole extra thing about peer review being a part of kind of community service. It's like open source. You have to have done it to be able to be let in the club and keep up your reps, or whatever. So there's definitely a lot of peer review stuff that happens. That's not as cool for, especially earlier career researchers, but there's definitely some funding that really goes back.

EVAN: Oh, yeah, I imagine. Getting research funded in academia is always hard, so sure. I mean, if it's a few bucks here and there, it's one thing, but 250 bucks for a journal.

MAE: That’s fascinating, that’s great.

EVAN: Damien, I'm going to try your idea. [laughs]

CASEY: The research I did was funded by the military because it was PTSD related.

EVAN: Oh.

CASEY: Even though for my interest, it was basic science; how do epigenetics affect memory. But that is the application is PTSD and the military has a big budget for that.

EVAN: Sounds like, you know what?

CASEY: I always felt a little weird about it because that's – I don't know. I didn't want to get money from the military, but I did want –

MAE: A lot of [inaudible] has – [overtalk]

CASEY: The research was important – [overtalk]

MAE: Always come from the military.

CASEY: A lot has. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

EVAN: Hey, this internet we're talking on? [laughs] This internet thing that we're using right now?

MAE: Yeah, sure.

EVAN: That little thing came from this thing called defense something research project agency, I think DARPA, ARPANET originally, and that was the internet way back when.

MID-ROLL 2: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.

Compiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you’ve always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code.

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I checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role, if any, that managers should have in code bases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can.

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CASEY: We've been talking about knowledge and what is truth, and I want to bring up an idea that I'm surprised surprises so many people. I use these words completely differently—believe, think, no, wonder, want, need. Every word like that is unique to me. So if I say, I believe that's true. That doesn't mean I think it's true, or I know it's true, or I want it to be true. It means I believe; it's a belief I have based on something. Do you want to know what that something is? I can tell you what that comes from. Or I know this is true. I reserve that for personal experience, or there's a study.

EVAN: Yeah.

CASEY: In the study, I might not even use no for, because they can be contradicted as we're talking about all the whole episode.

EVAN: Can we survey listeners? Because I'm actually curious how many people make this distinction. I do, too.

CASEY: Yeah.

EVAN: So I'm actually curious now is this normal, or are you and I weird in similar ways that way? Because again, how did I end up finding out I have ADHD and why did it matter to me? It's how am I different?

MAE: And we can a tarot deck out it.

EVAN: Oh and by the way, I mentioned comorbidities of ADHD. ADHD and autism spectrum disorders, they tend to coexist. There are a lot of people on autism spectrum disorders have ADHD, also comorbid anxiety, depression, sometimes eating disorders, ding, ding, ding and rejection sensitivity disorder. The list goes on and on and on.

CASEY: Yeah. Yeah.

EVAN: So some of these patterns, I've occasionally wondered hey, am I somewhere on the autism spectrum? I don't know. But I sometimes get into my clarifications and get really pedantic about them.

CASEY: I can be pedantic. Sometimes. I try to go light on it.

MAE: I like to be pedantic, too! [laughs]

DAMIEN: I promise you, normal people do not make distinctions between those words, but normal people are generally very sloppy with their language.

CASEY: Yeah. We can't afford to; forever programming changes the way we think.

MAE: I would like to normalize this word we're using right now pretty liberally, normal. Speaking of being special about our words.

EVAN: Neurotypical and neuroatypical – [overtalk]

MAE: Common.

EVAN: Might be a little bit better.

CASEY: Common, I like better most of the time.

DAMIEN: Common is the word what I should have used.

CASEY: Yeah, that's more specific. It is much more specific than normal. What kind of normal?

EVAN: Yeah.

CASEY: Normal, the word I want to drop, but it still slips into my speech. Just like guys.

MAE: Yeah, same.

CASEY: I have it found a perfect replacement for how guys feels to use.

EVAN: Y'all.

CASEY: I wish I could.

EVAN: Y'all. I love y'all.

CASEY: Sometimes y'all’s good. But if I walk into a room and say, “What are –?” Okay, that's not a good example.

EVAN: How are you folks?

CASEY: What are you guys doing? Well, y'all is great there.

EVAN: I use folks.

CASEY: It sounds like – [overtalk]

EVAN: I use filters – [overtalk]

MAE: I use folks. I use people. I use peeps. I use y’all.

EVAN: Yes.

MAE: I use all kinds of things.

EVAN: Yeah.

CASEY: Yeah. I use all these, too.

EVAN: I might have gotten one, or two of those to use – [overtalk]

MAE: When somebody says guys, as someone who has hung out in mostly places where it is all guys, I don't like it. I just don't.

CASEY: No.

MAE: Does not make me feel good.

EVAN: How do you know they self-Identify as male? Right? I mean, seriously, so. But no, I was going to say, Mae, or I tried to say earlier, I might have [inaudible] amount of – I’ve used that occasionally. I'm pretty sure maybe at least one of these came from you, from interacting with you at one point, just can't say which. Y’all, that was from a stint at Rackspace and going to Texas enough times, but I stuck with it.

CASEY: Y’all is great. Y'all should be more formal, popular, mainstream accepted English. It should not be just slang casual. I use it in formal writing as much as I can get away with.

EVAN: So happy in a work meeting yesterday to hear someone new to me use y'all in a work meeting setting. It tickled me. [laughs]

CASEY: It's like Spanish. Spain’s Spanish has vosotros that's y'all and that is more formal in Spanish.

EVAN: Yeah.

DAMIEN: Once we get y'all in English, we can extend it to the even more useful all y’all.

MAE: Yes! Now we're talking.

DAMIEN: You, y’all, all y'all.

EVAN: No, wait, there's some other ones I learned, too. There's yinzer. There's some other – [overtalk]

DAMIEN: Philadelphia yinz. That's a third person plural, second person plural.

EVAN: It gets kind of weird me, but every neologism starts weird before it gets normalized. I air quoted. [laughs] I remember the first time I heard fleek and I just couldn't accept it. [laughs]

MAE: Oh my gosh.

DAMIEN: That's a tough one.

[laughter]

CASEY: Fleek is for eyebrows. Eyebrows on fleek, that's what it's used for mostly.

I think it's my gray hair showing just, yeah, I still twitch a little there. I just lost a whole generation of people who might have been paying attention. [laughs]

MAE: What, by telling the truth and demonstrating vulnerability and saying things that…?

EVAN: Yes. [laughs]

CASEY: So first let's do reflections on the episode and then we'll do the plugs. Who wants to go first?

DAMIEN: I can go first. Yeah, because my reflection is something I think one things we talked least about, but was demonstrated most: the value of being vulnerable, of just revealing things and I think that's like – I think because Evan, you were so vulnerable opening up this conversation, it allowed us to have a really open and just really valuable conversation with that. So that's an object lesson that I witnessed today and was a part of.

EVAN: Thank you. And Mae was saying it a lot earlier and I really appreciate that you were vulnerable in sharing that feedback as we went. By the way, that's also me sort of trying to imply to people who are listening, feedback doesn't have to be bad.

[laughter]

Feedback can be encouraging, too.

MAE: Evan's doing his plug right now.

EVAN: Well, sort of. People hear the word feedback; they think it always has to be critical. I winced.

My reflection is I was tickled that we got to explore so many things and while there were points of disagree that the disagreement ultimately led to deeper discussion. I just had such a fun time with this. So very much echoing the sentiment Mae shared earlier in the conversation. My reflection is this was just fun kind of bouncing around all these different topics and exploring things scientific, spiritual, existential in all manner.

CASEY: I'll go next. I like how many times Damien got the word unfalsifiable into the conversation.

[laughter]

DAMIEN: And non-falsifiable a couple times.

CASEY: Yeah, yeah.

DAMIEN: One of those will be incorrect, right?

[laughter]

EVAN: We used not unfalsifiable the first time and I winced.

CASEY: Not unfalsifiable, yeah.

So I haven't thought on it in a long time. I'm sure I have before, but we can't usually know what is truth. Truth is maybe unattainable in a lot of ways. But we can know when something's false and there's something really satisfying about that. So I'm going to try to hold onto that thought and see how it feels.

MAE: I love that, Casey.

I'm trying to remember the thing that Damien said that I thought was going to be the thing that you were are going to say, Casey, because you're so good at always getting in on the CTA options, but.

EVAN: CTA?

MAE: Oh, thank you, Evan. I'm usually so good about acronyms and saying what they are. Call to action.

EVAN: Oh, I see.

MAE: Well, I'm going to – [laughs] my reflection is that I need to spend some time rethinking all of the stuff that we talked about. Maybe even relistening to be able to relay—I'm trying to come up with another word that starts with R-E. What my reflection is, but it's something Damien said and it was really good and I can't wait to rediscover it.

EVAN: Was it about unconscious bias and that we need to be talking about our biases because if it's not uncomfortable, then it's not productive?

MAE: That’s the one.

EVAN: Yeah.

MAE: That… maybe it wasn't. I think it is.

DAMIEN: Right.

MAE: I think I have to get back to us. [laughs]

EVAN: I think it was it's not an effective conversation about bias if it's not uncomfortable.

CASEY: Mm, that's it. I love that.

DAMIEN: Evan remembers it because it has a double negative in it.

EVAN: That's possible. It hurt me.

[laughter]

I’ve got to admit, it did hurt saying it. That's the truth. I felt it.

[laughter]

But it's also true, I'm just – I admit in my head, I am trying to knot the knots [laughs] and it hurts. [laughs]

DAMIEN: Well, don't get tied knots doing it, Evan.

EVAN: Bang, bang and Ruby hurt my brain except they convert things to Boolean. That's a nice little trick in the Ruby language.

MAE: I have a plug and kind of call-to-action.

CASEY: Plug, plug!

MAE: I really just like please everybody, think about all the ways in which you are biased and have healing to do and in your body. Brains, well, they're complicated and maybe we'll have some more studies to tell some more things about them. But our bodies, if you would consider bringing that also into your workplaces, in your families, in your communities about starting to truly talk about ways in which we are not awesome to each other, it will actually help us get more awesome to each other.

EVAN: Amen. Yeah, we don't get better until we talk about where it hurts. Until we face it.

I think I plugged it a few times already, but I'll say it more explicitly: Search Inside Yourself. I don't make money off of this. This is something where I took this class. I took it as a class in D.C. about 6 years ago. I took it with Casey. In fact, we took it the same time and…

CASEY: Yeah.

EVAN: It has been so impactful in my life in so many different ways that I literally took the time and effort to learn how to teach it. This is something I've been primarily doing in my spare time and it's taken a little bit of time away from work for the actual sit down with other people in trainings with the super experienced trainers. But most of that time has been evenings and weekends pouring over material and cramming all these things into my brain and trying to not only learn it all, but then learn the mental model of it all to be able to share it with other people.

Search Inside Yourself is a way to build the muscles to do exactly what Mae is urging you to do. That empathy is a skill, you can learn it. That you might not have learned early that enough – I'm extending that plugs to ADHD again, [laughs] but I'll finish.

That most of us didn't grow up with the minimum recommended dose of Mr. Rogers in our life. I say that as someone who didn't. I know someone, Casey and I have a good friend who did, and I'm really grateful. I guess, I'll mention that friend, Andrew Dunkman, that he grew up with a lot of Mr. Rogers and got me thinking and reflecting a lot more on the man and the more I learned, the more I wish I had paid attention when I was little.

MAE: Yeah.

EVAN: Because a lot of those lessons are really important in the modern world where we need to work with other people and live better with other people, and the consequences of not doing that is a world with a lot of hostility and divisiveness that oh, by the way, we live in right now. So if we all cultivated some more empathy, I think we would all be a lot better off. I think. Sorry, no, I don't think. I believe, but I also have data to support it. Interesting. See, I did use, I think colloquially there.

CASEY: Nuance! Yeah, Andrew has been on the show before. If you miss the episode with Andrew Dunkman, you might want to go check it out. It's pretty good.

All right. I want to share my plug. I'm so shy about sharing. I have my own business, Happy & Effective, and it is so related to every episode, honestly and finally enough people have encouraged me to talk about it on the show and now is a great moment. Just like Evan is studying to teach Search Inside Yourself, I do workshops kind of like that through my company on emotional intelligence and well-being. Things like debugging your brain. I do a lot of DEI training—diversity, equity and inclusion—strategic thinking, leadership skills. And my approach is so hands-on, it's all breakout rooms and talking to each other and applying it. I give homework. I give reading assignments.

Anyway, if you want to bring that to your company, reach out to me. I'd love to chat with you. We can help make it happen. The website for that is happyandeffective.com.

DAMIEN: Do you make people uncomfortable in that process, Casey? Excellent.

CASEY: Yeah, but they love it because they're in a supportive environment. That might be my superpower, making people comfortable trying do that things.

EVAN: That’s the one. We do that in Search Inside Yourself.

CASEY: It's true in the dance classes I teach, too. I get people who hate dancing, think they hate dancing to become comfortable with it, happy with it.

EVAN: You make people uncomfortable in Search Inside Yourself, too. Yeah.

CASEY: True.

EVAN: Well, you’ve got to stretch yourself. Damien, you haven't gone.

DAMIEN: [laughs] I wish I had something to plug. I'll plug some of the books we mentioned. Siddhartha, absolutely amazing.

EVAN: Yes.

DAMIEN: Short narrative.

EVAN: Short read.

DAMIEN: Fun read.

EVAN: Oh, yeah.

CASEY: There's a free link of this on Gutenberg. I put a link in the show notes. It's free. You can just get it on your phone, do it.

DAMIEN: Nonviolent Communication, another amazing book. That's not as much fun to read, but in part incredibly impactful.

EVAN: Oh, there are also courses on Nonviolent Communication that you can take offered around the world really fairly cheaply Some of them tend to be community given. My wife and I went to once some time ago, so.

DAMIEN: Yeah. I've heard good things about those.

EVAN: Yeah.

DAMIEN: And then finally the last one, Conversations For Action. Ooh, I hope I got that right. Fernando Flores. We didn't talk about this.

MAE: Ooh.

DAMIEN: But it talked very much about speech being an act. You're not just talking; you're doing something when you talk.

EVAN: Right.

DAMIEN: Also amazing book.

EVAN: Yeah. There are a lot of books in this list, that makes me happy. I have more things to read now, though. Get it?

[laughter]

Longer reading list.

DAMIEN: Well, Evan, thank you so much for joining us today.

EVAN: Thank you for having me.

MAE: Yeah, super fun.

EVAN: I was really glad. This was lot of fun.

Special Guest: Evan Light.

Sponsored By:

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Support Greater Than Code

Catch Dave on Episode 006 of Greater Than Code! Getting Technology Into the Hands of Children with David Bock

02:10 - Dave’s Superpower: Ability to Reevaluate and Drop Ideas – Onto The Next!

07:10 - The Acceptance of Ruby; Using Ruby as a Teaching Language

18:01 - Mobile Development

24:10 - Teaching Remotely

34:25 - Computer Science Education Week + Teaching/Volunteering

“Computers aren’t smart. They’re just dumb really, really fast.”

56:39 - Handling Time Management and Energy

Reflections:

Casey: Motivating students to learn algorithmic efficiency. Feeling the problem.

Mae: Becoming more involved in the community.

Chelsea: What are people in the tech world ready for?

Dave: How much talking about computer science education is invigorating and revitalizing. Seeing problems through beginners’ eyes.

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

To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.

CHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code. This is Episode 261. I’m Chelsea Troy and I’m here with my co-host, Mae.

MAE: And I’m here also with Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. We're all here today with Dave Bock.

Welcome, Dave.

DAVE: Hi, glad to be here again.

CASEY: David Bock is the Vice President of Strategic Development at Core4ce, Inc. where he is responsible for taking new strategic ideas within the company through development and into production.

Dave speaks frequently on software engineering and management topics at software engineering conferences.

Dave’s true passion is his work as the Executive Director of Loudoun Codes, a nonprofit for teaching K-12 students in Loudoun County, Virginia topics related to computer science. He has been volunteering in classrooms since 2013, working with parents and teachers on an official curriculum, extracurricular, and other supplemental activities.

Welcome, Dave. We’re so glad to have you.

DAVE: I'm thrilled to be here. I love to talk about my passions.

CASEY: Speaking of your passions, we always start the episode with a certain question. I think you're ready for it.

DAVE: Yeah, I’m never ready for this question. [laughs]

CASEY: What's your superpower and how did you acquire it?

DAVE: You know it's funny, listening to this podcast over the years, I have answered that question in the car a dozen times and every time it's a different answer. Sometimes, I don't think there's a good answer for it. It's like trying to settle on what I wanted to talk about this time. Because it's like I don't have any superpowers; they're just mundane powers applied well.

But I think my superpower, if I had to pick one, I would say it is my ability to quickly reevaluate and drop ideas that I no longer find value in like, I don't get overly attached to an idea. I guess, that's the best way to put it.

The first time I realized thinking about that was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Captain Picard said to somebody that if you truly believe your convictions, you won't be afraid to reevaluate them, and that's just something that I've always kind of applied.

It came up again. My wife watches the TV show, House, which is now long since off the air, but the premise of that show was this doctor who was an expert in rare pathological diseases and he was a kind of a grumpy antihero doctor.

Every episode, there'd be some weird, rare disease and he'd be the first one to identify it and then some other symptom would present itself and he'd abandon that idea and move on to the next one. At one point somebody said to him, “You always think you're right,” and he said, “No, I always think I'm eventually right.” Because if you see it, he's always willing to drop an idea and move on to the next one even when other people were still wedded to the old idea and I think I apply that daily.

But even in my career, back in the 2006, 2007 timeframe, I was set. I could have kept as a Java developer for the rest of my career and instead, I abandoned it and started doing Ruby on Rails development. And I've since abandoned it again. Did the Clojure for a while, abandoned that again and got into management. I just didn't want to identify myself with any one track record too long.

MAE: Love it. Was that how you ended up having that approach is from TNG, or that is like a –? [overtalk]

DAVE: No, I just realized that I had that and that resonated with me. That line resonated with me, that stayed with me all these years. I can't say I noticed it the first time that I saw the episode. It was in a repeat one day that it just really struck me.

CASEY: When did you first realize you have this skill? Was it before that?

DAVE: I think when it was made conscious to me was around the time I was career switching. I had a resume in the Java space that sounded unbelievable. I was a president of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group. I was on the Java 6 Spec Committee. I was one of the 100 people that Sun had called a Java champion. And I really had – I was speaking at a Java themed software engineering conference.

I saw Ruby on Rails and I was like, “That is so cool.” It's such a breath of fresh air. It's like every decision that a team normally argues over for the first several weeks is just made, you can just start moving out. I quit my job, started a consultancy doing Rails development and kept with that for 8 years and it was a blast. Meanwhile, I had friends in the Java community who were like, “Why are you doing that? That's a toy language.”

CASEY: Oh, wow.

[laughter]

CHELSEA: What did you say to them?

MAE: Yeah!

CASEY: How did you retort? Yeah.

DAVE: Yeah, I didn't have a good one. It was just, it was a good career move

MAE: Maybe you've been doing it so long, you don't have a way to explain it anymore, but how do you not get too emotionally attached to any single idea?

DAVE: Oh, man. I think it might be just a healthy amount of imposter syndrome.

[laughter]

Where I question myself a little bit and I know that it also presents itself in a way that, especially as I've gotten older, I noticed that when I'm working with people and a good idea will present itself, they'll immediately attach to that idea and start doubling down on it and about the time other people are starting to write a blog entry on it, I'm wanting to lean in and do research and figure out prior art. [chuckles]

CASEY: Have you experienced any downsides of this? Has this bit you before?

DAVE: Ah.

CASEY: I'm all for this concept that you're talking about, but.

DAVE: That's a good question. Have I ever been too quick to abandon an idea that would have paid out? Probably. I also fall into that cliché of people that wonder if they have never diagnosed ADHD because I have a million half started projects and it's like a milestone when I actually get to finish one. I wonder if that's related. I don't know.

MAE: It's a pretty huge swath of programmers.

DAVE: Yeah. [chuckles]

CASEY: True.

MAE: You mentioned the thing about the Java folks calling Ruby a toy language and I'm curious about where you think it stands today and why and how you find Ruby really effective, especially for educational purposes.

DAVE: I guess, I'm saddened to see so much news lately where people are talking about the death of Ruby, or the death of Rails. Because I really think that the acceptance of Ruby in a first-class way was my eye-opening to the world being a polyglot environment. That even when I was a Java developer, I was a JavaScript developer, a CSS developer, an HTML developer, and Ruby was just another dot on that map for me.

If I look at my career path, I started professionally programming in Pascal, did C, C++, Objective Pascal, switched to Java. So moving to Ruby was just another step on that long road for me, but it's the one that I keep going back to. I've also done Clojure. I'm managing a project now that's in Python and JavaScript and React. Ruby is at a sweet spot for me. When I want to solve a problem, it's the tool I bring out every time despite a half dozen languages I could probably do that with.

I did mention that it was a sweet spot for me in terms of teaching and I need to say that the curriculum that we formally teach in high school is based on Java and that's because the AP exam is in Java. So the march is towards programming in passing the AP exam. But I think the curriculum is a little bit schizophrenia in trying to decide whether it's teaching computer science, or whether it's a vocational skill for teaching programming. For me, teaching Ruby makes computer science much more approachable, mainly because I get to get syntax out of the way.

The first few weeks in a Java programming course, my students struggle with where the semi-colons go? Wait, why do I need to begin in brackets here? What is this public static void main thing about? Which is, that's especially frustrating because we never fully explained that even in 2 years of programming courses.

And Ruby just strips all that kind of complexity away. But then at the same time, it makes some aspects of teaching computer science much more approachable. The fact that I have all these cool things I can do with collections, like I can say each, I can select, I can reject, I can over a collection ask for every combination of five elements of that without it being a page and a half of recursive code [laughter] to get every possible combination.

I teach concepts around algorithmic performance by talking about permutations and combinations that would be inaccessible that quickly in other languages, including Python. Python is a close second, I think and Python definitely has mindshare for teaching in that space. But Ruby is just in a slightly sweeter spot than that for me.

It's funny because you get five programmers in a room and start talking about high school computer science education, you'll get six answers as to what language we should be teaching. I can say that 8 years in a classroom has challenged every assumption I've ever made about that and there are situations where I've taught students 6502 in Z80 assembly language programming on retro computers. So I've been through the gamut of trying to teach students various things.

There's an example where we even do a little bit of prologue to solve a [inaudible] puzzle. When my students, who have been programming in Java for a while, see Ruby, they accuse me of cheating.

[laughter]

No, you can actually program like this professionally.

MAE: Love it.

CASEY: I used to teach, too and a lot of this resonates with me. I taught undergrad programming and I chose Ruby, too for a lot of the same reasons [chuckles] because it's approachable and syntax gets out of the way.

I just shared in the sidebar here, a diagram that it's a dependency graph and you need to know what a variable is before you can sort an array, you need to know res exists before you can sort them, and you need to know about objects before you can learn Rails because it's based on objects. It's like, what do you need to know before you can know the next thing? It's a huge, huge spider web of stuff.

But in other languages, if I had taught Java, for example, there's a whole another mess, web tangled ball of yarn at the top, which is the syntax getting in the way. Ruby gets a lot of this whole what you need to learn first, second, third. It's a lot cleaner in Ruby.

DAVE: Right. And I don't know that there's a perfect teaching language and I think that's irrelevant that there isn't. I think how many of us professionally program in the first language we ever learned? I think the real expertise as a software engineer comes when you know several different languages and can bring them to bear on different problems.

So really – and I think that the computer science, the teaching community is starting to get this right, that they're starting to concentrate on computational thinking, not the syntax of computer programming. If you look at the kind of the hierarchy of skills, there's things that we can teach elementary school kids about computational thinking, give them puzzles on how do you explain to your friend how to solve a maze, things like that.

Then there's the notion of computer programming. How do we get the curly braces in the right place? How do we take our ideas and translate them to the computer? And then above that, there's computer science concepts and then using computer science concepts, but in a much different way, is software engineering.

I'll have students that ask me, “Well, what's the difference between the two?” And computer science, I tell them it’s ultimately about like the performance of algorithms and you can get into almost philosophy of what is computable within the universe if you take computer science to the ultimate theoretical limit. And software engineering is about how do we use as various pieces to solve business problems? How do we work together as a team? And those are very different problems and it's one of the reasons why you can go to school for 20 years to get an advanced theoretical computer science degree, but it's possible to come out of a 12-week bootcamp and have skills that those people would never have.

CASEY: Well said.

MAE: Chelsea also is a teacher. And I'm curious, Chelsea, if you have any thoughts in this realm?

CHELSEA: I do. So I teach a couple classes at the University of Chicago. One of them is Python programming. I teach Python and then intermediate Python and I teach a mobile software development class.

It's funny that you mentioned that there's not one perfect programming language for teaching, because I found that to be true as well. I teach the Python programming class, for example, the point isn't specifically to learn the syntax of Python. The point is to learn principles of programming and the language is chosen basically because it's a relatively low overhead language for a lot of the reasons that Casey mentioned before. But there are limitations that come with that, too.

So Python, I think one of the strengths of Python for example, is that the core Python team makes explicit what I think a lot of other programming language core teams leave implicit in such a way that it is apparent for new learners to understand which is that any tool, any programming language, anything that we write, or read, or use in computer science was written with a perspective in mind because it was written by a person, or a group of people. The Python core team makes that perspective explicit in a number of ways and that perspective leans towards object-oriented programming, which works for a lot of our use cases.

But if we are attempting to teach principles of programming, it also makes sense for us to include functional programming, functional paradigms, and functional programming thinking and I end up needing to use a couple of workarounds to get to that in Python. We end up writing decorators.

A decorator is a sort of meta function in Python that you can pass other functions into and it can rack those functions in the same way that you would decorate a class in something like Ruby. It's not the kind of thing that you would write as an end user application developer. Most folks using Python don't write decorators. I'd hazard the guess in fact, that most people who write Python don't know what a decorator is really.

So students start a little bit confused about the decorator syntax and even Python core maintainers have asked me, “Why do you teach decorators in an introduction to programming like Python course?” The reason isn't that students are going to need to use decorators professionally, it's that decorators are one of the only access points in Python for teaching functional concepts.

We run into a – we handle the problem a little bit differently, or I handle it a little bit differently in mobile software development. So that course, similar to the Python programming course, is a platform specific way to sneak in general programming concepts. And I happen to think that mobile is a really great avenue for teaching a lot of things in computer science. Because before you're on a really small device, a lot of the algorithmic optimizations and data optimizations, that we talk to students about being so primarily important, are just not functionally relevant on a machine of the power that these students have.

At this point, a laptop is so powerful that telling them that they need to optimize this loop in order to make something run faster, they're not going to be able to notice a difference on their machine. But when we're talking about something like a mobile device, where there is a very real, very tangible limit on the amount of data that your application can take up, those things start to feel tangible to students in a way that makes them relevant and memorable. We end up using a couple of different programming languages in that course—we use Swift, we use tiny bit of Objective-C, and we use Kotlin.

CASEY: I love that idea that you can motivate programming a really efficient algorithm by putting it onto a mobile device. [chuckles] Sometimes in a class, I would bring that up as the example like, “Well, sometimes you'll need to make it very efficient, like a mobile,” but we never taught – in my experience, I had never taught mobile app development, but that's so motivated. It matters there.

CHELSEA: It helps. I find that mobile is a great avenue for teaching a lot of different things in computer science. So we end up not talking a lot about sourcing ethics for mobile devices, for example, is a very tangible way for students to understand some of the engineering ethics concerns that we have.

And mobile allows us to talk about accessibility in ways that are tangible for students, because the truth is that the vast majority of the design innovations that made mobile devices so important when they came out, came from accessibility companies, accessibility ideas, and accessibility products.

So if folks have heard me talk about mobile development before, then they've heard me say this, but the touch capacitive screen that made the iPhone so important that made it break the market for phones that existed when we were using T9 and keypads. That innovation and its precursors came from this company called FingerWorks that Apple acquired and the goal of that company was to enable human computer interaction for people who had lost their fine motor skills.

There are a lot of things in development that are like that, where the fact that everyone at this point who's got a mobile phone, considers it so indispensable to their life is a testament to the way that building something in an accessible fashion makes it more useful to everyone, not just the community that “needs the accessibility.”

MAE: Yes. Thank you for plugging accessibility as accessible for all.

DAVE: You mentioned being able to teach them performance and you're right, that is a challenging problem on modern machines. I just shared in the chat two different links to puzzles that I use in the classroom.

One is this Star 26 puzzle, which is the numbers 1 through 12 on little pegs and you have to arrange them in rows of four numbers, kind of like the Star of David and have it so each row adds up to 26 and there are several hundred solutions to that problem. I walk through my students solving that puzzle and the way we can write a program to find every solution to that is just try every – I was talking before about combinations and permutations. We can literally try every possible permutation of the numbers 1 through 12, and we just have a function to see if that's a solution. In a Ruby program—Ruby is not the fastest language—and it can chug through that in about 2 minutes on my laptop.

The second puzzle I shared is called Aristotle's Number puzzle and that has the numbers 1 through 19 that have to be ranged in a hexagonal, almost like a honeycomb pattern so that every row and column has to add up to 39. If you look at the size of the permutation of the number 1 through 19 – and I'll show that puzzle to the students and they'll be like, “Oh yeah, we can write a program to solve that,” now that they've written the first one. They write the program and not considering the size of the set of the number of permutations of 1 through 19 and they sit there and they wait for it to start to spit out answers and wait and wait.

A few minutes go by and nothing happens and then I ask them, “Well, how much bigger is that space?” So we talk about finding all the spaces and we realize that if we could solve permutations of 1 through 12 and about 2 minutes, the permutations of 1 through 19 will take over a 1,000 years. So we're like, “How can we get that down?” And we have to have a completely different approach to solve that problem.

CASEY: That is motivated. To make them feel the pain of waiting, even though – [overtalk]

DAVE: Right, right.

CASEY: It's probably, it's time bound, right?

DAVE: Right.

CASEY: To give them a…

CHELSEA: How long did the final programs end up taking?

DAVE: So you use a little bit of linear algebra and believe it or not, I can use this to – they can intuit the concepts of linear algebra from this puzzle. I'd have to talk you through it, but I can find the solution to that first puzzle in under 30 seconds and then using the same approach on the first Star 26 puzzle, we can bring that solution to find all the possible answers in under 6 seconds.

CHELSEA: Wow.

DAVE: So we go from blindly testing every possible permutation to a depth first search where we quickly eliminate entire branches of the problem, because we know that they don't solve a simpler version of the constraint. And I have a bunch of different puzzles that kind of fit that pattern of the first one, the obvious brute force solution solves it in a couple of minutes, the next one would take a 1,000 years. So we have to figure out a smarter way to solve it.

CHELSEA: I think that's really cool that you give them the opportunity to see, to feel the waiting process.

DAVE: Right.

CHELSEA: I think that those sorts of experiences end up allowing lessons like these to stick in a way that just explaining that this thing is going to take a long time sometimes doesn’t.

DAVE: Right. I should also – I'm talking a lot about my time in the classroom here. I need to give credit to the teacher that I work with. I'm not going to say his name because I didn't get permission to mention him beforehand. But I work with a math teacher at the high school where I work, where 8 years ago, he opened his classroom to me and we lecture together. Most of the time, I would just wander around and help students with lab time. But there are several topics that he just lets me stand in front of the class and give my ideas and give them extracurricular projects. It's just fantastic that he opened his classroom to me like that.

I volunteer in his classroom two mornings a week and that has led to things that I do at local elementary schools, local middle schools. And then last year during the pandemic, when a lot of teachers were looking for other ways to engage their students, I started to engage a lot more remotely and that finally got me some visibility at the county level where there's a Director of Computer Science Education and a few education facilitators that I'm working with now as well.

CHELSEA: Very cool. How did teaching remotely compare for you to teaching in-person?

DAVE: Oh my God, it was so hard. In addition to this—I got into this whole thing because I have 3 boys that are triplets and they're finally at the high school where I'm teaching. But when they were in kindergarten, I started to volunteer through a program called Watch D.O.G.S Dads at their local elementary school. So that's how I got into this whole thing.

So I taught in the classroom for years before COVID and I saw it, first of all, with my own kids in that there were classes that they did fine at, especially with me being able to tutor them in some math stuff, that worked well. But it was also the first year that all three of them were taking Spanish and that was just a really hard remote thing to try to take a foreign language remotely because you sit there and you watch the teacher and she's like, “Okay, I want everybody in the class to say Hola, but I want you to all be muted because I can't hear you all at the same time. Okay, say Hola. Okay, now Daniel, you unmute and say Hola. Daniel, Daniel, the button. Yeah, honey, the button to unmute. There you go.” It took an entire class to get every student to say Hola and it was not going to go well that year.

In the computer science class, most of the time it was okay because it was lab time once they’ve got a concept of just sitting and thinking in front of a computer. In some ways, it was even easier because they can share their screen with me and stuff like that. But there's one topic that I love to teach. It's like I love to teach recursion to the high schoolers because the high school age, you teach them recursion and when they get it, it's like I taught them one of the secrets of the universe.

Normally, in the classroom, I see their faces light up and their eyes were like I've made the connection. They've understood it. At least they understand it in the minute. I'm sure you've all been there where you understand something and then tomorrow, it's a dim memory and you have to grasp for it again. But they understood it in the moment and remotely, I could not make that decision, or make that connection. I walked out of my office and went in to see my wife in her office across the house and I was just like dejected. I was like, “That was the worst teaching experience I ever had,” because I covered the material, but I had no connection with anybody. I could've just been doing it to a blank screen.

My county did not force students to have their cameras on, which is probably a good thing. But at the same time, very few students had their cameras on. So there were very few faces to make that connection to as you're talking. So oftentimes, I was just speaking to a blank screen and a microphone; I could have been singing in the shower for all I knew. There was no connection.

CHELSEA: Wow.

CASEY: Yeah. It's unnerving. I've been teaching online this year, too and when everyone's camera's off, it is unnerving.

DAVE: Yeah.

CASEY: I feel like I'm literally talking to myself. But often, I'll ask people to turn the video camera on and when I ask people to even give me visual feedback, even one person can completely transform my experience.

DAVE: Oh, right.

CASEY: Well, just one person. But I don't know that I do that with kids. I feel like you're stuck where you are.

DAVE: Right. Especially there's – not that any of that's happened in my county, but there are situations where students have been disciplined for posters they have up in their bedroom and stuff like that because it was now a school event. So I understand why as a high school student, I wouldn't want the school intruding into my personal space like that.

One good thing to come out of the remoteness of the pandemic. In Loudoun, we went to virtual very suddenly towards the end of the year before last. So the last few months of school was all remote and we weren't expecting to do that. It was one day, “Okay, we're going out on break,” and then all of a sudden, “No, you're not going back.” So students picked their classes for the next school year remotely and our percentage of women in the class went up and there's no real, like I haven't heard anybody doing studies on that.

At the Computer Science Teachers Association, there was anecdotal evidence that that was true across counties everywhere and the general thinking is that students pick their classes without that peer pressure of people being like, “Ooh, you're going to take that?” So the percentage of women taking computer science classes in high school went up.

And that's always been a mystery to me because we do events at the elementary school level and boys and girls are equally good and equally interested up until 5th grade, which is the end of elementary school. Then I see students again in the middle school when I do events in 7th grade and we already have that 70/30 split. It's like, where are all those girls that a couple of years ago really loved this stuff. They're just all kinds of weird peer pressure and there's no one cause that I can contribute to it. But then by the high school, where on bad years, were down to 20% women in a class. This year, we're up to 33, which is better than normal, but we can still do a lot.

CHELSEA: I wonder whether some of it would have also had to do with somebody’s experience in the class. So if you're taking a class remotely, you're not in this class surrounded by potentially people you don't know, people that you're not spending a lot of time with, people that you're not friends with. That's the kind of thing that I think would really influence the way that a middle schooler would select classes.

DAVE: Yeah.

CHELSEA: I remember being at that age and wanting to be in the classes that my friends were in.

DAVE: Right. Yeah. In fact, I have students that I've talked to, there's a little bit of perception there that that's the geeky subject, I don't want to take that, or girls are more academically interested earlier than boys are. So they want to start language classes a year earlier because that's a requirement and statistics bear that out. This is an optional extracurricular class and so, they're all kinds of reasons. There's no one root because that I can point to and say, “That's the thing we need to fix.”

MAE: Well, with the academic orientation, it's funny that you brought that up because when you described that about the online trend, I was like, “Well, I mean, people are.” It's pretty clear that having these skills will position you better and that is something that girls tend to be pretty attuned to. If we're talking in terms of a gender binary and if we're talking in terms of [laughs] total platitudes about gender stuff.

CASEY: I had some peers in undergrad who were really gatekeeping me as a developer. I had done some community college classes in high school. I was a total nerd. My parents supported me in doing it. It was great. I knew programming, but in freshman year, people said, “Are you a programmer? Here, I know how to tell if you are a programmer. What's recursion?” And I don't know, somehow, I was like, I got it already. I knew recursion years ago.

DAVE: Right.

CASEY: I was like, “I don't know how to answer this question.” So I clearly wasn't a programmer until I could prove I knew of recursion to this undergrad boy that was trying to gatekeep me out of it. Any amount of pressure like that, even if it's more subtle, to the women I imagine is even stronger.

DAVE: Yeah, and the gatekeeping thing is weird. The first year I was teaching, I saw a boy in one of the classes say to a girl that oh, I think it's cute that a girl is learning how to code and she beamed like it was a compliment. And I realized this is going to be tougher to figure out than I originally thought, because this mixes up in the high school dynamic of who has a crush on who and who wants a compliment from whom. At the time it happened, I sat there and just didn't know how to respond to it and since then, whenever I've seen something like that happen again, I actually have a little bit prepared where I'm like, “Well, actually the first computer programmers were women.” And I have a whole little keynote presentation ready to go that has – [overtalk]

MAE: Yes!

DAVE: Pictures of women in front of ENIACs switching the wires around and Grace Hopper is there in her admiral’s uniform and a whole little thing to talk about how this was originally seen as programming was kind of that secretarial pool, the original world of computers. But when computers were people and the computers were just a step above the secretarial typist pool and that as people figured out oh, actually this is kind of interesting, kind of like guys dominated. And how they kind of attribute that in the 80s as video games became popular and first-person shooters ruled the world, that computers became the toy that was in the boy's bedroom, not the girl's bedroom and that's where a lot of our gender bias today can come from. So I try to make them aware of that.

It's funny, I originally took the opportunity to volunteer in high school as a completely selfish reason to see what high school peer pressure was going to be like for my own kids these days. Because I grew up when breakfast club was a reality. My high school was clique upon clique and it's almost encouraging that that doesn't seem to exist as much today. There's, I think a lot more acceptance than I see in the high school.

CHELSEA: That’s interesting to hear. I wouldn't have… My experience of high school was very similar to your experience of high school and not only was it my experience, but it's also what I have seen reflected in—I'm not particularly partial to movies, or television that focus on high schoolers, but any movies, or television that I have seen that is focused on the high school age, or even the middle school age, that has essentially been the expectation for what it is like for students to be in school.

DAVE: Now I have to admit the students that I'm largely exposed to are a special group in that our first-year computer science, the intro class is a completely voluntary thing. It's not a requirement. And then the AP class is a volunteer thing again, an extracurricular, or not an extracurricular, but an elective.

CASEY: Elective.

DAVE: Yeah. So they're opting in twice. If they get involved in anything I'm doing extracurricularly with the competitions, or the events that I hold at my local library, they're opting in a third time. So those students are a rare group and they seem to be much more accepting of each other. I can't say that that's true in your typical English class for instance, but I do have geeks, jocks, nerds, everybody all in one room and they get along.

MAE: While we're on the topic of computer science education. Upcoming is the Computer Science Education Week, Dave and I understand you have a bit to tell us about.

DAVE: Yeah, this is how I actually got involved in this whole thing. I mentioned that I was volunteering at my son's elementary school and the first year I was just as overly enthusiastic parent who was kind of disappointed that they had a computer lab, but they only seem to teach 20th century office worker skills. I volunteered to try to teach something and “Well, we can install stuff on the computers. We don't have any curriculum.”

Well, the next year was the first annual Computer Science Education Week and there was this curriculum called the Hour of Code. The goal was to get every student in the country to have one hour of computer programming experience. I mentioned that to the technology resource teacher and she helped me get the principal involved in it and we ran the Computer Science Education Week with all the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders at the elementary school.

And then that got me involved at volunteering at the high school level and since then, we have been having our high school students every year go back to elementary schools and help teach the Computer Science Education Week. So we have high schoolers going back to the elementary schools that they went to helping their old teachers teach computer science. And – [overtalk]

MAE: Oh, I love that!

DAVE: It's amazing how much they accomplish in an hour. If you go take a look at code.org, or cseducationweek.org, or even hourofcode.org, there are lessons that take about an hour and need nothing more than a browser. My favorite is the one from the first year that just uses the game characters from Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies and you have to write a computer program that tells a zombie how to get through the maze to a flower.

So it starts out, you have to tell the zombie to move forward, and then move forward and turn right, and then move forward and if the path in front of you is blocked, turn left. Oh, but if the path to your left is blocked, turn right. And there's this whole – steps you through the algorithm to solve a maze and at the end of the class, you tell the students that just doesn't solve that maze, that can solve any maze and it blows their mind.

[laughter]

The schools are always looking for volunteers to help teach that stuff. So consider this a call to action for the audience, reach out to a local elementary school, a local middle school, even a high school, find the math teacher, or whatever teacher that's teaching some coding aspects, find out if they're doing an Hour of Code event, and volunteer to help. Because it is almost a stereotype that elementary school teachers walk into the classroom and are like, “Oh, don't ask me to program. I don't know anything about programming. I can't even figure out how to use the printer.”

That's not a great mindset to be teaching our elementary school kids because they eat this material up. They think it's fun. Let's get them encouraged with it. So I've been using other students to do that for years and it's to great success. I now have students that are arriving at the high school looking forward to this event because they remember it from when they were elementary school students.

CHELSEA: That's cool.

MAE: Yeah. I love that. I've done an Hour of Code before. We did a Scratch thing, but it was Star Wars themed.

DAVE: Yeah, I remember that one.

MAE: I wore my hair in buns. It was really fun.

DAVE: Yeah. The great thing is over the years, they've built out more and more curriculum. The problem with the first year is that advanced, like 5th and 6th graders, especially by the time they'd done it a couple of years, they were bored with it. Like, “We've done this before.” Oh, I have a great story about that I'll get to in a second. But then the 1st and 2nd graders would come and number one, sometimes they had trouble reading it. Number two, it's only at the end of the 2nd-grade year that they have the concept of they're looking top down on this screen, but they can't see it from the zombie’s eyes where the zombie has to move forward and then turn left and then move forward.

So the Star Wars curriculum has BB-8 that can move up, down, left, or right. So they take away the having to see it through the zombie’s eyes.

MAE: Right, yeah.

DAVE: And then at the kindergarten, 1st grade level, they have it with just up, down, left, and right arrows so you drag the arrows out. So now they don't even have to read. But then at the 5th-grade level, they have one based on Frozen where you're ice skating and you can do angles like 45 degrees, 30 degrees, 90 degrees. So there's a lot more motion available in that and almost spirograph like effects. So there's something for everybody there. It's just fantastic. It's stuff that's geared towards educational level, stuff that's geared towards gender, just all kinds of material there. You could almost get a computer science education for free off of code.org.

So I mentioned that I have two great stories about teaching 5th graders. The first year we did the Hour of Code when they complete the lesson, they can hit Show Code and it shows them the JavaScript code that would do what they just did in terms of move forward, turn left, all that stuff.

Well, I showed them the code I'd written for a game that played Connect 4. So we played Connect 4, I let the computer beat the whole class, and then I showed them the code. I was like, “Look, there's a lot more of it, but it's the same stuff you were just writing,” and we broke it down into one little and I showed them how six lines of code work and I said, “All the computer's doing is it looks –” there's only seven possible moves in Connect 4. So it looks at all possible seven moves and imagines what if it happened? Well, after that move, there's seven possible moves. So there's only 49 possible moves at that level. After that, there is only so many other moves and we keep – and I said, “So the computers just look seven moves ahead, sees who wins and loses, and decides I'm going to go that way down this whole tree.” And this 5th-grade girl said, “Oh, so computers aren't smart. They're just dumb really, really fast.”

MAE: Oh my gosh. I love that.

DAVE: And that quote, I use that quote all the time.

And then I had another student who came in a few years later and she was like, “I'm getting tired of this. I don't want to drag the buttons. I want to type the code like the big kids do.” So with one of the high school students in another one of the Hour of Code lessons, she was typing out JavaScript and we got a when she had to do move forward, move forward, move forward, she was like, “There should be an easier way to do this.” So she just tried writing “move forward” and in the empty parentheses she put the number 3 and it worked. She was like, “Awesome.” So. [chuckles]

MAE: Yes!

DAVE: And it's just great to see students like that that you're encouraging them to push the boundaries without fear.

CHELSEA: Well, and kudos to the developer who wrote the API that had move forward where you could put 3 in it.

DAVE: Right.

[laughter]

CHELSEA: I wish I had experience doing any – honestly, AWS integration anything.

[laughter]

If it were intuitive, I would cry with joy.

[laughter]

So at the level that I – I teach Masters students and at that point, I don't have as many fun things for them to program, but I make them program things like they write a testing framework, they modify a testing framework that I've written, and then they do a similar thing for a data analysis framework similar to pandas if you use Python, or something like that.

But the goal is very much what you were describing earlier with showing folks that Connect 4 code insofar as that I want them to understand that the libraries that they're using on a day-to-day basis aren't magic. There's not something happening in there that the fundamental concept would be unfamiliar to them if they were to hear about it. It's effectively maybe more complex and maybe more fiddly versions of things that they are writing and at some level, there's sort of this Pareto principle thing going on, where you can get 80% of the functionality of a lot of APIs with 20% of the code. Provided you're willing to make some assumptions, like people know how to use it and they're not going to put it in the wrong thing, and that kind of thing.

DAVE: Right.

CHELSEA: When you're introducing, like trying to make helpful error messages, that's way more code in most of these things than the happy path implementation is. So it's cool to see them implement those things and start to realize that a lot of the code that they use on a day-to-day basis, at least from the happy path perspective is not different from what they write themselves.

DAVE: Right.

CHELSEA: So you mentioned that you teach 1st and 2nd graders, 5th graders, 7th graders. Did I get that right?

DAVE: I've had done some stuff at the middle school and let me tell you, the middle school, my favorite thing to do there is to walk in as a guest lecturer with several teachers that I know. Because when you walk in for the class—and I tend to bring in wooden puzzles, or little encryption toys and stuff like that and I bring them in in this little suitcase that looks like the suitcase that guy in the Harry Potter movies that the animal pops out of? You walk into a classroom with something that looks like that and you have everybody's attention like the students are silent, waiting for you to open that thing and see what's in it. And teachers are always like, “I can't believe how attentive they were for you.”

But I can say that several years ago, pre-COVID, I ran a afterschool robotics club for middle school and where once a week we would spend an hour and a half building out this robot with the VEX Robotics team stuff. That was a little hard having to work with the same group of kids regularly on an afterschool extracurricular thing because there were several students who were there because they knew they loved robotics and you see them a few years later at the high school doing stuff with the robotics club. There were kids that were there because their mom can't pick them up until 4:30 and “You're going to do something after school that looks educational, you're going to do that and they didn't want to be there.”

The other coach and I are not formal teachers in the county. We're there as volunteer coaches. So these students. I don't know if they instinctually know that, or what, but there are disruptive students. That like 7th grade age where they're like, eh just so I've gotten to this point where like, if it's any long committal thing like that I have fun with them until 5th grade and then I'm like, “I'll see y'all in high school. You'll go have – I have some stuff to work out.”

[laughter]

But I do like to volunteer as a guest teacher in the classroom maybe four times a year with teachers that I know. That way you have a good rapport with the students. They remember you from elementary school. They're going to be happy to see you when they get the high school. Anyway, that's what my experience at the middle school levels become.

CASEY: Very cool. If someone listening wants to guest lecture at a school, what could that look like for them? If they call the front desk at the elementary school, who are they going to talk to, and then who, and how do they meet them?

DAVE: I have the best results reaching out to the teacher that I know is teaching the curriculum. And if you go to your school's website, there is probably going to be a list of all the faculty at the school and the subjects teach. Computer science topics are generally under the math curriculum. If you can't find exactly who's teaching it, talk to the department head, and they'll put you in touch with who's teaching it. Because that teacher is going to be the one that can say, “I have exactly the thing I can use you for.” The further I go up that chain, the harder it is as an entry point. But if you start grassroots, you can move up that chain.

So the whole reason I'm at the high school is that the first year I did this at the elementary level, we got some local press for it and the elementary school principal was like, “This is fantastic.” And then that high school principal was like, “I want to know more about that.” So that's how that happened, but I always have the best success just reaching out to a teacher and saying, “Hey, I have some stuff prepared. I'd love to volunteer as a guest in your classroom.”

It's even branched out from math teachers. I have a curriculum on computers in World War II that I did at the middle school level, when they were learning about World War II. My sons, who are now in 9th grade, I've talked to one of their world history teachers about talking about the development of math from a historical perspective. Like, I don't know if you've read the book, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.

MAE: No.

DAVE: But that, oh, fantastic book. It's called Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea and it's about the history of where the number zero comes from.

MAE: I have heard some of this, but I wasn't familiar with the book. Yeah.

DAVE: Yeah, because zero's kind of a contentious topic.

MAE: Yeah.

DAVE: Because counting is a natural thing when I'm counting my sheep in my farm. I have 5 sheep. I have 6 sheep. Oh, I'm giving you 2 sheep. You can almost even end up with negative numbers making sense because I gave you 3 sheep kind of thing. So you can – it's kind of weird that I have negative 3 sheep, but you owe me 3 sheep. Somebody can understand, but I have 0 sheep. Well, I also have 0 pigs. Why does that matter? So it was like a huge philosophical debate: is 0 a number we need to consider in math?

When 0 was introduced to cultures that used something like a Roman numeral based counting system, it didn't make sense. You think about counting in Roman numerals, you have the number 5. What do you do to make 6? You put a 1 in front of it, or a 1 after it. You put a 1 before it to make 4. Well, so if I have the number 5 and I put a 0 in front of it. 0 means nothing. But now you're telling me it's ten times as much. It's 50. What? But I put as 0 in front of it! So it didn't make a lot of sense to people where that was their mindset and it was a big cultural shift. And that book goes into that.

MAE: I must have talked to someone about this book because it was sheep examples and it was something also about that before numbers, people would take rocks and when the sheep went out, they would put a rock for each one and when the sheep came back in, they would then move that pile of rocks. So even – anyway, sheep counting [laughs] is a lot of base math apparently.

DAVE: [laughs] Right, right. So, and I have two great examples that I'm dying to use with this world history teacher who's currently on subjects of Mesopotamia and stuff. There is an artifact that is in this collection and it's labeled as Plimpton 322. This is a clay tablet that has numbers in, I can't remember the counting system, but it's based on a stick pressed into the tablet and the orientation of the stick represents what the number is.

After decoding this tablet, they realized that contains a bunch of Pythagorean triples, which if you remember the Pythagorean theorem, 3, 4, and 5 are a Pythagorean triple. So it's basically any three integers that can be the sides of a triangle. This tablet contains a bunch of Pythagorean triplets 1,500 years before Pythagoras was around and this is in Mesopotamia. That's like, where did that knowledge come from? That's just amazing that such a thing exists. So I have a bunch of references like that I'm using with this curriculum I'm working up to present to a world history class.

MAE: Love it.

CHELSEA: That seems like a great opportunity to drive home the idea that a lot of the things that we attribute to a singular person having invented, or discovered it, it probably wasn't necessarily that way. Even in the cases where we attribute one person, it was often a collaborative effort and even in the cases where we're attributing that one collaborative effort, a lot of ideas sort of materialize in several different places around the same time period.

DAVE: Right.

MAE: I know, it's so cool.

DAVE: You think Newton and Leibniz both came up with calculus at the same time, apparently pretty independently, but it's because the world was ready for such a thing to exist. We had all the foundational knowledge in place.

CASEY: I was just in Cancun last week for a wedding, which was really nice, and then we went on a trip. The Mayans apparently had zero and they represented it with an empty shell.

[chuckles]

MAE: Ah.

CASEY: Oh, this is a theme for me lately. Zero.

[laughter]

DAVE: Let me tell you something. It sounds like it would be a dry, boring book, but Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea is definitely worth the read.

CHELSEA: I mean, and now we're back to the point in programming where people don't want to have Nolan programs, so.

DAVE: Right.

[laughter]

CHELSEA: There might be something to this we really need zero idea?

DAVE: Well, then there's the whole debate around imaginary numbers. That's a whole interesting branch of mathematics as well.

CASEY: This reminds me of a line I almost said earlier where, when you're learning programming, you go from caring about programming for the computer’s sake, like algorithmic efficiency, and then on the next level of complexity is programming for people who are way more complex. The developers developing after you, maybe you, and the people you're developing for. They're differently complex, but practically, in all the jobs I've worked in, the algorithmic complexity is not the most complex one that takes the most time, it’s the hardest for problems space for it.

DAVE: That's one of the things that I tell students about when they're learning Java and they ask me about other programming languages like, “Well, why do other programming languages exist?” And I say, “Well, it's not so much for the computer because the computer will run any old thing we tell it to.” The different languages exist because it's how humans use to express thoughts and – [overtalk]

CHELSEA: That's right.

DAVE: Often where it's documentation for other humans.

CHELSEA: People want to express their perspective and if their perspective differs from a programming language that they see out there, they write their own.

DAVE: Right.

MAE: [laughs] I explain programming to non-programmers often as, or in describing coming into the industry, I thought it was going to be way more math like and really, I found it to be creative writing. A lot of people think that other people's code is bad because it's not how their brain works, or how they would've arranged it. And so, it is this thing about, is your brain most like the other brains, or are you able to predict what the other brains will want you to have said. [laughs].

DAVE: Right.

CHELSEA: Right. And we end up spending a lot of time reformatting code over things like that.

MAE: Yeah.

CHELSEA: So I give this workshop it's about technical debt and what technical debt action is and what that term means because folks, everyone sort of knows what technical debt feels like, but then the way that we end up conceptualizing it is a little bit different to that.

One of the things that happens a lot of times, if you give people a free week to refactor and reduce tech debt in the code base, what you get is a fair number of code renovations where what happened was somebody didn't like the way somebody else wrote it so they wrote it their way. Right now, it does the same thing and right now, the maintenance load is the same as it was before. Best case scenario, it's the same as it was before. Worst case scenario, you erased a bunch of context the team had about the way it worked.

The fundamental difference is a preferential one, rather in a functional one, rather than a documentation one, or a context one and it is shockingly easy to fall victim to that. It is extremely easy to feel like you are reducing the maintenance load in the code base when you're not because your personal perspective aligns by better with the way you're trying to write it than the way the code is aligned at that time.

MAE: Yeah.

DAVE: Yeah. I have students that in the first few weeks of programming get really frustrated learning to program, learning their syntax is wrong, their semicolons in the wrong place and they blame themselves. I'm like, “Don't. This isn't you; the computer is the stupid one in this relationship. You have to be smart for both of you.” And it's kind of like writing poetry for an obsessive-compulsive English teacher who is expecting where every semicolon has to be in the right place.

MAE: [laughs] Oh. And to go back a moment, though, I do want to put in a plug because Chelsea recently can that workshop at RubyConf and when that comes out and is available, definitely check it out.

DAVE: Excellent.

CHELSEA: Oh yeah, I did. If you have a RubyConf ticket, by the way that recording is available as of today.

MAE: Ooh.

CHELSEA: Yeah. It'll be on YouTube at some point too. But I had a teacher who expressed a very similar thing that you did, Dave insofar is that if we were having trouble getting something, he was very, very quick and he said that he did this in his programming job as well. He would blame the UI typically and I find myself doing that a lot. In particular, when it comes to ops type stuff. [chuckles] if I'm messing with ops, I'm like, “It's not my fault that I don't understand why this dropdown only has one item in it,” and stuff like that.

It's funny that you – and I'll bring this back as well that you mentioned earlier elementary school teachers talking about how like, “Well, I can't be expected to know anything about code. I can barely operate the printer.” When you said that, I thought to myself, “I mean, I'm a professional software engineer and there are days that I can't operate that printer.”

DAVE: Yeah. That's a hardware problem. I'm a software – [ianudble 56:27]

CHELSEA: I know.

[laughter]

Like, I'm a mechanic, that don't mean I'm a good driver and it certainly doesn't mean that I can read the mind of a designer who I never met, who released something 20 years ago that now sits in a break room somewhere. I think it’s very different skillsets.

CASEY: And that designer probably didn't think it was great either; they had constraints.

MAE: Right. Totally.

CASEY: But there are people who will defend the design. Maybe they don't see the fuller picture here.

MAE: They didn't take Dave Bock's lesson of how to not get too attached to an idea.

CASEY: Ah! Love it.

CHELSEA: Actually, I did need to ask you that about that, Dave because you mentioned you teach a number of different age groups, you do a number of different guest lectures. You go and you volunteer at the local library. I imagine that for a lot of our listeners would love to be able to give back to their communities in addition to their full-time job. But like you, they got kids, they got things going on and there's logistical challenges associated with that.

I'm interested in hearing a little bit about how you manage maybe your time, but in my experience, limiting ingredient is really more energy than it is time. So I'm curious to as to how you approach that.

DAVE: Wow. It's not like I have more time in my day than anybody else. I just – [overtalk]

MAE: Especially with triplets.

DAVE: Right. It's just how I manage it. If anything, because of the triplets, I'm used to having to have a higher energy level. But first of all, for years, I didn't watch television at all. Not a single thing on TV at all. Like I missed probably a decade of cultural awareness and movies and everything. First of all, because I had kids, but also because I was volunteering in the classroom and that kind of stuff.

But I have to say that the curriculum that I'm building with my students, that effort back every year. Every year, I'm like, “Oh, you know what, that's a neat little puzzle. I tend to do stuff with a lot of little wooden puzzles and I'll be like, “Oh, that's a neat puzzle. I'm going to add that to the curriculum,” and “Oh, that's just like that puzzle.”

So I mentioned earlier, the 26 puzzle and the Aristotle’s Number puzzle, those are two puzzles I saw at completely different times, but similar gimmick, different scales. By the same token, if you've ever seen the Cracker Barrel triangle peg jumping thing.

MAE: Oh yeah.

DAVE: The peg solitaire. Well, that also exists in what they call English solitaire, which is marbles on a board and there's about 33 marbles doing the same thing, like a cross arrangement. Again, similar jumping mechanic, completely different size space problem. So I keep finding puzzles like that in pairs. I found a bunch of board games that are like this and each one illustrates some concept along computational thinking and every year, I have a fresh crop of new students so every time I add a puzzle to it, it just keeps glomming onto the complete set of curriculum I've developed. So it's not like I've spent tons of time developing this curriculum. I've spent a little bit of time over 8 years building it out and it's evergreen because there are always more students to learn.

So how do I manage my time? I could not tell you that I have any secret sauce. I can tell you that prior to COVID, since about 2007, I have been working remotely on and off and not having a commute really gave me time, back in my day, to do stuff. The job I have now, they treasure the time that I spend in the classroom.

In fact, my last several jobs have really supported me in this in the fact that I work from home, I'm 5 minutes from my high school, I can schedule a class on my calendar and it's just like a meeting. I can disappear for an hour and come back and it's just like I had a meeting in the middle of my day with anybody. So it really gives me that flexibility to volunteer at the school. In fact, for a year and a half, I had an hour and a half commute on a good day and for that year and a half, I was not in the school nearly as much because I couldn't get to it.

So I think being able to work remotely is a big draw of my time. Not spending time parked in front of the TV, which admittedly has changed. I found a few guilty pleasures in television shows lately.

CHELSEA: Ooh, what are you watching?

MAE: Yes!

DAVE: Oh my God. I am late to Ted Lasso.

MAE: I haven't seen yet!

[laughter]

CHELSEA: What!

[laughter]

MAE: Why have you not seen?!

DAVE: Oh, oh God. I’ve got to tell you. I'm not going to spoil anything because I want everybody to watch this show.

A friend of mine was raving about this show in terms of its postmodernism and he's off on a tangent describing that he predicted a show of this kind of non-ironic sentimentality and virtue ethics years ago because of the way the society was going.

When I first heard about this show, I was like, “Let me get this straight, a show about an overly positive, self-righteous character that is a soccer coach? Okay, I'm not a sports guy so I don't care about soccer and everything I've seen and heard about this guy, it sounds like it's Ned Flanders from the Simpsons. Why am I going to watch a show where Ned Flanders is the main character of that show?”

[laughter]

So I was dead set against a show forever and then somebody said to me—I was at a gathering of a bunch of friends recently and he said to me— “You're absolutely right. You need to watch it anyway.” So then I don't know, a month, or so ago, my wife and I were watching something. We were dead tired after a long day, sitting down for dinner. She wanted to watch something on TV and we were like, “Well, we could start the Foundation series. or we could watch the Dune movie,” and we're like, “No, both are too heavy to get into now.”

And Apple TV showed us a big flag thing for Ted Lasso and I was like, “Sure, I'll watch it right now. I don't feel like watching anything and I won't get committed to it.” 15 minutes into it, I'm watching it and I'm thinking, “Yeah, this isn't for me. Yeah, this is not the show I want to watch.” And then there was a line. I'm going to say the line—it doesn't give anything away. But this Ned Flander's type, after making somebody angry with his at first what comes across is toxic positivity turns to somebody else and says, “Wow. If he thinks he hates us now wait till we win him over?” And that line kind of touched me, like he's not just some random one-dimensional Saturday Night Live character failing up; he's doing this with intent and this is a decision to be this way.

MAE: Mm.

DAVE: And all of a sudden, the character had all this depth and with that one line I was hooked. And then in another episode, he was talking about his role as coach and a reporter was interviewing him—another one liner that doesn't give anything away. A reporter was interviewing him about the loss of a soccer game and he says, “I don't care if my team win wins, or loses,” and the reporter thought that was incredulous. He's like, “You don't care if they win, or lose?” And he's like, “It's not my job to care if they win, or lose. It's their job as the players to win, or lose. It's my job to make them the best players, the best people that they can beat today,” and I was like, “Wow.”

The show revolves around this character who is just an upstanding human being at every point, unironically, and how he influences the lives around him and influences them just through his existence to be better people and how all this chaos around him and they all become aligned. It's just such an awesome show. I really recommend it.

When we watch a TV show, my wife and I have a commitment that we don't binge watch it. I hate binge watching a show because later on I'm like, “Oh, I don't remember that thing.” So we're watching one episode night, or two and it gives me the space to think about that episode and it's just such a rich, rich thing to think about it. It's really something that makes you think about your philosophy of life.

CASEY: Oh, maybe I have to watch this now, don’t I?

MAE: I know! That’s how I feel. [laughs]

CASEY: It also sounds like – [overtalk]

DAVE: Sometime when you're brain dead and don't feel like watching anything, give the first episode a shot.

CHELSEA: Yes.

DAVE: Let me know what happens.

CASEY: It also sounds like the first contemporary male role model I might like.

CHELSEA: Oh, totally.

CASEY: My favorites for me are Dick Van Dyke, Bill Nye the science guy, Weird Al, and a lot of people from Star Trek, but there's none in the last 10 years. No one I can name who in media has been a good, positive male role model other than Ted Lasso, apparently.

DAVE: I really think you'll like this character. I can't imagine who wouldn't. You would have to be the most cynical puppy kicker to hate the show.

MAE: I definitely want to watch it. As someone that can be taken as a Pollyanna person about other people's lives [chuckles] and not my own, I have chosen a lot of things about being positive and honest, and it can get lost and be seen as naïve. So I really like what you've described.

I get extra positive by looking at the negative, like I can hold contradictions and human foibles and failures really, really well. So that doesn't make me now not want to deal with that person. So yeah, I'll be curious to see what Ted Lasso has to say about all kinds of things.

DAVE: Yeah, definitely recommend that show. This'll date me when I talk about how I haven't watched TV for a decade. The last characters that I felt this kind of passion about and they were the antiheroes was the – God, I can't remember the character's name now. But it was on the TV show, The Shield, which was basically a bunch of cops as antiheroes about how they had come to terms with, they could not just be forces of good in the world at sometimes they had to be the force of least evil and the mechanism that they had to do that and they were at times, real antiheroes.

Then the early days, I only watched the first two seasons of Dexter, the serial murderer with code. So real antihero kind of TV shows. I just have not watched a lot of TV and then to land on Ted Lasso is such a breath of fresh air. I can see why, especially during the height of the pandemic, that show resonated with a lot of people.

MAE: Oh my gosh. I have so many things to say to [chuckles] what you just said about the being least evil and a lot. Also Chelsea, you brought this up about how many things happen through – [overtalk]

DAVE: Vic Mackey. That's the name of the cop, Vic Mackey.

MAE: Oh, cool, cool, cool.

DAVE: Sorry.

MAE: No, no.

[laughter]

How many people contribute to whatever it is and a lot of the vexing problems, like the pharmaceutical industry, it gets really complicated when you start to see there is no one lever and a lot of people do feel, in those positions, that they are being the least evil.

So many more topics, but we might be closer to the end of our session. I don't know if anybody else has any other zingers they want to put in before we do our reflections?

CASEY: Yeah. I think we're out of zingers for now.

[laughter]

We could come up with more.

All right, let's do reflections.

I happened to have one already, I can go first. Usually, I take a second to think of one. From earlier in the episode, I noticed a couple examples we had about how do you motivate students to learn about algorithmic efficiency and we had two examples.

One is Chelsea has mobile apps need the faster algorithms and that makes sense. [laughs] If I knew mobile app development enough to teach it, I think I would start there, too. And then Dave had the great algorithm, like a simple wooden puzzle and then a complex wooden puzzle, and then moment in the middle where you pause, they're trying to run the simple naïve algorithm. That's so motivating. Help them feel the problem in the mobile app sense, help them see how slowly it would load before you make it refactored.

In my background in education, computer science, it was definitely algorithms first and I was always like, “Why, though?”

[laughter]

No one answered that at any point, really. [laughs] I was never that motivated to learn algorithms and I still didn't study them, but I might in these situations.

MAE: I have participated in Hour of Code and I did call my local school, but it kind of fell through and so, I really appreciate just getting reminded about coming more involved in my community. So thanks for bringing that, Dave.

CHELSEA: For my reflection, I tend to have a strong recency bias right after I'm thinking about things and so, the thing that I'm remembering the most right now is our discussion of the television shows.

But what I think I'll take away from that is the comment from your friend, Dave, around having predicted that something like this would have its time, which reminds me of our discussion earlier in the conversation about the world being ready for something being a larger factor in when something gets developed than a fictitious individual progenitor of that thing, the way that calculus was.

I find myself wondering right now, what in our field, in programming, in tech in general, what is the industry, is the world, are the people that we serve, what are they ready for that I expect will see not because some genius comes along, but because that's what our field needs and I don't know what it is, but I'll be thinking about that.

DAVE: Ooh. Wow, that's real food for thought there.

MAE: Mm hm.

CHELSEA: I try, I try.

DAVE: That's kind of like – [overtalk]

MAE: I knew Chelsea’s was going to be really good, which is why I went first. [laughs]

CHELSEA: Oh gosh.

DAVE: That's kind of the William Gibson quote of “The future is here—it's just not widely distributed yet.” I used that in another curriculum we'll talk about someday.

CASEY: I hope the answer to that is inclusion because that's a big thing – [overtalk]

MAE: Yes!

CASEY: And it's not being applied nearly enough.

DAVE: Yeah.

MAE: Totally.

CASEY: I hope that's what we get next. That's the next upgrade I'm looking for in teamwork OS, whatever.

DAVE: So I can tell you that I've been at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference the last 2 years that it's been virtual and inclusion is a big topic there, even dominating discussion about pedagogy and teaching algorithms. People are talking more about how do we increase representation in the classroom.

So my takeaway—and I actually did not realize it until the last second when Chelsea mentioned what I said was my superpower at the beginning was me sitting here talking about Ted Lasso is exactly an example of that. Because I was committed that I was not going to be interested in a show with Ned Flanders as a character and now here I am saying, “Everybody needs to watch this.” So that's a little example of I'm not wedded to that evaluation and I revisited it and moved on.

But before she said that, the thing I was considering about my takeaway is how much even after a long, tiring day at work when I'm sitting here thinking, “Oh, okay, now I have to do this interview. It's going to be an hour and a half and then I can take a break.” Whenever I talk about this stuff, it is invigorating and revitalizing. I am just so passionate about this stuff that it gives me so much energy. It recharges me. So I'm going to try to take that point in some useful direction.

CASEY: I want to comment on that last thing you said. I was thinking earlier, what gives you energy so you can volunteer more, Dave Bock? And then your answer was kind of volunteering gives you energy.

MAE: Mm hm.

CASEY: You didn't quite say that, but that's what I picked up from it. So anyone who wants to get the enough energy to volunteer may be powering through and just getting started and trying it once could be enough to get you started and if it energizes you in the end anyway. It might not. You could try it, though.

DAVE: Yeah. I never expected it to be this kind of fuel. I’ll have one last parting thought on that in that when I hold events at the library, it's often without any real agenda, except, “The end of the semester's coming up, come to the library and I'll help you with our end of the semester projects, or even if you just want to explore something else, I'll be there, to” – I'll have students that come with random ideas and we just sit there and just my presence can give them the encouragement to do something they'll be like, “I don't know, let's do that together.”

I can get so involved in an interesting problem that I can forget I'm working with a high school student and not some relatively new graduate peer of mine at work and I just begin to see a problem with beginner’s eyes. That is very invigorating. Maybe I’m a vampire stealing energy from our youth, I don’t know. [laughs]

CASEY: They’ll got plenty; they’ll share.

MAE: Yeah, yeah.

Special Guest: Dave Bock.

Sponsored By:

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Support Greater Than Code

01:01 - Ian’s Superpower: Curiosity & Life-Long Learning

06:27 - Streaming and Mentorship: Becoming “The Career Development Guy”

12:01 - Tech Interviews (Are Broken)

16:43 - How do I even get a first job in the tech industry?

24:25 - Interview Processes Don’t Align with Skills Needed

35:06 - Fixing Tech Interviews: Overhauling the Process

Reflections:

Mandy: Peoples’ tech journeys are like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Keep acquiring skills over life-long learning.

Arty: The importance of 1-on-1 genuine connections. Real change happens in the context of a relationship.

Ian: Having these discussions, collaborating, and saying, “what if?”

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

To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Transcript:

ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 260 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore.

MANDY: Thank you, Arty. And I'm here with our guest today, Ian Douglas.

Ian has been in the tech industry for over 25 years and suggested we cue the Jurassic Park theme song for his introduction. Much of his career has been spent in early startups planning out architecture and helping everywhere and anywhere like a “Swiss army knife” engineer. He’s currently livestreaming twice a week around the topic of tech industry interview preparation, and loves being involved in developer education.

Welcome to the show, Ian.

IAN: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

MANDY: Awesome. So we like to start the show with our famous question: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

IAN: Probably curiosity. I've always been kind of a very curious mindset of wanting to know how things work. Even as a little kid, I would tear things apart just to see how something worked. My parents would be like, “Okay, great. Put it back together.” I'm like, “I don't know how to put it back together.” So [chuckles] they would come home and I would just have stuff disassembled all over the house and yeah, we threw a lot of stuff out that way.

But it was just a curiosity of how things work around me and that led into computer programming, learning how computers worked and that just made the light bulb go off in my mind as a little kid of, I get to tell this computer how to do something, it's always going to do it. And that just led of course, into the tech industry where you sign up for a career in the tech industry, you’re signing up for lifelong learning and there's no shortage of trying to satiate that curiosity. I think it's just a never-ending journey, which is fantastic.

ARTY: When did you first discover computers? What was that experience like for you?

IAN: I was 8 years old. I think it was summer, or fall of 1982. I believe my dad came home with a Commodore 64. My dad was always kind of a gadget nut. Anything new and interesting on the market, he would find an excuse to buy and so he, brought home this Commodore 64 thinking family computer, but once he plunked it down in front of me, it sort of became mine. I didn't want to share.

I grew up in Northern Canada way, way up in the Northwest territories and in the wintertime, we had two things to do. We could go play hockey, or we'd stay indoors and not freeze. So I spent a lot of time indoors when I wasn't playing hockey—played a lot of hockey as a kid. But when I was home, I was basically on this Commodore 64 all the time, playing games and learning how the computer itself worked and learning how the programming language of it worked.

Thankfully, the computer was something I had never took apart. Otherwise, it would have been a pile of junk, but just spending a lot of time just learning all the ins and outs. Back then, the idea was you could load the software and then you type a run command and it would actually execute the program. But if you type a list, it would actually show you all the source code of the program as well and that raised my curiosity, like what is all this symbols and what all these words mean?

In the back of the Commodore 64 book, it had several chapters about the basic programming language. So I started picking apart all these games and trying to learn how they worked and then well, what would happen if I change this instruction to that and started learning how to sort of hack my games, usually break the game completely. But trying to hack it a little bit; what if I got like an extra ship, an extra level, or what if I change the health of my character, or something along those lines? And it kind of snowballed from there, honestly. It was just this fascination of, oh, cool, I get to look at this thing. I get to change it. I get to apply it.

And then of course, back in the day, you would go to a bookstore and you'd have these magazines with just pages and pages and pages of source code and you'd go home and you type it all in expecting something really cool. At the end of it, you run it and it's something bland like, oh, you just made a spreadsheet application. It's like, “Oh, I wanted a game.” Like, “Shucks.”

[laughter]

But as a little kid, that kind of thing wasn't very enticing, but I'm sure as an adult, it's like, oh cool, now I have a spreadsheet to track budgeting, or whatever at home.

It was this whole notion of open source and just sharing knowledge and that really stuck with me, too and so, as I would try to satiate this innate curiosity in myself and learn something, I would go teach it to a friend and it's like, “Hey, hey, let me show you what I just did. I learned how to play this thing on the piano,” or “I learned how to sing this song,” or “I learned how to use a magnifying glass to cook an ant on the sidewalk.”

[chuckles]

Whatever I learned, I always wanted to turn around and teach it to somebody else. I would get sometimes more excitement and joy out of watching somebody else do it because I taught them than the fact that I was able to learn that and do it myself. And so, after a while it was working on the computer became kind of a, oh yeah, okay, I can work on the computer, I can do the thing. But if I could turn around and show somebody else how to do that and then watch them explore and you watch that light bulb go off over their head, then it's like, oh, they're going to go do something cool with that.

Just the anticipation of how are they going to go use that knowledge, that really stuck with me my whole life. In high school doing little bits of tutoring here and there. I was a paid tutor in college. Once I got out of college and got into the workplace, again, just learning on my own and then turning around and teaching others led into running my own web development business where I was teaching some friends how to do web development because I was taking on so much work that I had to subcontract it the somebody where I wasn't going to meet deadlines and so, I subcontracted them. That meant that I got to pay my friends to help me work this business.

And so, that kind of kicked off and then I started learning well, how to servers work and how does the internet work and how do I run an email server on all this stuff? So just never-ending stream of knowledge going on in the internet and then just turning around and sharing that knowledge and keeping that community side of things building up over time.

MANDY: Very cool. So in your bio, it said you're streaming now so I'm guessing that's a big part of what you do today with the streaming. So what are you streaming?

IAN: So let's see, back in 2014, I started getting involved in mentorship with a local code school here in Denver called The Turing School of Software and Design. It's the 7-month code program and they were looking for someone that could help just mentor students. They were teaching Ruby on Rails at the time. So I got involved with them. I was working in Ruby at SendGrid at the time where I was working, who was later acquired by Twilio. And I'm like, “Yeah, I got some extra time. I can help some people out.” I like giving back and I like the idea of tutoring and teaching.

I started that mentorship and it quickly turned into hey, do any of our mentors know anything about resumes and the hiring and interviewing and things like that. And by that point, I had been the lead engineer. I had done hiring. I hired several dozen engineers at SendGrid, or helped hire several dozen people at SendGrid. And I'm like, “Yeah, I've looked at hundreds and thousands of resumes.” Like, “What can I help with?”

So I quickly became the career development guy to help them out and over time, the school started developing their career development curriculum and I like to think I had a hand in developing some of that. 3 years later, they're like, “You just want a job here? Like you're helping so many students, you just want to come on staff?” And so, I joined them as an instructor, taught the backend program, had a blast, did that for almost 4 full years.

And then when I left Turing in June of 2021, I thought, “Well, I still want to be able to share this knowledge,” and so, I took all these notes that I had been writing and I basically put it all onto a website called techinterview.guide.

When I finished teaching, I'm like, “Well, I still miss sharing that knowledge with people,” and I thought, “How else can I get that knowledge out there in a way that is scalable and manageable by one human being?” And I thought, “Well, I'll just kind of see what other people are doing.” Fumbled around on YouTube, watched some YouTube videos, watched people doing livestreaming on LinkedIn, livestreaming on Facebook, livestreaming on YouTube and trying to think could I do that? Nah, I don't know if I could do that.

A friend of mine named Jonan Scheffler, he currently works at New Relic, he does a live stream. So I was hanging out on his stream one night and it was just so much fun seeing people interact and chat and how they engage the people in the chat and answering questions for them. I'm like, “I wonder if I could do that.”

The curiosity took over from there and you can imagine where that went; went way down some rabbit holes on how to set up a streaming computer. Started streaming and found out that I wasn't very good at audio routing, [chuckles] recording things, and marketing, all that kind of stuff. But I kind of fumbled my way through it and Jonan was very generous with his time to help me straighten some things out and it kind of took off from there. So I thought, “Well, now I've got a platform where I can share this career development advice having been in the industry now for 25 years. Now, I've been director of engineering. I'm currently the director of engineering learning at a company. I've got an education background now as an instructor for several years. I've been doing tons of mentoring.”

I love to give back and I love to help other people learn a thing that's going to help improve their life. I think of it like a ripple effect, like I'm not going to go out and change the world, but I can change your world and that ripple effect is going to change somebody else's world and that's going to change somebody else's world. So that's how I see my part in all of this play out. I'm not looking to be the biggest name in anything. I'm just one person with a voice and I'm happy to share my ideas and my perspectives, but I'm also happy to have people on my stream that can share their ideas and perspectives as well.

I think it's important to hear a lot of perspectives, especially when it comes to things like job hunt, interview prep, and how to build a resume. You're going to see so much conflicting advice out there like, “This is the way you should do it,” and someone else will be like, “No, this is the way you should do it.” Meanwhile, I'm on the sidelines going, “You can do it all of that way.” Just listen to everybody's advice and figure out how you want to build your resume and then that's your resume. It doesn't have to look like the way I want it, or the way that someone else wants it; it can look how you want it to look. This is just our advice kind of collectively.

So the livestream took off from there and I've got only a couple of hundred followers, or so on Twitch, but it's been a lot of fun just engaging with chat and people are submitting questions to me all the time. So I do a lot of Q&A sessions, like ask me anything sessions and it's just been a ton of fun.

ARTY: That's awesome. I love the idea of focusing on one person and how you can make a difference in that one person's life and how those differences can ripple outward. That one-on-one connection, I feel like if we try and just broadcast and forget about the individuals, it's easy for the message and stuff to just get lost in ether waves and not actually make that connection with one person. Ultimately, it's all those ones that add up to the many.

IAN: Definitely. Yeah.

ARTY: So can you tell us a little bit more about the Tech Interview Guide and what your philosophy is regarding tech interviews?

IAN: The tech interview process in – well, I mean, just the interview process in general in the tech industry is pretty broken. It lends itself very well to people who come from position and privilege that they can afford expensive universities and have oodles and oodles of free time to go study algorithms for months and months and months to go jump through a whole bunch of hoops for companies that want four, or five, six rounds of interviews to try to determine whether you're the right fit for the company and it's super broken.

There are a lot of companies out there that are trying to change things a little bit and I applaud them. It's going to be a tough journey, for sure. Trying to convince companies like hey, this is not working out well for us as candidates trying to apply for jobs.

As a company, though I understand because I've been a hiring manager that you need to be able to trust the people that you're hiring. You need to trust that they can actually do the job. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech interview process does not adequately mimic what the day-to-day responsibility of that job is going to be.

So the whole philosophy of me doing the Tech Interview Guide is just an education of, “Hey, here's my perspective on what you're likely to face as a technical interview. These are the different stages that you'll typically see.” I have a lot of notes on there about how to build a resume, how to build a cover letter, thoughts on building a really big resume and then how to trim it down to one page to go apply for a particular job. How to write a cover letter that's customized to the business to really position yourself as the best candidate for that role. And then some chapters that I have yet to write are going to be things like how do you negotiate once you get an offer, like what are some negotiation tips.

I've shared some of them live on the stream and I've shared a growing amount of information as I learn from other people as well, then I'll turn around and I'll share that on the stream. The content that's actually on the website right now is probably 3, 4 years old, some of it at least and so, I'm constantly going back in and I'm trying to revamp that material a little bit to kind of be as modern as possible.

I used to want to go a self-publish route where I actually made a book. Several of my friends have actually gone through the process of actually making a book and getting it published. I'm like, “Oh, I want to do that, too. My friends are doing that. I could do that, too,” and I got looking into it. It's like, okay, it's an expensive, really time-consuming process and by the time I get that book on a shelf somewhere, a lot of the information is going to be out of date because a lot of things in the tech industry change all the time. So I decided I would just self-publish an online book where I can just go in and I can just constantly refresh the information and people can go find whatever my current perspective is by going to the website.

And then as part of the website, I also have a daily email series that people can sign up for. I'm about to split it into four mailing lists. But right now, it's a single mailing list where I'm presenting technical questions and behavioral questions that you're likely to get asked as a web developer getting into the business. But I don't spend time in the email telling you how to answer the question; what I do instead is I share from the interviewer's perspective. This is why I'm asking you this question. This is what I hope to hear. This is what's important for me to hear in your answer.

Because there's so many resources out there already that are trying to tell you how to craft the perfect answer, where I'm trying to explain this is why this question is important to us in the first place. So I'm taking a little bit different perspective on how I present that information and to date I've sent out, I don't know, something like 80,000 emails over a couple of years to folks that have signed up for that, which has been really tremendous to see. I get a lot of good feedback from that. But again, that information it doesn't always age well and interview processes change.

I'm actually going through the process right now in the month of November to rewrite a lot of that information, but then also break out into multiple lists and so, where right now it's kind of a combination of a little bit of technical questions, a little bit of behavioral questions, a little bit of procedural, like what is an interview and so on. Now I'm actually going to break them out into separate lists of this list is all just technical questions and this list is all just behavioral questions and this list is going to be general process and then the process of going through the interview and how to do research and so on. And then the last one is just general questions and answers and a lot of that is stemmed from the questions that people have submitted to me that I answered on the live stream. So it all kind of packages up together.

MANDY: That's really cool. I'd like to get into some of the meat of the material that you're putting out here.

IAN: Yeah.

MANDY: So as far as what are some of the biggest questions that you get on your street?

IAN: Probably the most popular question I get—because a lot of the people that come by the stream and find the daily email list are new in the industry and they're trying to find that first job. And so by far, the number one question is, how do I even get a job in the industry right now? I have no experience. I've got some amount of education, whether it's an actual CS degree, or something similar to a CS degree, or they've gone through a bootcamp of some kind. How do I even get that first job? How do I position myself? How do I differentiate myself? How do I even get a phone call from a company?

That's a lot of what's broken in the industry. Everybody in the industry right now wants people with experience, or they're saying like, “Oh, this is a “entry-level role,” but you must have 3 to 4 years’ experience.” It's like, well, it's not entry level if you're asking for experience; it can't be both. All they're really doing is they're calling it an entry-level role so they don't have to pay you as much. But if they want 3-, or 4-years’ experience, then you should be paying somebody who has 3-, or 4-years’ experience.

So the people writing these job posts are off their rocker a little bit, but that's by far, the number one question I get is how do I even get that first job. Once you get that first job and you get a year, year and a half, 2 years’ experience, it's much easier to get that second job, or third job. It's not like oh, I'm going to quit my job today and have a new job tomorrow. But the time to get that next job is usually much, much shorter than getting this first job.

I know people that have gone months and months, or nearly a year just constantly trying to apply, getting ghosted, like not getting any contact whatsoever from companies where they're sending in resumes and trying to apply for these jobs. Again, it's just a big indication of what's really broken in our industry that I think could be improved. I think that there's a lot of room for improvement there.

MANDY: So what do you tell them? What's your answer for that? How do they get their first job? How do you get your first job?

IAN: That's a [chuckles] good question. And I hate to fall back on the it depends answer. It really does depend on the kind of career that you want to have. I tell people often in my coaching that the tech industry is really a choose your own adventure kind of book. Like, once you get that job a little bit better, what you want your next job to be and so, you get to choose. If you get your first job as a QA developer, or you get that first job as a technical writer, or you get that first job doing software development, or you get that first job in dev ops and then decide, you don't want to do that anymore, that's fine.

You can position yourself to go get a job doing some other kind of technical job that doesn't have to be what your previous job was. Now, once you have that experience, though recruiters are going to be calling you and saying, “Hey, you had a QA role. I've also got a QA role,” and you just have to stand firm and say, “No, that's not the direction I'm taking my career anymore. I want to head in this direction. So I'm going to apply for a company where they're looking for people with that kind of direction.”

It really comes down to how do you show the company what you bring to the company and how you're going to make the company better, how are you going to make the team better, what skill, experience, and background are you bringing to that job. A lot of people, when they apply for the job, they talk about what they don't have. Like, “Oh, I'm an entry level developer,” or “I only went to a bootcamp,” or “I don't know very much about some aspect of development like I don't know, test driven development,” or “I don't really understand object-oriented programming,” or “I don't know anything about Docker, but I want to apply for this job.” Well, now you're highlighting what you don't have and to get that first job, you have to highlight what you do have.

So I often tell people on your resume, on your LinkedIn, don't call yourself a junior developer. Don't call yourself an entry level. Don't say you're aspiring to be. You are. You are a developer. If you have studied software development, you can write software, you're a software developer. Make that your own title and let the company figure out what level you are. So just call yourself a developer and start applying for those jobs.

The other advice that I tend to give people is you don't have to feel like you meet a 100% of the requirements in any job posts. As a hiring manager, when I read those job posts often, it's like, this is my birthday wish list. I hope I can find this mythical unicorn that has all of these traits [laughter] and skills and characteristics and that person doesn't exist. In fact, if I ever got a resume where they claim to have all that stuff, I would immediately probably throw the resume in the bin because they're probably lying, because either they have all those skills and they're about to hit me up for double the salary, or they're just straight up lying that they really don't have all those skills.

As a hiring manager, those are things that we have to discern over time as we're evaluating people and talking with them and so on. But I would say if you meet like 30 to 40% of those skills, you could probably still apply.

The challenge then is when you get that phone call, how do you convince them that you're worth taking a shot, that you're worth them taking the risk of hiring you, helping train you up in the skills that you don't have. But on those calls, you still need to present this is what I do bring to the company. I'm bringing energy, I’m bringing passion, and I'm bringing other experience and background and perspectives on things, hopefully from – just increasing the diversity in tech, just as an example. You're coming from a background, or a walk of life that maybe we don't currently have on the team and that's great for us and great for our team because you're going to open our eyes to things that we might not have thought of.

So I think apply anyway. If they're asking for a couple of years’ experience and you don't have it, apply anyway. If they're asking for programming languages you don't know, apply anyway. The languages you do know, a lot of that skill is going to transfer into a new language anyway. And I think a lot of companies are really missing out on the malleability and how they can shape an entry-level developer into the kind of developer and kind of engineer that they want to have on the team.

Now you use that person as an example and say, “Now we've trained them with the process that we want, with the language and the tools that we want. They know the company goals.” We've trained them. We've built them up. We've invested in them and now everybody else we hire, we're going to hold to that standard and say, “If we're going to hire from outside, this is what we want,” and if we hire someone who doesn't have that level of skill, we're going to bring them up to that skill. I think a lot of companies are missing out on that whole aspect of hiring, that is they can take a chance on somebody who's got the people skills and the collaboration skills and that background and the experiences of life and not necessarily the technical skills and just train them on the technical skills.

I went on a rant on this on LinkedIn the other day, where I was saying the return on investment. If a company is spending months and months and months trying to hire somebody, that's expensive. You're paying a recruiter, you're paying engineers, you're paying managers to screen all these people, interview all these people, and you're not quite finding that 100% skill match. Well, what if you just hired somebody months ago, spend $5,000 training them on the skills they didn't have, and now you're months ahead of the game. You could have saved yourself so much money so much time. You would have had an engineer on the team now. And I think a lot of companies are kind of missing that point. Sorry, I know I get very soapbox-y on some of the stuff.

ARTY: I think it's important just highlighting these dynamics and stuff that are broken in our industry and all of the hoops and challenges that come with trying to get a job.

You mentioned a couple of things on the other side of one, is that the interview processes themselves don't align to what it is we actually need skill-wise day-to-day. What are the things that you think are driving the creation of interviews that don't align with the day-to-day stuff? Like what factors are bringing those things so far out of alignment?

IAN: That's a great question. I would say I have my suspicions. So don't take this as gospel truth, but from my own perspective, this is what I think. The big, big tech companies out there, like the big FAANG companies, they have a very specific target in mind of the kind of engineers that they want on their team. They have studied very deep data structures and algorithms, the systems thinking and the system design, and all this stuff. Like, they've got that knowledge, they've got that background because those big companies need that level of knowledge for things like scaling to billions of users, highly performant, and resilient systems.

Where the typical startup and typical small and mid-sized company, they don't typically need that. But those kinds of companies look at FAANG companies and go, “We want to be like them. Therefore, we must interview like them and we must ask the same questions that they ask.” I think this has this cascading effect where when FAANG companies do interviews in a particular way, we see that again, with this ripple effect idea and we see that ripple down in the industry.

Back in the early 2000s, mid 2000s—well, I guess right around the time when Google was getting started—they were asking a lot of really oddball kinds of questions. Like how many golf balls fit in a school bus and those were their interview challenges. It's like, how do you actually go through the calculation of how many golf balls would fit in a school bus and after a while, I think by 2009, they published an article saying, “Yeah, we're going to stop asking those questions. We weren't getting good signals. Everybody's breaking down those problems the same way and it wasn't really helpful.”

Well, leading up to that point, everyone else was like, “Oh, those are cool questions. We're going to ask those questions, too,” and then when Google published that paper, everyone else was like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb. We're not going to ask those questions either.” And then they started getting into what we now see as like the LeetCode, HackerRank type of technical challenges being asked within interviews. I think that there's a time and place for some of that, but I think that the types of challenges that they're asking candidates to do should still be aligned with what the company does.

One criticism that I've got. For example, I was looking at a technical challenge from one particular company that they asked this one particular problem and it was using a data structure called Heap. It was, find a quantity of location points closest to a target. So you're given a list of latitude, longitude values, and you have to find the five latitude and longitude points that are closest to a target. It's like, okay and so, I'm thinking through the challenge, how would I solve that if I had to solve it?

But then I got thinking that company has nothing to do with latitude and longitude. That company has nothing to do with geospatial work of any kind. Why are they even asking that problem? Like, it's so completely misaligned that anybody they interview, that's the first thing that's going to go through their mind as a candidate is like, “Why are they asking me this kind of question?” Like, “This has nothing to do with the job. It had nothing to do with the role. I don't study global positioning and things like that. I know what latitude and longitude are, but I've never done any kind of math to try to figure out what those things would be and how you would detect differences between them.” Like, I could kind of guess with simple math, but unless you've studied that stuff, it's not going to be this, “Oh yeah, sure, no problem. It's this formula, whatever.”

We shouldn't have to expect that candidates coming to a business are going to have that a, formula memorized, especially when that's not what your company does. And a lot of companies are like, “Oh, we're got to interview somebody. Quick, go to LeetCode and find a problem to ask them.” All you're going to do is you're going to bias your interview process towards people that have studied those problems on LeetCode and you're not actually going to find people that can actually solve your day-to-day challenges that your company is actually facing.

ARTY: And instead, you're selecting for people that are really good at things that you don't even need. [chuckles] It's like, all right! It totally skews who you end up hiring toward people that aren't even necessarily competent in the skills that they actually need day-to-day. Like you mentioned FAANG companies need these particular skills. I don't even think that for resilience, to be able to build these sort of systems, and even on super hardcore systems, it's very seldom that you end up writing algorithmic type code. Usually, most of the things that you deal with in scaling and working with other humans and stuff, it's a function of design and being able to organize things in conceptual ways that make sense so that you can deconstruct a complex, fuzzy problem into little pieces that make sense and can fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

I have a very visual geometric way of thinking, which I find actually is a core ability that makes me good at code because I can imagine it visually laid out and think about the dependencies between things as like tensors between geographically located little code bubbles, if you will.

IAN: Sure.

ARTY: Being able to think that way, it’s fundamentally different than solving algorithm stuff. But that deconstruction capability of just problem breakdown, being able to break down problems, being able to organize things in ways that make sense, being able to communicate those concepts and come up with abstractions that are easy enough for other people on your team to understand, ideally, those are the kinds of engineers we want on the teams. Our interview processes ought to select for those day-to-day skills of things that are the common bread and butter. [chuckles]

IAN: I agree.

ARTY: What we need to succeed on a day-to-day basis.

IAN: Yeah. We need the people skills more than we need the hard technical skills sometimes. I think if our interview process could somehow tap into that and focus more on how do you collaborate, how do you do code reviews, how do you evaluate someone else's code for quality, how do you make the tradeoff between readability and optimization—because those are typically very polarized, opposite ends of the scale—how do you function on a team, or do you prefer to go heads down and just kind of be by yourself and just tackle tasks on your own? I believe that there's a time and place for that, too and there are personality types where you prefer to go heads down and just have peace and quiet and just get your work done and there's nothing wrong with that.

But I think if we can somehow tap into the collaborative process as part of the interview, I think it's going to open a lot of companies up to like, “Oh, this person's actually going to be a really great team member. They don't quite have this level of knowledge in database systems that we hope they'd have, but that's fine. We'll just send them on this one-week database training class that happens in a week, or two and now they'll be trained.” [overtalk]

MANDY: Do they want to learn?

IAN: Right. Do they want to learn? Are they eager to learn? Because if they don't want to learn, then that's a whole other thing, too. But again, that's something that you can screen for. Like, “Tell me what you're learning on the side, or “What kinds of concepts do you want to learn?” Or “In this role, we need you to learn this thing. Is that even of interest to you?” Of course, everyone's going to lie and say, “Yeah,” because they want the paycheck. But I think you can still narrow it down a little bit more what area of training does this person need. So we can just hire good people on the team and now our team is full of good people and collaborative, team-based folks that are willing to work together to solve problems together and then worry about the technical skills as a secondary thing.

MANDY: Yeah. I firmly believe anybody can learn anything, if they want to. I mean, that's how I've gotten here.

IAN: Yeah, for sure. Same with me. I'm mostly self-taught. I studied computer engineering in college, so I can tell you how all the little microchips in your computer work. I did that for the first 4 years of my career and then I threw all that out the window and I taught myself web development and taught myself how the internet works.

And then every job I had, that innate curiosity in me is like, “Oh, I wonder how e-commerce works.” Well, I went and got an e-commerce job, it's like, okay, well now I wonder how education works and I got into the education sector. Now, I wonder how you know this, or that works and so, I got into financial systems and I got into whatever and it just kind of blew my mind. I was like, “Wow, this is how all these things kind of talk to each other,” and that for me was just fascinating, and then turning around and sharing that knowledge with other people.

But some people are just very fixed mindset and they want to learn one thing, they want to do that thing, and that's all they know. But I think, like we kind of talked about early in the podcast, you sign up for a career in this industry and you’re signing up for lifelong learning. There's no shortage to things that you can go learn, but you have to be willing to do it.

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ARTY: What kind of things could we do to potentially influence the way hiring is done and these practices with unicorn skilled searches and just the dysfunctional aspects on the hiring side? Because you're teaching all these tech interview skills for what to expect in the system and how to navigate that and succeed, even though it's broken. But what can we do to influence the broken itself and help improve these things?

IAN: That's a great question. Breaking it from the inside out is a good start. I think if we can collectively get enough people together within these, especially the bigger companies and say like, “Hey, collectively, as an industry, we need to do interviewing differently.” And then again, see that ripple effect of oh, well, the FAANG companies are doing it that way so we're going to do it that way, too.

But I don't think that's going to be a fast change by any stretch. I think there are always going to be some types of roles where you do have to have a very dedicated, very deep knowledge of system internals and how to optimize things, and pure algorithmic types of thinking. I think those kinds of jobs are always going to be out there and so, there's no fully getting away from something like a LeetCode challenge style interview.

But I think that for a lot of small, mid-sized, even some large-sized companies, they don't have to do interviewing that way. But I think we can all stand on our soapbox and yell and scream, “Do it differently, do it differently,” and it's not going to make any impact at all because those companies are watching other companies for how they're doing it.

So I think gradually, over time, we can just start to do things differently within our own company. And I think for example, if the company that I was working at, if we completely overhauled our interview process that even if we don't hire somebody, if someone can walk away from that going, “Wow, that was a cool interview experience. I’ve got to tell my friends about this.”

That's the experience that we want when you walk away from the company if we don't end up hiring. If we hire you, it's great. But even if we don't hire you, I want to make sure that you've still got a really cool interview experience that you enjoyed the process, that it didn't just feel like another, “Okay, well, I could have just grind on LeetCode for three months to get through that interview.” I don't ever want my interviews to feel like that.

So I think as more of us come to this understanding of it's okay to do it differently and then collectively start talking about how could we do it differently—and there are companies out there that are doing it differently, by the way. I'm not saying everyone in the industry is doing all these LeetCode style interviews. There are definitely companies out there that are doing things differently and I applaud them for doing that.

And I think as awful as it was to have the pandemic shut everything down to early 2020, where no hiring happened, or not a lot of hiring happened over the summer, it did give a lot of companies pause and go, “Well, hey, since we're not hiring, since we got nobody in the backlog, let's examine this whole interview process and let's see if this is really what we want as a company.” And some companies did. They took the time, they took several months and they were like, “You know what, let's burn this whole thing down and start over” as far as their interview process goes. Some of them completely reinvented what their interview process was and turned it into a really great process for candidates to go through. So even if they don't get the job, they still walk away going, “Wow, that was neat.”

I think if enough of us start doing that to where candidates then can say, “You know what, I would really prefer not to go through five, or six rounds of interviews” because that's tiring and knowing that what you're kind of what you're in for, with all the LeetCode problems and panel after panel after panel. Like, nobody wants to sit through that.

I think if enough candidates stand up for themselves and say, “You know what, I'm looking for a company that has an easier process. So I'm not even going to bother applying.” I think there are enough companies out there that are desperately trying to hire that if they start getting the feedback of like you know what, people don't want to interview with us because our process is lousy. They're going to change the process, but it's going to take time.

Unfortunately, it's going to drag out because companies can be stubborn and candidates are also going to be stubborn and it's not going to change quickly. But I think as companies take the step to change their process and enough candidates also step up to say, “Nah, you know what, I was going to apply there,” or “Maybe I got through the first couple of rounds, but you're telling me there's like three more rounds to go through? Nah, I'm not going to bother.”

Companies are now starting to see candidates ghost them and walk away from the interview process because they just don't want to be bothered. I think that's a good signal for a company to take a step back and go, “Okay, we need to change our process to make it better so the people do want to apply and enjoy that interview process as they come through.” But it's going to take a while to get there.

ARTY: Makes me think about we were talking early on about open source and the power of open source. I wonder with this particular challenge, if you set up a open source hiring manifesto, perhaps of we're going to collaborate on figuring out how to make hiring better. Well, what does that mean? What is it we're aiming for? We took some time to actually clarify these are the things we ought to be aiming for with our hiring process and those are hard problems to figure out. How do we create this alignment between what it is we need to be able to do to be successful day-to-day versus what it is we're selecting for with our interview process? Those things are totally out of whack.

I think we're at a point, at least in our industry, where it's generally accepted that how we do interviewing and hiring in these broken things—I think it’s generally accepted that it's broken—so that perhaps it's actually a good opportunity right now to start an initiative like that, where we can start collaborating and putting our knowledge together on how we ought to go about doing things better. Even just by starting something, building a community around it, getting some companies together that are working on trying to improve their own hiring processes and learning together and willing to share their knowledge about things that are working better, such that everybody in the industry ultimately benefits from us getting better at these kinds of things. As you said, being able to have an interview process that even if you don't get the job, it's not a miserable experience for everyone involved. [chuckles] Like there's no reason for that.

IAN: Yeah.

MANDY: That's how we – I mean, what you just explained, Arty isn't that how we got code of conducts? Everybody's sitting down and being like, “Okay, this is broken. Conferences are broken. What are we going to all do together?” So now why don't we just do the same thing? I really like that idea of starting an open source initiative on interviewing. Like have these big FAANG companies be like, “I had a really great interview with such and such company.” Well, then it all spirals from there. I think that's super, super exciting.

ARTY: Yeah. And what is it that made this experience great? You could just have people analyze their interview experiences that they did have, describe well, what are the things that made this great, that made this work and likewise, you could collect anti-patterns. Some of the things that you talked about of like, are we interviewing for geolocation skills when that actually has absolutely nothing to do with our business? We could collect these things as these funky anti-patterns of things so that people could recognize those things easier in there because it's always hard to see yourself. It's hard to see yourself swinging.

IAN: An interesting idea along those lines is what if companies said like, “Hey, we want the community to help us fix our interview process. This is who we are, this is what our business does. What kinds of questions do you think we should be asking?” And I think that the community would definitely rally behind that and go, “Oh, well, you're an e-commerce platform so you should be asking people about shopping cart implementations and data security around credit cards and have the interview process be about what the company actually does.”

I think that that would be an interesting thing to ask the community like, “What do you think we should be asking in these interviews?” Not that you're going to turn around and go, “Okay, that's exactly what we're going to do,” but I think it'll give a lot of companies ideas on yeah, okay, maybe we could do a take-home assignment where you build a little shopping cart and you submit that to us. We'll evaluate how you did, or what you changed, or we're going to give you some code to start with and we're going to ask you to fix a bug in it, or something like, I think that there's a bigger movement now, especially here in Canada, in the US of doing take-home assignments.

But I think at the same time, there are pros and cons of doing take-home assignments versus the on-site technical challenges. But what if we gave the candidate a choice as part of that interview process, too and say, “Hey, cool. We want to interview you. Let's get through the phone screen and now that you've done the phone screen, we want to give you the option of, do you want to do a small take-home assignment and then do a couple of on-site technical challenges? Do you want to do a larger take-home and maybe fewer on-site technical challenges?”

I think there's always going to be some level of “Okay, we need to see you code in front of us to really make sure that you're the one that wrote that code.” I got burned on that back in 2012 where I thought somebody wrote some code and they didn't. They had a friend write it as their take-home assignment and so, I brought them in for the interview and I'm like, “Cool, I want you to fix this bug,” and they had no idea what to do. They hadn’t even looked at the code that their friend wrote for them it's like, why would you do that?

So I think that there's always going to be some amount of risk and trust that needs to take place between the candidates and the companies. But then on the flip side of that, if it doesn't work out, I really wish companies would be better about giving feedback to people instead of just ghosting them, or like, “Oh, you didn't and pass that round. So we're just not even going to call you back and tell you no. We're just not ever just going to call.” The whole ghosting thing is, by far, the number one complaint in the tech industry right now is like, “I applied and I didn't even get a thanks for your resume. I got nothing,” or maybe you get some automated reply going, “We'll keep you in mind if you're a match for something.”

But again, those apple looking at tracking systems are biased because the developers building them and the people reading the resumes are going to have their own inherent bias in the search terms and the things that they're looking for and so on. So there's bias all over the place that's going to be really hard to get rid of. But I think if companies were to take a first step and say like, “Okay, we're going to talk to the community about what they would like to see the interview process be,” and start having more of those conversations.

And then I think as we see companies step up and make those changes, those are going to be the kinds of companies where people are going to rally behind them and go, “I really want to work there because that interview process is pretty cool.” And that means the company is – well, it doesn't guarantee the company's going to be cool, but it shows that they care about the people that are going to work there.

If people know that the company is going to care about you as an employee, you're far more likely to want to work there. You're far more likely to be loyal and stay there for a long term as opposed to like oh, I just need to collect a paycheck for a year to get a little bit of experience and then job hop and go get a better title, better pay. So I think it can come down to company loyalty and stuff, too.

MANDY: Yeah. Word of mouth travels fast in this industry.

IAN: Absolutely.

MANDY: And to bring up the code of conduct thing and now people are saying, “If straight up this conference doesn't have a code of conduct, I'm not going.”

IAN: Yeah. I agree. It'll be interesting to see how something like this tech interview overhaul open source idea could pick up momentum and what kinds of companies would get behind it and go, “Hey, we think our interview process is pretty good already, but we're still going to be a part of this and watch other companies step up to.”

When I talked earlier about that ripple effect where Google, for example, stopped asking how many golf balls fit in a school bus kind of thing and everyone else is like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb.” We actually saw this summer, Facebook and Amazon publicly say, “We're no longer going to ask dynamic programming problems in our interviews.” It's going to be interesting to see how long that takes to ripple out into the industry and go, “Yeah, we're not going to ask DP problems either,” because again, people want to be those big companies. They want to be billion- and trillion-dollar companies, too and so, they think they have to do everything the same way and that's not always the case.

But there's also something broken in the system, too with hiring. It's not just the interview process itself, but it's also just the lack of training. I've been guilty of this myself, where I've got an interview with somebody and I've got back-to-back meetings. So I just pull someone on my team and be like, “Hey, Arty, can you come interview this person?” And you're like, “I've never interviewed before. I guess, I'll go to LeetCode and find a problem to give them.” You're walking in there just as nervous as the candidate is and you're just throwing some technical challenge at them, or you're giving them the technical challenge that you've done most recently, because you know the answer to it and you’re like, “Okay, well, I guess they did all right on it. They passed,” or “I think they didn't do well.”

But then companies aren't giving that feedback to people either. There's this thinking in the industry of oh, if we give them feedback, they're going to sue us and they're going to say it's discriminatory and they're going to sue us. Aline Lerner from interviewing.io did some research with her team and literally nobody in recent memory has been sued for giving feedback to candidates.

If anything, I think that it would build trust between companies and the candidates to say, “Hey, this is what you did. Well, this is what we thought you did okay on. We weren't happy with the performance of the code that you wrote so we're not moving forward,” and now you know exactly what to go improve.

I was talking to somebody who was interviewing at Amazon lately and they said, “Yeah, the recruiter at Amazon said that I would go through all these steps,” and they had like five, or six interviews, or something to go through. And they're like, “Yeah, and they told me at the end of it, we're not going to give you any feedback, but we will give you a yes, or no.”

It's like so if I get a no, I don't even find out what I didn't do well. I don't know anything about how to improve to want to go apply there in the future. You're just going to tell me no and not tell me why? Why would I want to reapply there in the future if you're not going to tell me how I'm going to get better? I'm just going to do the same thing again and again. I'm going to be that little toy that just bangs into the wall and doesn't learn to steer away from the wall and go in a different direction. If you're not going to give me any feedback, I'm just going to keep banging my head against this wall of trying to apply for a job and you're not telling me why I'm not getting it. It's not helpful to the candidate and that's not helpful to the industry either. It starts affecting mental health and it starts affecting other things and I think it erodes a lot of trust between companies and candidates as well.

ARTY: Yeah. The experience of just going through trying to get a job and going through the rejection, it's an emotional experience, an emotionally challenging experience. Of all things that affect our feels a lot, it's like that feeling of social rejection. So being able to have just healthier relationships and figuring out how to see another person as a human, help figure out how you can help guide and support them continuing on their journey so that the experience of the interview doesn't hurt so much even when the relationship doesn't work out, if we could get better at those kinds of things. There's all these things that if we got better at, it would help everybody.

IAN: I agree.

ARTY: And I think that's why a open source initiative kind of thing maybe make sense because this is one of those areas that if we got better at this as an industry, it would help everybody. It's worth putting time in to learn and figure out how we can do better and if we all get better at it and stuff, there's just so many benefits and stuff from getting better at doing this.

Another thing I was thinking about. You were mentioning the language thing of how easy it is to map skills that we learned from one language over to another language, such that even if you don't know the language that they're coding in at a particular job, you should apply anyway. [chuckles] I wonder if we had some data around how long it takes somebody to ramp up on a new language when they already know similar-ish languages. If we had data points on those sort of things that we’re like, “Okay, well, how long did it actually take you?” Because of the absence of that information, people just assume well, the only way we can move forward is if we have the unicorn skills.

Maybe if it became common knowledge, that it really only takes say, a couple months to become relatively proficient so that you can be productive on the team in another language that you've never worked in before. Maybe if that was a common knowledge thing, that people wouldn't worry about it so much, that you wouldn't see these unicorn recruiting efforts and stuff. People would be more inclined to look for more multipurpose general software engineering kinds of skills that map to whatever language that you're are doing. That people will feel more comfortable applying to jobs and going, “Oh, cool. I get the opportunity to learn a new language! So I know that I may be struggling a bit for a couple months with this, but I know I'll get it and then I can feel confident knowing that it's okay to learn my way through those things.”

I feel if maybe we just started collecting some data points around ramp up time on those kind of things, put a database together to collect people's experiences around certain kind of things, that maybe those kinds of things would help everyone to just make better decisions that weren't so goofy and out of alignment with reality.

IAN: Yeah, and there are lots of cheat sheets out there like, I'm trying to remember the name of it. I used to have it bookmarked. But you could literally pull up two programming languages side by side in the same browser window and see oh, if this is how you do it in JavaScript, this is how you do it on Python, or if this is how you write this code in C++, here's how you do it in Java. It gives you a one-to-one correlation for dozens, or hundreds of different kinds of blocks of code. That's really all you need to get started and like you said, it will take time to come proficient to where you don't have to have that thing up on your screen all the time.

But at the same time, I think the company could invest and say, “You know what, take a week and just pour everything you’ve got into learning C Sharp because that's the skill we want you to have for this job.” It's like, okay, if you are telling me you trust me and you're making me the job offer and you're going to pay me this salary and I get to work in tech, but I don't happen to have that skill, but you're willing to me in that skill, why would I not take that job? You're going to help me learn and grow. You're offering me that job with a salary. Those are all great signals to send.

Again, I think that a lot of companies are missing out and they're like, “No, we're not going to hire that person. We're just going to hold out until we find the next person that's a little bit better.” I think that that's where some things really drop off in the process, for sure is companies hold out too long and next thing they know, months have gone by and they've wasted tons of money when they could have just hired somebody a long time ago and just trained them.

I think the idea of an open source collective on something like this is pretty interesting. At the same time, it would be a little subjective on “how quickly could someone ramp up on a, or onboard on a particular technology.” Because everybody has different learning styles and unless you're finding somebody to curate – like if you're a Ruby programmer and you're trying to learn Python, this is the de facto resource that you need to look at. I think it could be a little bit subjective, but I think that there's still some opportunity there to get community input on what should the interview process be? How long should it really be? How many rounds of interviews should there be from, both the candidates experience as well as the company experience and say, as a business, this is why we have you doing these kinds of things.

That's really what I've been to teach as part of the Tech Interview Guide and the daily email series is from my perspective in the business, this is why. This is why I have you do a certain number of rounds, or this is why I give you this kind of technical challenge, or this is why I'm asking you this kind of question. Because I'm trying to find these signals about you that tell me that you're someone that I can trust to bring on my team.

It's a tough system when not many people are willing to talk about it because I think a lot of people are worried that others are going to try to game the system and go, “Oh, well, now that I know everything about your interview process, I know how to cheat my way through it and now you're going to give me that job and I really don't know what I'm doing.”

But I think that at the same time, companies can also have the higher, slow fire, fast mentality of like, “All right, you're not cutting it.” Like you're out right away and just rehire for that position. Again, if you're willing to trust and willing to extend that offer to begin with. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's a business decision; it's not a personal thing. But it's still devastating to the person when they don't get the job, or if they get fired right away because they're not pulling their weight, but if they're cheating their way through it, then they get what they deserve to.

MANDY: Awesome. Well, I think that's a great place to put a pin in this discussion. It is definitely not a great place to end it. I think we should head over to our reflection segment.

For me, there were so many things I wrote down. I loved that you said that people's tech journey is like a choose your own adventure. You can learn one thing and then find yourself over here and then the next thing you know, you find yourself over here. But you've picked up all these skills along the way and that's the most important thing is that as you go along this journey, you keep acquiring these skills that ultimately will make you the best programmer that you can be.

Also, I really like that you also said something about it being a lifelong learning. Tech is lifelong learning and not just the technical skills. It's the people skills. It's the behavioral skills. Those are the important skills. Those skills are what ultimately it comes down to being in this industry is, do you have the desire to learn? Do you have the desire to grow? I think that should be one of the most important things that companies are aware of when they are talking to candidates that it's not about can this person do a Fibonacci sequence. It's can they learn, are they a capable person? Are they going to show up? Are they going to be a good person to have in the office? Are they going to be a light? Are they going to be supportive? Are they going to be caring? That's the ultimate. That right there for me is the ultimate and thank you for all that insight.

ARTY: Well, I really, really loved your story, Ian at the very beginning of just curiosity and how you started your journey, getting into programming and then ended up finding ways to give back and getting really excited about seeing people's light bulbs go off and how much joy you got from those experiences, connecting with another individual and making that happen.

I know we've gotten on this long tangent of pretty abstract, big topics of just like, here's the brokenness in the industry and what are some strategies that we can solve these large-scale problems. But I think you said some really important things back of just the importance of these one-on-one connections and the real change happens in the context of a relationship.

Although, we're thinking about these big things. To actually make those changes, to actually make that difference, it happens in our local context. It happens in our companies. It happens with the people that we interact with on a one-on-one basis and have a genuine relationship with. If we want to create change, it happens with those little ripples. It happens with affecting that one relationship and that person going and having their own ripple effects. We all have the power to influence these things through the relationships with the individuals around us.

IAN: I think my big takeaway here is we have been chatting for an hour and just how easy it is to have conversation about hey, what if we did this? How quickly it can just turn into hey, as a community, what if? And just the willingness of people being in the community, wanting to make the community better, wanting to help build up other people around them to make something better about tech. There are a lot of things broken in tech. I'm a white guy in tech; I've been a part of the problem. I will admit that very forthrightly.

But my main takeaway here is how easy it is to just sit down and have conversation with people, who I've never met before, and still come up with great ideas and collaborate and just be open to ideas, open to perspectives. I'm walking away from this conversation going now, I wonder what it would take to go build that open source collective on shaking this thing up. Who do I know at different companies that would be open and willing to help back this and put their name on it? Who do I know at different companies and who do I know in different upper management types of positions that would be willing to take a chance and say, “You know what, we're going to try this a little bit different for a quarter and see what kind of impact it has on our team and kind of impact it has on our hiring,” and then report back? Do that agile feedback of try a thing, get some feedback, make a change.

I love that we can just sit down and have conversation about it. It doesn't have to be polarized. It doesn't have to be politicized. It can just be, “Yeah, this is not working. What idea do you have?” I love that you're both willing to entertain ideas and present ideas and I appreciate the concept now. I actually want to go do something about it.

So if anybody listening to this wants to do that, you can reach out to me. I'm on techinterview.guide. My email's on there. My LinkedIn's on there. You're welcome to contact me at any point and I would love to keep this conversation going.

Arty, I'd love to pick your brain a little bit more. And Mandy, if you've got ideas about this, too, let's start pooling this stuff together. Let's start being that change.

ARTY: That sounds great.

MANDY: Thank you.

ARTY: Thank you, Ian so much for joining us on and I agree, we should totally keep this conversation going. This is how magic happens, right?

IAN: Sure.

ARTY: You have connections and relationships that form just in the context of having a conversation like this and maybe we can kickstart something awesome.

MANDY: Heck yeah! Well, thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you all next week.

Special Guest: Ian Douglas.

Sponsored By:

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Support Greater Than Code

01:42 - Rin’s Superpower: Writing, Public Speaking, and Being Neurodivergent + Awesome!

02:18 - GitHub Actions

07:47 - Improving Developer Experience

11:33 - Neurodivergence + Autistic Burnout

17:04 - Mentoring and Reviewing for Kubernetes

20:49 - Open Source Contribution

29:04 - Mentoring (Cont’d)

32:46 - Evaluating Open Source Projects: Tips For Newbies

Reflections:

John: Technical Mentorship vs Social Mentorship.

Mando: Providing a welcoming sense of community for people with non-traditional backgrounds.

Rin: Being intentional about helping others, but also helping others means helping yourself.

John 2: The distinction between technical and autistic burnout.

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

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Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.

JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Mando Escamilla.

MANDO: Hi, John. Thanks. And I am here with our friend, Rin Oliver.

RIN: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with you all.

MANDO: We're happy to have you, man.

Rin is a Technical Community Builder at Camunda. They enjoy discussing all things open source with a particular focus on improving hiring pipelines in the technology industry for those that are neurodivergent and improving the developer experience for new and returning open source contributors.

So Rin, we like to start off each of our episodes mostly the same way, which is to ask our new friend, what is your superpower and how did you arrive to it?

RIN: I’m solid at writing, pretty solid writing, and I've been writing since I was a kid. I'm somehow really good at public speaking and I never used to be good at that. That was just through repetition. Other than that, being neurodivergent and being awesome is another superpower.

[laughter]

MANDO: Absolutely.

RIN: Yeah, I would say writing and public speaking and generally just being awesome. In terms of programming languages, I'm still kind of learning a bunch of different things. I'm enjoying DevSecOps and I really enjoy GitHub Actions so CICD.

MANDO: Cool.

RIN: Oh, I think they're great.

MANDO: Oh, I mean, so I love them as well and I shouldn't say that. I should take that back because I very much enjoyed GitHub Actions for the first, I don't know, two, or three weeks that I was using them. [laughs] And then I started hitting the problems of trying to share bits and pieces of my jobs across other jobs and that became a non-stop frustration.

RIN: Do you mean by concurrent actions where you use a different piece of action and another action kind of thing?

MANDO: I don't know about concurrent necessarily, but more just like, I want to be able to run this reusable step across multiple different actions.

RIN: They fixed that. We had that problem, too. They fixed that very recently back in August and you can now use the uses and with keywords and action repeatedly. You don't have to have it just – you can have the uses word define more than once.

MANDO: Really?

RIN: Yeah.

MANDO: Huh. Man. All right. Well, this podcast – [overtalk]

RIN: Made your day.

MANDO: Just covered the price of admission [inaudible] guy. Thank you.

RIN: I know, right. You're welcome.

[laughter]

MANDO: Yeah. The solution that I had before was to pull that stuff out into some bash script, or…

RIN: That's what we did, too. We've got it in bash script right now, but we might go back in and refactor it so we can have that uses keyword come back in. Just do it that way. Yeah, but now you can do that.

MANDO: That’s great.

RIN: Yeah, they just fixed that in a patch back in August, early September.

MANDO: Oh man. That's fantastic.

RIN: Yeah. The words you're looking for is concurrent actions. That's what they call those.

MANDO: That's what they call it? Okay. Well, fantastic. That's great to hear.

RIN: I know, right?

MANDO: So what kinds of things are you doing with GitHub Actions? Like, is it just CICD, or are you doing other things with it as well?

RIN: It is mostly just CICD, but another thing that I've been working on along with our infra team was bringing in security into that CICD function in that we brought in Aqua Security Trivy to scan the automatic releases that we were doing using GitHub Actions for critical vulnerabilities before they could automatically release. So we brought Trivy in with a bash script and it says, “Hey, if you have a critical CVE, you cannot do that release. Go back, do not pass Go, do not collect your $100.”

MANDO: No, that's awesome. That's fantastic.

RIN: Yeah. I just gave a presentation about it a couple weeks ago at DevX Day, which was a KubeCon, cloud data con co-located events. So that was pretty cool. I will link you all the slides if you'd like.

MANDO: So was it doing actual scanning of the thing of the output artifact, or was it –? Can you go a little bit deeper into I guess, what you all were doing specifically around security scanning as part of your pipeline?

RIN: Specifically? So what we had Trivy doing was scanning that output artifact and flagging it for CVs and if it didn't return them, it would upload them to Trivy in SARIF format so that people could review them, the retainers could review those and be like, “Hey, here's that?” And they wouldn't be able to automatically release until they'd resolved that.

MANDO: Got you. What were these output artifacts like? Were they like Java JARs, or –?

RIN: They are. They are mainly Java JARs. Yes, that's correct. It was used for publishing artifacts that may have been central.

MANDO: Got you. Nice.

RIN: I will actually link it to you. It's in our community hub and that is my project that I've been working on for the entire time I've been at Camunda and I've been there for almost a year.

Camunda Community Hub is our open source GitHub organization where all of our community powered extensions live. That is their home and if that is where people can find all of the things that extend Camunda and make it better, that are powered by our wonderful community and it's a wonderful place. There's a 124 repositories in there as of today and one of them is our community-action-maven-release, which is this tool that we are using to allow some of our maintainers that opt to use it to release automatically to Maven Central. So I will drop a link and it's a wonderful tool.

It was a collaboration with myself and our infra team and a bunch of our other team members and the community itself. It was a whole bunch of people that came together to make this happen and make it better collaboration between Camunda, the community, and all of our wonderful people involved in this open source project to make it happen. The infra and developer experience team collaborated on that security piece and then we've also had a few people come to improve the tooling as of a whole in the DevRel team and the community as well in the last couple weeks too, which is great.

JOHN: Nice.

MANDO: I'm reading the README right now. [laughs]

RIN: Good. I'm glad. I'm glad I love a good README. That's wonderful. Good.

MANDO: Yeah. But it makes for not great podcasting [laughs].

RIN: That is true. That is true.

In summary, essentially, this GitHub Action supports the community extension release process for those individuals in our Camunda Community Hub that have extensions that are written in Java. So that workflow defines composite run steps to duplicate actions across repositories that allow for releasing to Maven Central and we do have a process workflow that shows that workflow as it stands in terms of both, the security scanning, how you use it, the prerequisites, and troubleshooting so that if you're interested in that and you want to undertake that option to release those artifacts to Maven Central automatically using this tool, you can do so.

JOHN: Nice. So I noticed in your bio, you talked a lot about improving the developer experience of new and returning contributors and open source and sounds like that's where you've been spending a lot of time with this community work that you've been doing. So tell me more about what it is that you feel needs to be worked on and what work have you been doing in that area?

RIN: The short version is that right now, I work in the Developer Experience team at Camunda, which is about again, obviously improving the developer experience, which is, for those people that are working with Camunda, ensuring they get the best experience possible. How can we make that experience better for those developers that are working with and extending out Camunda in that open source community? That's where I come in. And then Contributor Experience, how do we make the experience for our contributors, for our extension maintainers better? How can we improve that process as a continually improving function moving forward?

On the longer-term side, I actually am a member of Kubernetes and I got involved in Kubernetes in 2018 and I joined the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group. So that's where I do a lot of my behind this scenes work is in the Kubernetes Contributor Experience SIG and I've gotten a few people interested in Kubernetes who have gone on to actually speak at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and have gone on to do wonderful things and just generally, amazing people and have been a pod mentor at Kubernetes at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in the past—a few of them now—and just said, “You don't need a technical background,” and I hate to say technical. But you don't have to have a computer science background. You don't have to have a certain background to contribute to open source. Don't self-select out. You have an option to contribute to this community no matter what your background. You can write documentation. You can update READMEs. You can any number of things, you can be supportive of the open source community with and the Kubernetes community definitely needs your help.

JOHN: Very cool. So what sorts of things – you were talking about working behind the scenes. So tell me more about what those things are that you're doing to make that developer experience friendly, or smoother, or whatever their goals are there.

RIN: So for me, basically what I do, or I try to do anyway, is I do a lot of work improving, for example, contributor experience docs, building out that contributor ladder, making sure that there's unified READMEs and processes in general is what I'm hoping to build out at Camunda, unifying that contributing.md document, making sure that contributor journey is clearly laid out and everyone has the same experience regardless of where they come into that contributor journey and that there's a clearly defined pathway towards becoming a maintainer, et cetera. So that they know that this is what a commit message should look like, this is what's to be expected of code reviewers, this is what's to be expected of maintainers, et cetera. That experience is unified and cohesive across that platform.

Making sure that in terms of the broader spectrum, such as Kubernetes, just making sure that we're holding space for people and just making sure that we understand that not everybody learns in the same way, not everybody absorbs information in the same way. Starting those conversations about burnout and enabling people to come together and talk about those conversations; what does that look like, what does autistic burnout look like, how do we recognize that, et cetera.

MANDO: From a first time, or an early contributor for projects like the different Kubernetes and Cloud Native projects, Rin would you suggest that the CONTRIBUTING.md be kind of the first place that you start, if you are thinking about contributing code? Should you start there and do some research – [overtalk]

RIN: Absolutely.

MANDO: Before you start diving in?

RIN: Yeah, I would say hands down, go there first. Go to kubernetes.dev and then just go check out that welcome section and then check out, it says right there, “The first step is check out the contributor guide.” That's absolutely the first place you should go is always check out that contributor guide. That's your first point of call.

MANDO: Okay. For those of our friends listening right now who are neurodivergent, what are some things that you think they should be especially on the lookout for, or things that they should keep in mind before and during their journey down open source?

RIN: I would say if you haven't already, definitely check out the recording that Julia Simon did at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 a few weeks ago on burnout. Julia’s presentation was amazing and it was packed during that KubeCon and that was a reason for that is that we're talking about burnout. Julia started a burnout channel and the CNCF Slack. I would say, join that.

I've given some presentations on autistic burnout. I will link that. I would say autistic burnout, be aware of what that looks like because it's very different from how neurotypical people experience burnout. Be aware of autistic burnout, be aware of those signs and recognize them, and be sure that you're talking about it with your team, your community, your friends, and be sure that what that looks like for yourself.

JOHN: Yeah. That was going to be one of the questions I have on my list here is how does that differ from burnout in more neurotypical area?

Oh, actually before we get too deeply into that, I did actually want to talk have, if you could quickly talk about neurodivergence and what that means to you just in case there are listeners out there that are maybe not entirely clear on what that means.

RIN: Absolutely. So neurodivergence, basically that's an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of things. It relates to autism, ADD, ADHD, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, Tourette’s—there's a whole boatload of other things and it's very individual just because one person relates to neurodivergence another way. And also, it can relate to aspects of mental health as well. It can also be acquired; it doesn't have to be something you were born with. For example, CPTSD, or complex posttraumatic stress disorder is another form of neurodivergence and you don't have that necessarily at birth. That's something you acquire and that is a neurotype.

I'd say that there are plenty of – every neurotype and every combination of neurotypes is very unique to the individual. Nobody has the same neurotype. So I would always caution you that just because one person that is neurodiverted, you know just that one person. Definitely, you know just one person.

I myself am autistic, I have ADHD, I have dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and CPTSD so I have a whole boatload of things. I also have some ignored disabilities in that I have a bunch of metal in my left leg, but you wouldn't know it by looking at me. [chuckles] So it's just one of those wonderful things.

I navigate the world as someone who is also fat and trans. So those are also things. Visually impaired. So that's another one and the list goes on, but they're just some of the many facets that make up me and none of them fully define who I am. They're just aspects of who I am as we all are. We all facets of things that make up a whole and I would say that none of us are static. I would always be aware of that, that we are always ever evolving as individuals.

MANDO: Oh, I love that. Yeah, because it's absolutely true. The person we are today is not who we were yesterday.

RIN: Absolutely.

MANDO: Probably won't be the person that we are tomorrow, right?

RIN: No, I like to tell people that if you met me before I was like 32, we've had some updates to the system and all the bad codes have been patched down.

[laughter]

Be aware that there are further releases coming in the pipeline.

MANDO: [laughs] Yeah. Got to keep an eye out.

RIN: Exactly. Continuous improvement, continuous deployment of self.

JOHN: I have a conference talk where I talk about if you've got unhandled traumas, or emotional stuff that's stuck in there, that's emotional debt just like you have technical debt and you need therapeutic techniques in whatever stripe to do the work there and that's an update. Like you're clearing out all that old stuff; it leaves more room for all your current processes to run, they get more CPU, more RAM, or space to expand and really be the you that you want to be rather than you that's stuck in forever ago.

RIN: That is so true. I feel like also therapy is something that is very individual as well and I think that individual journey is just another, that's so unique to every individual and everyone has their own unique journey with therapy and the therapeutic process. I think that's something that's really challenging for neurodivergent people as well is to find a therapist that will listen to you and that's been a rough one, finding a good therapist

JOHN: Yeah. With CPTSD as well, there are so many forms of therapy, or therapists who aren't informed enough to actually be able to treat you well and it's a challenge to find someone to work with. Once you've gotten to the point where you've decided you want to work with someone, actually getting someone that's going to do some good for you is hard.

RIN: Absolutely. I found a therapist that finally specializes in EMDR and I'm just, just starting to say, I might want to explore that, maybe, eventually. Let's talk about that. She's been really respectful, but it took me months to find her and I'm like, “Okay, okay. This is good.” EMDR is pretty cool. But again, that's super unique and just because it might work for me. Check back with me in a few months.

[laughter]

MANDO: You never know given how our brains are in fact, individual snowflakes and – [overtalk]

RIN: Exactly.

MANDO: You don't know what medication is going to do to you necessarily. You don't know what different kinds, like you were saying, Rin of therapeutic approaches. Just because it did a certain thing for one person doesn't mean it's going to do it for you.

RIN: Exactly. You could take one medication and it could be fine for you, but it makes somebody else break out in hives.

MANDO: Yeah. So Rin, what areas of the Kubernetes project are you closely connected to right now, if any?

RIN: Closely connected to right now, I would say I'm actually working on becoming a reviewer so I'm in a mentoring project wherein I'm getting some mentorship and being involved with other mentors and learning how to become a reviewer for Kubernetes. The good part is you can take that at your own pace and I fully tend to do that because I do have a day job and contributing to open source is not my bread and butter. So I would do that on my free time, very slowly, and learning hopefully, how to review and become a reviewer in Kubernetes.

Another place that I'm contributing actively, or plan to is in our annual contributors’ summit, sort of contributor celebration event. We had a bakeoff last year, or the year before—my years are kind of blurry together—that I actually won, which was awesome. [laughs]

Yeah, won that, which was rad. That was super fun. But it was tough. I was up against a really stiff competition and it was a challenge for sure, but that was a really fun event.

This year my friend, that came in second. It was a dead tie; we actually had a vote off. Anyway, we're both going to be judging this year, if we have another bakeoff. So that's something that I'm hoping to be involved in and I will be. If we do end up having another bake off, I will be a judge on that and that is something that I'm hoping comes to fruition. Fingers crossed because that's cooking show judge has been my dream since I was a kid.

[laughter]

Please let this happen, please.

MANDO: Awesome.

JOHN: Yeah, can't go wrong with that.

RIN: I love it. It was during peak pandemic so we couldn't do it in person, but I wish we could have because it would've been so fun. It would've been just – and it was really, it was so fun. Even virtual, it was. We were all on Zoom and just cooking and it was chaotic, but it was fun and just getting to hang out with a bunch of my favorite people. Like I had somebody come up to me two weeks ago and they're like, “My kid thinks that you are their hero because the cake that you made at the bakeoff had candy that came out of it. It was a piñata cake and my kid loves you.” I'm like, “This is the best day of my life.”

[laughter]

MANDO: Oh.

[laughter]

JOHN: That's what you want to be known for.

RIN: I know, right. If I'm known for anything, please let be the piñata cake, I'm begging you.

MANDO: Well, best of luck that you'll be able to put another one together.

RIN: I know, right? Yeah, that's where I'm working is that area of being mentored to learn how to become a reviewer. I poke my hat in SIG counter backs, but I actually have taken a little bit of time off from open source because I am trying to focus all my new job, my new role here at Camunda. I want to learn to become a reviewer and be more active in that reviewer process. Also, I’m a mentor for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as often as I can be. So I try to do that.

So yeah, that's where I'm most active and of course, I spoke at the last KubeCon + CloudNativeCon that just happened and I throw my hat in the ring for speaking every now and again at KubeCon. So in terms of being active in Kubernetes right now, I'm on that mentor short path and I'm taking it slow, but I've got to balance my time and I dip my head in every now and again and I try to do my best to be welcoming and positive when people do see me and they go, “Hey, it’s Rin.”

MANDO: Heck yeah. What did you speak on at the last?

RIN: At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, I did the DevX Day co-located event for building secure open source communities from the ground up.

MANDO: Nice.

RIN: And then I did at CloudNativeCon itself was how did I get started in open source using your Kubernetes contributions, or building off your Kubernetes contributions to further your career sort of thing. I'm blanking on any of my own talk, but that's fine.

MANDO: Oh.

[laughter]

Yeah, absolutely.

RIN: Yeah, that's fine. Everything's fine.

MANDO: [laughs] That's something that I've seen, or at least I've felt like I've seen a shift in the way people understand open source contribution. And it might just be me getting older, but it seems to me and correct me if I'm wrong, or if you feel different, but it seems to me like people are walking into doing open source contributions now with maybe their eyes wide open a little bit more than they used to. What I mean by that is they're coming into these kind of contribution spaces looking not only to see how they can make – how they can improve the community and contribute to the community, I should say.

But they're also approaching it with a solid eye on like, how can they use this to further their career? How can they use this to get a better job? How can they use this to move into maybe a different direction that they were originally kind of started off in, or use it as a way to get their foot in the door? Maybe more of, I don't know, mutually beneficial path as opposed to the older school “altruistic path” of like, you're going to contribute open source software for the betterment of the community and then Apple takes your code and makes a bunch of money off of it and you're just kind of sitting around wishing you had more money.

RIN: That is true and that's something that I've had to conversations with a few people about now, about paying maintainers and saying we need to support our maintainers and make this experience better. I don't know what's going to come out of that conversation, but it's an ongoing one. Not my project, but I'm talking to people that are organizing a project around that so fingers cross that comes to fruition, because I'm always of the mind that we need to thank maintainers and pay maintainers. There's a GitHub sponsor button. It does great things, use it.

But in terms of people coming into open source with their eyes wide open, I think so. I think that's true. But I also think that yes, people used to contribute for altruistic reasons. You did that because you love the project, or because you want the maintainers to have an easier time, or because you genuinely see something wrong and you know how to fix the IT, or whatever. But I think that there's also a case for the fact that open source software contribution is a way for people that don't necessarily have access to a computer science career background sort of education, or they can't clear those gatekept hurdles to get involved and say, “No, I am enough and here's how.”

MANDO: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely and it was a refrain early on in my experience with open source was that this was a way, a path, a potential path and you would hear stories of folks who are coming from non-traditional backgrounds contributing to open source and then getting hired by some company based on their open source contributions.

RIN: That's what happened to me.

MANDO: Yeah. Do you feel like that's something that's well understood kind of in the – and this is so hard to say because I was thinking in the community of people who want to break into technology, but don't come from a traditional background. But okay, what cohort of people is that? [chuckles]

RIN: It's starting to be. It's starting to be because people like myself and a lot of people in the Kubernetes community and a lot of people in the broader open source community are saying if you come from a nontraditional background, make sure that you have your open source contributions on your LinkedIn, on your resume. Call it out, make sure that when you are applying for jobs, they know about it. Tell people and never stop telling people. Document those wins and say, “I have contributed to the following projects. These are my skills. This is what I'm doing. Here's my GitHub. Here's everything that I've done and the ways that I'm active in the community that might not necessarily be code. Here's the meetups I'm running. Here's the special interest group meetings I attend. Here's the projects that I'm helping on. Here's the mentoring I'm doing, or the mentoring I'm receiving,” et cetera.

MANDO: When we're talking about this area of technology specifically, like DevOps, DevSecOps that have that part of the community, in my mind that is a little bit of a, I don't know, harder task to experiment and play with this stuff on your own as opposed to sitting down and writing a Rails project, or a Spring project. Like there's more involved, in my mind, to doing DevOps-y kind of stuff, like building a lab and things like that.

Rin, what's your experience in helping people who aren't – maybe who are interested in doing that kind of work, but don't really know where to start. Like, do you point them toward like, I don't even know anymore. I know that there was MiniKube used to be a way that you could get a small Kubernetes cluster running on your laptop. What are the options for folks now?

RIN: Yeah, MiniKube is still a thing as far as I know. But for me, in terms of DevSecOps, where I actually turn people to is I'm actually a board member for The Diana Initiative, which is a non-profit for gender diverse individuals in technology that's focused on information security, DevSecOps, et cetera. They have an annual conference and they have a wonderfully active Slack full of a couple thousand people at least. And that's where I tell people to hang out and submit CFPs and generally meet that community and get them involved.

And I say, the CFP is going to be open in January, please submit. If you are a gender diverse person and interested in InfoSec, DevSecOps, et cetera, cybersecurity, all of those wonderful things, submit to The Diana Initiative. We'd love to read your CFP. [laughs]

JOHN: No, that's fantastic to have a spot that helps people land. That says, “This is for you. This is where you can come get that feedback on joining community, starting your speaking career, starting your open source contributions.”

RIN: Absolutely. And for that security side, it's full of just such helpful people, like the people that I met in The Diana Initiative InfoSec community are some of the most helpful people that I've ever met in this industry and they are people that you would never think would take 2 minutes to talk to you that have given me time out of their days to help me and to say, “Hey, here's some options.” I've met wonderful friends and wonderful community members. It's just a great place to be and they're always really helpful and really inspiring.

I'm glad to be a part of that community, be on that board, and to push that initiative forward into getting more gender diverse people, more non-binary people, more trans people be involved in that community and saying there's a place in for you in cybersecurity, there's a place for you in DevSecOps.

In terms that projects to work on. Honestly, for me, I'd say look at things like Aqua Security’s Trivy. How can you implement security scanning into tools that you're already using? You don't have to reinvent the wheel; look at how you can use DevOps and DevSecOps tools into things that you're already using.

MANDO: I love that. That's fantastic. Absolutely one of the things that is a constant struggle, especially when you're talking about building containerized workloads. How do you make sure that the containers that your engineers are building are running on the latest version of the operating system that they're pulling in, or make sure that they're doing the dependency scanning to make sure that they're not releasing something that has a recently discovered CVE?

All that work that you were talking about in the beginning, Rin beginning of the episode, the stuff that you had done spreading that gospel, [chuckles] if you will, to your engineering team, or I guess, your engineering friends, or whatever. That does sound like a pretty interesting and I don't know, I guess, relatively low friction way to start. You don't have to shove that in the middle of a process. You can kind of do that out of band and roll it out slowly rather than having to say, “We're going to stop the world and do this incredibly intrusive security audit and no one can release software until this third-party auditor has come through and gone through things.” Right?

RIN: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And in terms of auditing, that's another thing where people that have non-traditional backgrounds can get involved because you can be involved in an audit and not necessarily have to write code. You can look at docs. You can review things that you have access to. It depends on who your CSO is. It depends on your cybersecurity team. You can help them write the documentation. You can help them write their findings. You can help them check their grammar and their reports, et cetera. You can still help. Even if you necessarily aren't writing that hard cybersecurity code, you can still help.

JOHN: You mentioned mentoring at KubeCon and I'm curious is that mentoring first time speakers coming in, or is that mentoring attendees of the conference?

RIN: That is actually mentoring attendees of the conference and I will drop a link to that. KubeCon pod mentoring. “Pod mentoring gathers a group of mentors to help people get their Kubernetes-related questions answered quickly and efficiently.” So where I usually sit is in that community track, that's where I come in is I mentor in the community track because that's where I have a lot of expertise is the community side.

But there's people in – there's a technical track. There's a whole bunch of other things and people ask really – they ask some really solid questions and it's pretty great. It's available during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events. You have to register for it individually for the event to be eligible for mentoring, but it's really cool. They're not run by Contributor Experience, actually run by the CNCF and Linux Foundation. They're not run by SIG Contributor Experience, but they do advise and the SIG Contributor Experience members do help out such as myself. So that is a CNCF/Linux Foundation initiative and it's great. I love doing it. Something that I will always do if I have time at every KubeCon I go to.

JOHN: That's so interesting because what you described there is completely different from what I was imagining, but in a way that's really interesting to me because I'm part of the scholarship organizing group at Ruby Central. So we do RubyConf and RailsConf.

RIN: Oh, cool.

JOHN: And so we have a scholarship where we get people who are either brand new and underrepresented to tech – [overtalk]

RIN: I know that.

JOHN: For scholarships to the conference. But then we also pair them up with a guide so that they have a conference buddy, someone who's more experienced, who possibly knows a bunch of people, can help introduce them, and also help just get plan through what they're going to do and get the most out of the conference. That was sort of what I was thinking.

As far as mentoring goes, we don't have anything like that in the Ruby conference world that I'm familiar with, where we have that technical question and answer like, “Hey, I'm stuck on this problem,” or “I don't really understand how this thing works.” That's a really interesting way of also like bringing developers in and helping support at them that I hadn't heard about and so, now I'm sort of spitting in my mind about what we could do there.

RIN: The good news is it's open source and you can use it as a framework.

JOHN: [laughs] Awesome.

RIN: If you want any help, I'm happy to help. That's something that I love doing and like I said, I'm getting interested in Ruby and poking around with Ruby and GitHub Actions, who knows maybe I could be a mentee this time.

JOHN: Yeah.

[laughter]

RIN: Switch it on me. I could actually get some help. [laughs]

But starting a mentorship program such as this one in any community, I think is really valuable because you have time for people to ask those questions and say, “I'm stuck,” and be in that supportive environment where they're not going to get downloaded on Stack Overflow, or some other terrible place and they're not going to get judged relentlessly. They can come to that safe space and get answers from the people that are actually doing the work on a daily basis and that might have more experience in a particular area and can help them get unstuck, or at least push them further towards a resolution.

JOHN: Yeah. That's super fantastic. I do some individual mentoring with people outside of the conference and I can definitely, in that experience, I can see how so often it would be so valuable to them if there was that technical resource where it's like senior developer on demand where you can go ask the questions like, “I don't quite work how this thing is doing for me,” or “Here's my code, why doesn't it do what I think it does?” I think that would make for a wonderfully welcoming community.

RIN: I agree. And I think making those community is welcoming. It's just a concept of, like we said, in the beginning of the show, continuous action, continuous improvement. Nothing is static; it always evolves over time.

JOHN: Cool. I think the other question I had was around again, working with so many people who are new to the industry and I think lot of them here, especially in the bootcamps. “You should have some open source on your resume. It's going to help out do the thing,” like we were saying earlier. And I hear the next thing out of their mouth is, but I have no idea where to start. I don't know what projects are out there and accepting which ones have been groomed with issues that are suitable for new developers. You don't have to be Mr. Expert, or Mrs. Expert to go in and jump on those issues and actually solve them and start getting that contribution count up.

So do you have any advice for people to sort of like, “Oh, I'm a bit lost in this whole world. Where is a good place to start looking, or how do I evaluate a project once I am interested to find out if it's going to toxic, or welcoming?”

RIN: I would say, first things first, always make sure that a project you're contributing to has a Code of Conduct and read it. Sign their Contributor License Agreement. If they have one, sign that CLA. Make sure that you adhere to that Code of Conduct, do your best to be a good human, just be a good person and if they have a CRC lined up – and CRC stands for Code of Conduct. If they have that Code of Conduct lined up, you know what you're in for, what to be is expected of you, what is expected of the people that you're going to be working with.

So read that and then from there, I would say, check out the issues. Are they labeled? Do they have that good first issue label? Are they using it well? And if they're not, see if you can go at it to some issues that you think are good first issues. That's a good place to start, too.

MANDO: You mentioned CLAs there. Real quick, could you give our listeners a quick definition of what a CLA is?

RIN: I can. CLA actually stands for Contributor License Agreement and it's an agreement that a lot of open source projects would ask that you sign and some people like them, some people don't, we don't have time to get into that. [chuckles] But CLAs in general are a tributed relations agreement that says by signing this, you are contributing to this project open source and it's a whole bunch of legal jargon. Essentially, read it. But that's basically what it is. It's an agreement between yourself and the project that you're contributing to that says you can do these things, but not necessarily some other things.

MANDO: Are there any things in the Code of Conducts, or the Contribute License Agreement that you think people should keep an eye out for? The things you have seen in the past that you'd equate to being like a red flag.

RIN: I would say not having a code of conduct. [laughs]

MANDO: Fair enough, yeah.

RIN: Is kind of a red flag. I'm sure that there's some projects even that might not have a code of conduct in our community up. I'd like to hope they all do. But on the other hand, it's not necessarily something that you can force people to do. It's something where you can say, “We recommend that you have this, we would prefer that you have this,” but we can't force anyone to have it. We would like to hope that people do. A lot of projects do have those, what they call default community health files, where they've automatically any repo that is created – actually in the community hub, if you create a repo from our template repo, you well automatically get a Code of Conduct IMD generated. So that is good. We have that in place that says you have to buy this Code of Conduct if you would like to be a participant in this organization. So we do have to adhere to our Code of Conduct to be a part of the community hub. So that is very important. [laughs]

But I would say not having one, or just not going to rattle off the many lists of things that would red flag because that's individual from me, what red flags for me are, I would say use your best judgment. If someplace feels unwelcoming, or seems like it's overly judgmental, or is just a negative place full of people that are saying things that aren't positive and not aren't welcoming, I would maybe not.

MANDO: Yeah. That's a really good point.

JOHN: And you would see those discussions and say, GitHub issues, like as things are going back and forth?

RIN: Exactly. Yeah. You watch the issues. There’s Stack Overflow, or Reddit, or wherever that discussion is taking place, or Twitter. You'll know if that conversation is ingenuine in any way.

MANDO: That's a really good thing to mention that when you're deciding to contribute your time and effort to a community, take a little bit of time. Just because you like using a piece of software doesn't necessarily mean that the community might be as open and welcoming as you would hope. It's not necessarily indicative of a community that you would want to spend time interacting inside. So it's worth going to Reddit and it's worth going and checking out their GitHub issues, or whatever they're using to track it. Look to see if they have a Slack, or a Discord. Just spend a little bit of time trying to get your thumb on the pulse of the community. That's a really good thing.

RIN: Absolutely. I would say try to get your feel for community before you start contributing. Get the lay of the land, explore some special interest groups, explore the Slack, see how things are run, figure out how things are done, how people respond to issues, what that contributor experience is like, see how people talk to each other, see how they treat each other and say, “Is this a place that I want to invest my time?”

JOHN: Yeah. Better to do that upfront than to have spent months working on code and then trying to perfect your submissions, and then discovering that it's going to be a real fight to get through your thing. Even though it's not that big a deal, or if you just getting being dismissive, or in intent, or whatever the dysfunctions of the community are. Knowing that beforehand, this is probably really valuable.

RIN: Exactly.

JOHN: It's funny that reminded me of – completely tangential. A friend of mine was trying to figure out what kind of dog breed to get and so, he spent a whole bunch of time going into different dog owner, like breed owner communities to see what the people that owned those kind of dogs were like, and use that as another data point to say like, “Oh God, I would never hang out with those people. I'm not going to get one of those dogs.” [laughs]

MANDO: It's not bad. Isn't that bad at all.

RIN: That's smart. Honestly, I wish I would've done that. That's really smart.

[laughter]

JOHN: So we've come to the time on our show when we do what we call our reflections, which is basically just each of us is going to reflect on this wonderful conversation we just had and talk about what it is that's going to stick with us, or we're going to be thinking about for the next couple of days, or new ideas things that we found.

And for me, I think looking into this different concept of technical mentorship versus social mentorship and especially in the conference context, but it could go into a lot of different areas, too and ways to expand that level of support within a community so that you not only have social support and mentorship on that level, but also, on the technical side, just to make that even more welcoming. I love that idea and I'm going to keep thinking about what we can do in the communities I'm in.

MANDO: Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.

The thing that struck me, I had thought about it some. It’s something that keeps kind of rolling around in my head here and there, but the idea of all of the different ways that we have, as a community, to allow folks from non-traditional backgrounds, maybe non-computer science backgrounds and how it's a bit of – it's a responsibility on us and Rin, you touched on this and this is what really made it stick in my head. It's a responsibility on us who are in the community to make sure that the wins that folks get, who come from non-traditional backgrounds, make sure that we keep track of those and make sure that we celebrate them so that we provide that welcoming sense of community, John, like you're saying. That we provide a way to say, “These are some paths that people have taken.” You can see kind of the fruits of their labor and where they started from and where they've gotten to and they didn't have to go through the traditional path.

It's on us to make sure that those things are brought out into the light and other people get to see them so that they can if not be inspired, at least have something that they can stumble across on the internet when they're feeling maybe a little down, or discouraged, or I'm never going to get in. I'm never going to get that job. They can come across these wins, maybe it'll give them a lift in the sales at the right time.

RIN: Absolutely. I'm going to be thinking about [chuckles] just continuous improvement and being intentional about where you spend your time, being intentional about helping others, taking time out of your day, but also understanding that you also sometimes helping others looks like helping yourself. It's that whole adage: put your mask on first like they do on the airplane. That whole concept is important to understand that you need to be aware and check yourself of burnout and make sure intentionally how you're spending your time and remember that you and everyone around you can hopefully always improve as people and try to uplift people and make this community better. Leave it better than we found it.

MANDO: Beautiful.

JOHN: Yeah, for sure.

MANDO: 100%. Yeah.

JOHN: And actually that's my post-reflection reflection is also that you brought up the distinction between typical burnout and autistic burnout. That's definitely something I'm going to be reading up on because I had no idea there was a distinction there and it sounds like a very important one.

MANDO: Yeah, yeah. Me neither. But it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense that there would be distinct differences there and as folks in the community, this stuff's on us.

RIN: Totally. It's on all of us to just do better, and learn and be better, and research and find what we can to just make this a better place to be at the end of the day and I guess, our takeaway is what are you going to do to make this a better place?

JOHN: All right, that wraps us up for today. Thank you, everyone for listening to the show.

Special Guest: Rin Oliver.

Sponsored By:

• Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.

Support Greater Than Code

01:53 - Michael’s Superpower: Networking and Community Building

10:36 - Defining Mental Health

20:09 - Involving Gaming in Engaging in Talk Therapy

31:13 - “Age-Appropriate Horror”

38:45 - Social Media, Media, and Mental Health: Curate & Engage Responsibly

50:41 - The Geek Therapy Community

55:16 - Connect with Mike!

59:14 - Intergenerational & Epigenetic Trauma

Reflections:

John: Coyote & Crow Role Playing Game + Using Role Playing and Game Playing to treat mental health.

I’m Begging You To Play Another RPG (Facebook Group)

Mae: The pragmatic approach to seeing where people are and meeting them there.

Casey: Helping middle schoolers talk to friends in a structured way.

Mike: The hardest part about doing something is helping people know you’re doing it.

Tall Poppy Syndrome

Bristol Children’s Hospital: Oath of Accessibility: “Anyone can be a hero. Everyone deserves to go on an adventure.”

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

To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.

JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 258. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Mae.

MAE: Hi, there! Also with us is Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here today with Mike, The Nerd Therapist.

Mike is a mental health counselor from Perth, Western Australia, and he does geeky therapy. He runs programs in which they use video games and tabletop games in therapy like Civ, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Dungeons and Dragons.

Mike also writes the Pop Culture Competence project, which is a resource for parents, teachers, and therapists and seeks to boost professionals’ awareness and understanding of the themes and applications of Nerd Culture.

Welcome, Mike.

MIKE: Hey, thanks for having me.

CASEY: All right. It's time for that question we prepared you for. We want to know, Mike to kick off the episode, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

MIKE: My superpower, I'd say I've been told by people whose opinions I trust is networking. In my last job, I was actually known to a few people before I even got there. And then in my previous job, when I worked in school counseling, I knew most of the applicants for new roles and I knew before the manager of our agency knew that they'd been picked up for jobs.

Yeah, I love community and I found this out after recovering from social anxiety, that I just love community and building networks and meeting people. And that's evolved very naturally into creating professional spaces and working in professional spaces and just getting to know and to meet people.

CASEY: That's awesome. How did you acquire this skill, networking and community building?

MIKE: When I see a need, I'm driven to fill it, which that may actually have been a better answer to begin with, but hey, we're committed to this answer.

So during my degree, we had an opportunity to do some training in a program called Mental Health First Aid. It's a really good piece of training, it's meant for like bystander civilian level people, but it's a professional grade training. It's really good. My university said, “You have to organize this. So just organize this on your own time, but we thought this might be cool to share with you.” So I contact the trainer and she goes, “Listen, it's 2 grand to book the weekend, but if you can get group of 20 people together, it's a 100 per person.” So I'm like, “Yeah, okay.” So I got 20 people together and we did that and then I sat there at the end of the second day of training. I'm like, “We could do this again.”

About three months later, we did some more mental health training. We did some severe critical mental health training. A couple months later, we did it again with a special victims’ ward of our local hospital and then we did probably about four training courses that year. We actually were all in our second, or third year of our degrees, but we were as qualified as graduates to actually deliver programs. It's kind of, I discovered that it is able to get out there and get people together to accomplish something.

MAE: I love that Mike, I find also sometimes I want to stay in community, but I'm so oriented to goals and outcomes [chuckles] that I try to do it around projects. So I'm a much more reliable buddy on keeping in touch if we're working on something together. I'm curious, it sounds similar to what you said, but maybe different. I don't know if it resonates with you.

MIKE: No, I hear you. If I'm in proximity to someone, or we're working on something, I find a way easier to keep in touch. Especially when we're with workmates, or studying, or something, I do find it better if there's kind of not a reason to give someone a message, but I find it easy to stay engaged if we're working towards something. That community of professionals that I'd actually built up, the long-term goal was to become a volunteering agency. But unfortunately, just being university students, what we had planned was a little bit it out of our scope and no one would insure us.

[laughter]

R: The bureaucracy bites.

MIKE: It does. It was also my call because the original plan was to put mental health workers. So we've got a part of our city is just devoted to nightclub and the overall plan was to put mental health crisis workers in the nightclub district so that some drunk girl gets kicked out of a club, one of our team can make sure she gets into a taxi safely, or just someone's having a moment as a former nightclub bartender—nights don't always go well.

So just having some Mental Health First Aid trained people in the city that can deescalate and bring people down to a safe place, that was the goal. But unfortunately, that also involved putting a whole bunch of 18- to 22-year-olds in the nightclub district on weekends and it was a logistical nightmare to do that ethically and safely.

CASEY: I think I've heard of bartender training, or professionals. Oh, the specific story I heard of was training barbers, I think it was in New York City, to have this Mental Health First Aid triage, or connecting people to services that would be helpful for them. So this idea is really powerful, I think.

MIKE: It is really good because it's really helpful because there's two types of people that people tell everything, that's barbers, or hairdressers and bartenders and that was kind of the goal. We actually have a similar program here in Australia where we're teaching hairdressers and barbers, we're actually providing them domestic violence training so that they can recognize signs and know who to talk to next.

Because if there are people in society who are being told everything because it's very intimate physician, it would be a missed opportunity to do some good, but also to provide these people some training so they can handle it because as a bartender, I heard a lot of stuff that would be challenging to hear if I wasn't already an experienced mental health professional while I was doing it. So these programs, I love that they're recognizing this is a thing that happens and I'm also really hoping that they're teaching these people how to actually support themselves when they're hearing the rough stuff.

CASEY: Yeah. I wonder what percentage of bartenders and barbers get any kind of training? 1% would be better than I would've thought a year ago.

MIKE: Honestly, I wouldn't know. I haven't been something I've been engaged with. My city, Perth, we've got a big focus on mental health at the moment. There's a few charities working in the industry, trying to support people from an employee perspective, but also from an industry perspective because bartending doesn't lead to the healthiest lifestyles.

JOHN: I was thinking, it reminds me of there's an organization called MAPS that does research into psychedelics and they provide counselors for example, at Burning Man, or at other places where people are going to be doing a lot of these things, trained in dealing with people having problems while they're on psychedelics and so, they were able to talk people down and keep them centered and get them into a good place. I think it's so powerful to acknowledge that people are going to be doing these things.

MIKE: Yeah.

JOHN: People are going to be doing drugs, they're going to be going out in the evening, they're going to have a night out. But they're not always going to go well and having a support system right there is, I think so important versus waiting till it spirals so much more than it would otherwise. And then police are involved and every goes downhill from there.

MIKE: Oh, a 100%. It's all about the harm reduction. I actually didn't know they did that. That's a really great initiative.

MAE: Love it. I was going to bring up Burning Man. Mutual Aid and so many different community conveners are in touch with how much mental health is connected to all the other things. My dad owns a biker bar and I'm 5 feet tall and it has been interesting to bartend there in rural upstate New York, figure out how to navigate the after-midnight hours. [laughs]

MIKE: That would be interesting. I was once contacted about providing mental health and emotional support at a BDS&M night and that would've been a really interesting – unfortunately, I was busy because when you are bartending, you're already working weekends. But I liked that the organizers were looking for some support for these events and they ended up doing the Mental Health First Aid training as well.

JOHN: Nice.

MIKE: Which was really cool.

CASEY: That's awesome. Yeah. I'm thinking about all this in the sales funnel framework so like, how do you get people into the top of the funnel in the first place.

[laughter]

It's often the missing step.

MIKE: Yeah.

CASEY: You’ve got to get people exposed to the idea that they could, take the training, and then they have to be interested and they have to decide to do it and go to the barrier of scheduling and paying. And then same for applying it; it’s like a process. I love that we're talking about the top of the funnel because a lot of the conversations in the bottom of the funnel, like go to a therapist. I mean, as a series of funnels but.

MIKE: Yeah.

CASEY: Very top of the stop post one.

MIKE: And that's the big part of the conversation is a lot of people don't know these services exist. Like Mental Health First Aid, if you go to any given Mental Health First Aid training course, it will doubtless be mostly filled with people who work in mental health, or be people who work near mental health, like teachers when it's designed to be a bystander level course, it's designed for people. So if you were [chuckles] literally anyone who doesn't work in mental health, that's who the course is for and getting people out there, who can actually provide support, is so important for that ground level stuff so we can head off a crisis.

MAE: I wonder if it might be useful to talk about some definitions for a moment and people who don't identify as having any mental health challenges, or know anybody in their life, it can sound really big. So just to say, maybe from your perspective, how would you define mental health and my opener leading question caveat is that I don't understand how we all don't just have [laughs] orientations toward external support and there's a lot of stigma stuff. Just hoping to break down some of that for any listeners who have us experience with this whole framework could have some access points.

MIKE: The problem I experience with mental health is that people only ever use the phrase mental health to refer to times when something's not working correctly, or when something's wrong like a crisis. It very rarely comes up in terms of positive mental health and in terms of things going well; it's always disordered. That's a problem because it would just be nice to not have the phrase mental health be synonymous with not doing well. Mental…

[laughter]

Mental anguish.

CASEY: Yeah. Well said. That sounds like it would be the literal term for it: health of the mental [inaudible] – [overtalk]

MIKE: It does.

CASEY: But it is not.

MIKE: And semantically, it is. But when we're talking about mental health trauma, it's always talking about disorders, or experiences like trauma and it becomes really challenging because we see a lot of these big conversations and it's harder than it has to be because a lot of people self-invalidate. They'll go, “Oh, I'm just experiencing this. It's not as bad as what this person's going through, or this news article I've seen.”

I guess, the one thing I tell a lot of people is that your experiences are valid and what your feelings are. Just because you don't have it as bad as the next person doesn't mean you still don't have it bad. We have this idea called dialectics, which basically distills down to two seemingly contradictory concepts can peacefully coexist and that in this context with you, other people have it bad and I can also have it bad even though doesn't seem to be as bad as them.

MAE: Yeah. I really love moving away from comparative definitions [chuckles] into self-assessment stuff. Is that where you were going to go, John?

JOHN: Well, I was noting that I frequent the CPTSD subreddit for complex PTSD and the number of people in there who have had truly horrific experiences that are having that same argument with themselves. “Oh, what?”

MIKE: Yeah.

JOHN: “I wasn't actually murdered as a child so, other people had it –” and it's really heartbreaking to see someone having had such experience still invalidating them and still thinking they're not worthy of treatment and support.

MIKE: I attended a training when I worked in schools and some of the participants there were from a very prestigious private school in my state. They were teachers, they were year leaders, they were, I think the principal was there as well. It was close to a third of the class from this one high school and the thing they all said their students faced was everyone just assumes they don't have problems because they're rich, or everyone assumes their problems can't be solved with money. Now we can solve a lot of problems with money, don't get me wrong. But it really just brought to mind this comparison that these privileged kids must be experiencing. It would be hard for them to go because people are very invalidating of that because they have means and access. This is just a really interesting thing that I'd never really considered.

MAE: Are you familiar with the study about the amount of money at which point more money does not lead to more happiness? Like, there's basic needs and some comfort, and then after that, the more money really does not have a direct correlation to happiness, but below that, for sure.

MIKE: I did. I only read that a couple weeks ago. It was really cool. It was titled like “Money does buy happiness, but it suffers from diminishing returns,” and I really enjoyed reading that because it's true. A lot of problems, a lot of issues that a lot of people face is systemic and it's financial. There's a whole lot of stresses out there that wouldn't be stresses if we could just afford the way to solve it. But unfortunately, people don't always get that, or understand that. We get these trite little sayings like, “Money doesn't buy happiness.” It's like, yeah, but it puts food on the table and it buys medicine and it pays for therapy.

JOHN: It buys a lot of happiness up to a point. [laughs]

CASEY: It's a more nuanced phrase, less catchy maybe.

JOHN: Yeah.

CASEY: But I'd rather have that one.

MIKE: Mm.

MAE: My life and experience of life and other did change when I could afford my bills and I didn't have to check my bank account every day to figure it out. And the amount of hours that I would have to spend in order to make sure that my bills were taken care of like, to be poor is significantly more expensive.

MIKE: Mm hm. Oh, it is.

MAE: Which compounds mental health challenges as well.

MIKE: It's like that line from… Well, it’s not a line, it's like a whole page, but it's from a Discworld, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and it goes into the Boots theory of poverty. A rich man can spend $50 on boots that will last him all year, but a poor man will have to spend $10 a month on boots that will only last him the month, but he can't afford that $50. All he can afford is the $10 so it's more expensive to be in poverty because you have to buy poor quality items.

JOHN: Yeah. I'd always wish that some high-powered economist could actually crunch the numbers on what the curve is like, at what level of income does it stop being more expensive to be poor and then I assume that there's the opposite curve where the more money doesn't do any. But I know there's a curve there and it would be super curious to know what that looks like.

MIKE: That would be really interesting to read. I'm not a big money person. I don't like those conversations. I really struggle with business and finance sort of stuff. But I would read that article in a heartbeat to figure out where is the line.

CASEY: I want to hear the original one adjusted for inflation, too. The original study saying money doesn't buy happiness is probably old at this point. I think the dollar has doubled in, or halved in value since 1990 to today. Did you all know that? I look it up once in a while. I try to see the sodas I bought as a kid, how much are they inflated to today and it is $2, it used to be $1 for a soda. So, for all these studies, double it at this point, if you're not sure.

MAE: A comment on the money thoughts. There's this book, that's now a couple years old, circulating called Decolonizing Wealth. It's mostly focused on fundraising and the development, discipline and philanthropy and how all of that happens behind the scenes. But it's written by a man who is indigenous and has some really interesting takes on money and how and when and why it flows. I think he might appreciate that one, too, Mike.

MIKE: That would be an interesting read.

JOHN: Yeah, I think I want to track that down.

CASEY: Let’s link it. By the way, we also have noted that we will link Mental Health First Aid, which I encourage all the listeners to take. I haven't taken myself, but everyone who's taken it raves about it afterwards. It's so helpful. It's practical.

MIKE: It is such a good piece of training. I can't speak for other ones, but the provider I had came from a youth not-for-profit who are based in Melbourne on the other side of Australia. They come over to Perth, my city, to deliver it and I picked up more practical information in a 2-day course than I probably did at six months at uni. And that's speaking more about the quality of the course than the quality of my education. My uni was great, but the course was so – it was a big 2 days because you were covering some huge topics.

I always experience what I call a course hangover because it's 2 days of thinking about some really heavy stuff. So I always leave with migraines, but it is such a powerful skillset and I wish it was more available to the general public.

JOHN: Yeah. Actually, my company's making a big push to get people that training, which I'm super excited about.

MAE: Awesome!

CASEY: Brilliant.

MIKE: There's lots of different variants, too. So there's Mental Health First Aid is the standard, there's Children's Mental Health First Aid and all the different variants focus more on the issues that affect that group. So there's Children's Mental Health First Aid. I haven't done that one. There's Teen Mental Health First Aid that focuses a lot on anxiety and eating disorders. There's a Youth Mental Health First Aid, which is like everyone from 5 to 25, and that focuses a lot on substances, eating, and anxiety again. There's Older People's Mental Health First Aid. Again, I haven't done it, but it sounds really good. And there's even one, and I really want to do this, it's an Indigenous Australians Mental Health First Aid. It teaches how to be culturally appropriate in terms of mental health delivery.

MAE: Love all of this.

JOHN: Yeah. That's amazing

MAE: In listening to your bio, Mike, I couldn't help but think of, and I wonder if you could share a little bit about if you're familiar with her work and if it has some overlap, but Jane McGonigal's TED Talk about mental health and gaming. It's a little older now.

MIKE: I feel like I've watched that TED Talk. Is that the How Gaming Can Make a Better World one?

MAE: Yeah.

MIKE: I have watched it.

MAE: She's got a couple, actually and she was one of the early proponents of involving gaming in engaging people in perhaps non-standard talk therapy ways and the gamification of positive healthy habits.

MIKE: Yeah.

MAE: Which sounds right up your alley. So regardless if you're familiar with her, [chuckles] maybe if you want to tell us a little bit more about some of your applications and approaches.

MIKE: Sure thing. I do remember watching that TED Talk when I was at uni and I thought it was amazing.

Oh, for the last little bit over a year, I've run Nerd Therapy. So I started off as a counselor working in schools like elementary schools and probably September last year. So we've got our own like – therapists have a million Facebook groups for location, for specialty, for their needs, just really, if you can think of a niche reason to have a group, there is one.

I'm in a few of them and those recurring questions about, “Hey, what's Fortnite, what's Minecraft, what's Pokémon,” and a lot of the answers they were being given were actually pretty disingenuous. Someone literally called Pokémon a children's dogfighting game, which isn’t wrong, but it was also completely inaccurate.

[laughter]

Pokémon consenting at the very least, it's a very healthy industry. And I've realized these people who are working with kids were getting very tarnished views of the media these kids are engaging in and it's going to be hard to engage in a positive way if you actually have told and you believe that children are engaging in recreational murder.

So I started writing up whole essays in Facebook comments. I was that person and it was getting tiring finding them again and reposting them because I didn't have the foresight to save them to a Word document for reuse later. So I made a website and I called it The Nerd Therapist and it was, “Hey, this is Fortnight. This is a simplified overview of what it is, here is why people like it.”

I really enjoyed writing that segment because it made me think that Fortnight's one of the most inclusive games ever made in terms of access because it'll run on almost any device and everyone can play together. So you've got like that one kid in the friend group who doesn't have the newest console, or has an Xbox and all his friends that have PlayStations, that kid doesn't get left out. I love that because that would happen with a lot of games.

I write why they're into it, what makes it fun, and finish it off with a segment like, “Okay, here's how you use it in therapy.” You can use it to build communication skills. You can use it to build teamwork abilities. You can just use it to think about mental health and defenses in your own strategies. There's a lot of symbolism and don't talk so much smack about the Battle Royale when everyone's favorite book for a few years was about a Royale book by the name of The Hunger Games.

I create this project and for a few months I ran it in secret because I'm like, “You know what? I don't feel confident sharing that I'm doing this with people because I'm going to get called unprofessional.” It's going to get nasty because I'm out there telling this industry, these people with a very uncharitable view towards video games that they can actually think about video games and anime superheroes in a productive way.

I started that this September 4th last year and I'm yet to receive a single negative comment on the internet.

MAE: What?!

MIKE: Yeah.

[laughter]

Even that's after two Reddit AMAs and that's…

MAE: Wow.

MIKE: A hell of an achievement for anyone who gets the internet to any degree. So after about two, or three months, I went public with them like, “Okay, this is me. This is what I do.” I took the shot; I shot my shot. And then I got asked by someone who contacted me for the project for some advice, they go, “Have you ever do you run D&D as therapy?” And I sat there for a second and I'm thinking, why the hell don't I run D&S as therapy?

[laughter]

CASEY: Yeah.

MIKE: Because I'd read the studies, I'd read the awesome articles about people doing it, and I'm like, “Why the hell haven't I done this yet?” So I probably spent like a month reading through research and figuring out how to do—it was my obsession—and then I introduced it to the program and I started running D&D as therapy. And then I completely rebranded because I had a counseling practice at the time, but the Facebook page was very neutral earth tones, very touchy feely, it was kind of nice counselor, but very generic counselor and I just went, “No, this isn't me. I'm cosplaying as a therapist here. This isn't really who I am.” Had a lot of mountain imagery and I'm like, “You know what? No.”

So I rebrand, I become The Nerd Therapist and I changed my project's name to Pop Culture Competence because I'm advocating for movies, media in general, to be more recognized as an element of cultural understanding because at the moment, it's not. There isn't someone you can go to. There's a consultant for every cultural group. Every cultural religious group, there'll be someone in this community who runs a project, or organization so you can learn more about them and how to engage them in therapy.

But until this project started, I was not aware of and I still haven't found just a free, simple resource you can go to when you need to know about nerds. When you work in primary schools, they may not be nerdy, but every kid's playing Fortnite. So if your view of that is not charitable, it doesn't help your relationship with them and the kids can tell. Every little facial expression that an adult pulls that when they're hearing about games and they don't want to hear about games, the kids pick up on it and it hurts a little.

CASEY: Yeah.

MIKE: I actually got sent by a colleague, or friend, they’re working in the United States, actually have a list of phrases that will shut down any conversation with a gamer and it was really cool to read because it's basically a list of nerdy microaggressions. It was really fascinating to read and I'll share some with you.

MAE: Yes, please. Yes.

MIKE: If you want to shut down a conversation with a gamer, “You play what now? Oh, I heard that game was violent.”

JOHN: Oh yeah.

CASEY: Oh, that's bad.

MIKE: Yeah. All that phrase is all you need to tell your kid that you don't actually care about what they're into is that you're just believing whatever's been on the news out it, or whatever other people have told you, and you're not willing to listen to them about why you are really just frigging thrilled that you figured out how to make something in Minecraft. It's digital Lego. You can't malign Minecraft. You can malign Notch who made Minecraft, but he's out of the picture now.

But I get a lot of calls from people whose kids have been invalidated and belittled by a therapist for playing games, or whose parenting skills have been brought into question by therapists for allowing them to play games. I've said this since I was about 8 years old, but I'm not going to take criticism on gaming from people who watch an equal amount of TV.

CASEY: Oh! Love it. [laughs]

MAE: I love thinking of you at 8 years old having that to say as well. [laughs]

MIKE: I was a mouthy 8-year-old

[laughter]

But it's that invalidation and it stops conversations from happening. So I started this project so I can at least boost understanding.

And probably the best article I wrote was the one that really pushed what I was willing to say was I did an article on Grand Theft Auto and that was a calculated risk because I'm like, “Okay, here's probably the most famous game for being kind of what people accuse it of being.” And I enjoyed GTA, but at the end of the day, it is what it is. So I wrote about it. I'm like, “Look, this is Grant Theft Auto. First, I have to start off by saying, ‘Look, I don't advocate for any of the in-game actions [chuckles] because of all the legal stuff. But if you want to start with it, this is what you can do.’”

I gave a brief rundown of the history and then I started talking about the plot of Grant Theft Auto V because GTA V has a plot. I also talked about the social commentary in it and the political commentary in it about how, especially in GTA V, crime isn't portrayed as particularly glamorous, or without risk. It's a game where a lot of people die simply for being involved with you.

I used it to talk about the socioeconomic determinants of crime and what leads people to do crimes and how it's way more than presented because GTA V actually gave us some storylines. You had Franklin who is just raised in the hood, raised in the cycle of gang violence, and trying to break out of it. And you had Michael who peaked in high school and never really managed and his only real thing that he could figure out was crime.

And then even again, finish off that article with here's how to use GTA's imagery to boost communication and teamwork, because you need to have a good cohesive team who communicates in order to pull off a heist.

That one was a tricky one to write because GTA is infamous and that article actually got some good reception. I got even got some messages from some people with really impressive job titles and they're like, “I've never thought about GTA in this way before,” and I'm like, “Yeah.”

CASEY: That's awesome. You were really taking the perspective of other people and including yourself, I guess, in this case. But what do people enjoy in this and how can it make sense to someone who doesn't get it? You're validating.

MIKE: Yeah, and that's what I try to do. That's what I try to say even for stuff I'm not a big fan of. Like, I'm not a huge fan of Five Nights at Freddy's, just not my kind of game, but I still did an article on it and I gave it it's validation. Oh, this is what it's about and also, while we're here, can we talk about how there's no kids horror.

Kids are seeking out horror content and they're having to go out of their age range because they don't make horror for kids and yeah, horror for kids would be incredibly tricky to pull off and it would be a huge niche, but it's also better than being greeted by a group of 3rd graders who've just watched Stephen King's It because I wouldn't even sit down and watch that movie. I don't like seeing kids get hurt. I don’t know how we'd get it done. But I just feel like kids like to be scared, like to be startled, they like suspense, they seek out horror. So we get a lot of kids into stuff like Five Nights at Freddy's, or Slender Man despite it being not appropriate at all and I just wish there was more age-appropriate horror for younger viewers.

MAE: Ooh. I love what you just said. Age-appropriate horror, [chuckles] that I do think is an untapped market right there, [laughs] market need. I personally like have always moved away from horror. Even as a kid, there was some movie, I don't remember what it was, but it ended up not being a scary movie in the end. I think it was the one where there were the little roller animals that – [overtalk]

JOHN: Oh, Critters?

MAE: Yes!

JOHN: Critters, yeah.

MAE: Yes, John, thank you. We went to the movies as a family and we were going to see Critters and I was like, “Mm I can't do it. It's too scary.” I left and instead, I went into the Jackie Gleason movie where he's dying. [laughs] Like this super heavy drama, that's where I went as a kid. But you're helping me because I do have and the older I get, the stronger it becomes; some judginess and aversion toward violence, hatred, and horror. I don't totally support my niece's 5-hour day TikTok habit, so.

[laughter]

There are ways in which I don't want to be like, “Boy, that rock and roll is really messing with the kids today.”

[laughter]

But I also, I don’t know, there's pieces in there that I don't love like the portrayals of women from the Grant Theft Auto posters I've seen, or there's stuff that I don’t know is awesome even when there's other things that are skills-based that we all could use more of.

MIKE: No, I hear that and that's another thing I address in the topic of my Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto posts. I'm like, “Look, these aren't for kids. These are not for kids. They are explicitly not for kids,” but kind of that acceptance of kids are playing them and we've got to look at what we can do in that scope if we're not stopping access entirely. That can be really challenging because yeah, GTA, it aims to be problematic.

[laughter]

And I still enjoy parts of it for what it is in that not a lot of games will just let you drive around a city without being incredibly boring and that's what – like, I've talked with a lot of parents whose younger kids play GTA, but it's not for the violence. It's not for killing. It's just for being let loose on a city with a car because there's not a lot of games where you can just kind of drive around a city and if there are, there's usually some sort of caveat, like you’ve got, in Crazy Taxi, your missions are only going to last for 90 seconds, or something.

This is kind of that free-roaming freedom and that's one of the things I do bring up is like, look, these aren't age-appropriate. Here's what they're getting out of it. Maybe let's think about some alternatives and unfortunately, there's not always alternatives. I always come back to stuff like Five Nights at Freddy's and the horror genre, and they're seeking out these age-inappropriate things because there isn't much age appropriate for them. One of my favorite movies when I was 8 was Starship Troopers and I still love Starship Troopers, but there's nothing kind of really in that big gung-ho military satire sci-fi for my age group at the time.

JOHN: Yeah, and I can't say that I'm any sort of expert in this, but one way to approach say, your 12-year-old niece comes to you saying how much they love Grant Theft Auto and they've been playing it 5 hours a week and whatever may like your reaction is like, “Well, okay, I can see there's fun stuff, but there's also this stuff that makes me cringy and I'm really uncomfortable with.” I'm thinking that that can actually be a point of communication.

MIKE: Yeah.

JOHN: Like you can relate to them about what they're doing and what they're enjoying about it and then you can say, “Well, what did you think about that other thing? Like, was that something you thought was cool, or were you a little uncomfortable, or?” You can use that to discuss, like you were saying, Mike, about the social determinants of crime in the world that it exists and you could start conversations on that because they're portrayed in the game world.

MIKE: Yeah. They are great prompts. It's like, “Hey, you've seen this thing happen in the game. Is that something you'd like to talk about?” And if you've got adults that a kid can trust to have that conversation, you can actually start conversations rather than end them. So if you hear a kid say, “Oh, I'm really into” – we'll keep going with Grand Theft Auto. “I'm really into Grand Theft Auto.” It's like, cool and instead of dumping on GTL saying, “Oh, that's not appropriate. Let's do something else.” Then you can actually start a conversation, go, “Yeah, how did you feel about that scene where Michael's daughter is trying to get onto a reality show and she's being exploited by Lazlow?”

You can talk about some of these really big topics if that's where you want to go and that's kind of at the end of every article, I talk about themes and it's, “Here's where you could go if you want to have a conversation, here's some of the topics you could go into.” I do a lot of values-based work and that's where we can look at where we can go from here. It's like, how do you have a conversation with people about using Among Us for instance, or what conversations can you start?

CASEY: My therapist friends, Among Us was their go-to last year.

MIKE: Hmm.

CASEY: It was also the zeitgeist. The most popular thing. But to do during therapy with kids was Among Us, totally.

MIKE: Yeah. I didn't use Among Us in the work, but I still have it on my phone and we just again, covered it in articles like, “Here's the conversations you can have with it. Here's how you talk about. Here's a way to look at intrusive thoughts as being this little imposter trying to tell you, you are what you're not.”

One game I'm currently playing – and again, looking at gaming and decision-making, one game I’m currently playing is Civilization VI and we're looking at values in terms of like hey, what kind of civ are you going to be? Are you going to look more at military? Are you going to look more economics, trade, politics? Where's your decision-making going and then you can look at decision-making by the turn. It's like hey, this city's been at war with you for a little while, you've been on war with it for a couple of turns now, what are you thinking of doing and you can look at why, what logic, and what values are driving your decisions.

MAE: Yeah, totally. And just for the record, I’m not an advocate of all that much censorship, but just well, what I usually say is, “Listen, Niecy, you are in charge of your brain and the stuff that you put in there, it affects how you think about yourself and others and so, it's up to you. There are things that you're going to be curious about and going to want to know about, but just as long as you're having a more meta view,” [chuckles] which I don't say it that way, but I think it's food. It's mental food, all the things that we engage ourselves in, these topics among them, and we can be healthy consumers of information to go back to that word, health, or we can eat lots of candy, which I definitely do sometimes.

MIKE: And that's a 100% accurate especially in terms of, I'm actually looking at that similar thought process in social media right now because I see a lot of parts about how social media is damaging. But what I'm also suggesting to people so if you're having a bad experience on for media, you can curate your newsfeed and if you're seeing posts that are just designed to make you angry and there's content out there designed to elicit an emotional response from you, change what you're seeing.

During my degree, I subscribed to a whole bunch of science pages and it was really cool cause it was science posts and then it reached this point where they'd stopped being about science posts as much as they started being about abuses and human rights violations of children in American schools.

It reached this point where I was logging onto social media and just becoming incredibly frustrated and then typing out half an essay in a comment section and like, “Wait a second. What am I achieving here? I am just railing against someone in the USA who will never read this post.” There’s some school principal who's made a horrible decision and while it is important to stand up for what's right, you've also got to take the choice of when it is impacting your mental health and looking at when things are and aren't serving you.

It's the same in media and I really do think that's why the last few years has been such a push to wholesome memes is because our media consumption, especially during I guess, the last few years of the 2000s was very focused on being edgy. And then we see that in the series like Rick and Morty, or BoJack Horseman, they’re incredibly depressing and cynical and that's fine. If that's what you want to engage in, that's fine. But also be wary. I've watched BoJack Horseman at a time when I shouldn't and it sucked. It was just so depressing. It was too depressing and we've got to –

It's a 100% right that the fruit and nutrition analogy is perfect because there are cognitive houses out there and if all you're taking in is this specific media on these specific topics, it does affect your world view. That's again, where we've got to have conversations that are empathic and validating. It's not as if you should stop because this is wrong. It's like, well, friend, person, human being, please think about how you're engaging and engage responsibly and maybe if you're not vibing with it right now, just go play some Minecraft, or listen to something chill because we do need that balance of our media content.

MAE: You reminded me of BoJack Horseman. There's this one episode of where he's giving a eulogy for his mother. There's parts about it that are depressing, but the realism of challenges many, many people have with their relationships, with their parents, and orientations to their passing. I thought it was incredibly therapeutic [chuckles] and people who are very close to me, who have those challenges, I've recommended [chuckles] it so many times as one of the very best pieces of, I don't know, any collection movie, any medium, this best captured for me the complexity of some of those challenges.

So I don't know, but I get excited by naming complexity and challenge. [chuckles] Whereas, other people are really discouraged by that. Once there's more of a map, or a light in the room, or something, it all feels more navigable to me. So there's that

MIKE: When I'm sitting there watching a movie and the point of it clicks and I'm like, “Wow, this movie is about something.” When I watched Zootopia, it was during my degree and I'm sitting there watching Zootopia with my family and I'm like, “Wow, this movies about a lot of stuff.”

I had the same thing with Pixar. They could just do this. Inside Out, I left that – I think I watched Inside Out a month before I started my degree, before I started studying—I'd quit my last job and I was going to start working in mental health—and I was like, “Wow, this is amazing.” This just perfect. This is how depression works. This is a big conversation about grief is happening here as well. The complexity of the emotional experience in terms when everything turns from just these five emotions, these five core emotions, and sadness and happiness becomes bittersweet, and anger and joy joining together to form assertion and fun. It's really awesome to kind of have these aha moments as an adult and being like, “Oh, that's what this movie's about.”

I kind of realized when I was like 7, or 8 that the X-Men was about oppression and that's again, one of my favorite conversations to have with people who maybe are new to comics, or new to the X-Men. I can't wait for the MCU X-Men to start so I can have this conversation with even more people, because that's been such a cool thing to think about and I do love having those big conversations with people.

It's also why I can't watch Onward ever again. I don't know if you watched Onward last year. I feel like this movie doesn't get as much conversation as it deserves. It's absolutely brilliant, but it's also about a really specific experience of grief that just kicks my ass and I can't watch that movie without crying.

CASEY: Oh, that was the D&D trolls one. I did see that. Which one was that?

MIKE: Yeah, it was an urban fantasy. They were elves. They were blue and had pointy ears. I think they were elves. And they were on a quest to resurrect their dad. Pixar released it in June 2020 so still talking like height of the pandemic and they released it online. I think it was one of the first big online releases and yeah, I just watched that and it broke me in a way that a movie hadn't for a long time.

CASEY: But Mike, you're inspiring an idea in me and maybe you were already working on this—it sounds like it. A lot of people end up wanting to use the same approaches to deal with challenging experiences, for instance, talking about it and journaling and I see fewer people reach to reading things, or consuming media that's related to what they're doing. I think partly because it's hard to find an appropriate one that you would relate to. I hear you listing out a whole bunch of things that might relate to a circumstance someone is in. Have you thought about that problem space and how would you navigate trying to help get people to the right media that helps them?

MIKE: Well, I kind of vibe on what people are already interested in and I don't always give recommendations, but I will have chats about to see what people where people are and what they need and if there's kind of an experience they're seeking. It hasn't been a big one for me because a lot of the clients I see are already into a lot of what the stuff I've been to and I end up getting more recommendations from them than I have to give.

[laughter]

But I use them to, again, it's for conversations. It's like, “Have you watched this? Have you thought about this?” And the conversation kind of go, “Yeah, I've seen it and this is what I thought,” or “I haven't seen it and here's why.” And sometimes, I'll have a conversations like, “Have you watched this movie?” and people go, “No, I really don't want to because I know what it's about and I don't want to kind of go there yet.”

CASEY: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

MAE: Kind of riffing off of your thing, Casey and tying in some of Mike's work with equipping schools better with mental health tools that having a little, I don't know, glossary of here's a challenge and here's five different options like here's a poem and here's a movie and here's a video, or song. That'd be amazing.

I agree with you on Inside Out, my lap was so wet thinking just the tears were streaming out of my eyes thinking of all the young people who will now have language to be able to articulate [chuckles] what it is that they're feeling.

MIKE: Yeah, yeah. There’s actually really cool programs that use Inside Out in therapy. Because I left that movie theater thinking about how I'm going to use this in therapy later. I hadn't even started my degree. I had no theoretical backdrop. I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to use this.” And then a year later, I'm at a school – taking my son to school and I see the classroom is covered in Inside Out stuff and I'm sitting there like, “Oh my God, this is better than I ever imagined.”

I love having these conversations and I love playing clips and stuff. When I worked in the schools, if we had a school competition—and people would win and people didn't win—there'd always be someone who's really upset because they didn't win this thing. Whether it was a classroom recollection, or sports stuff, we'd always have conversations. I would go in and one of most fun things I'd ever do is I'd fire up YouTube and I'd play that clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard says, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That's just the way life is sometimes.”

I'd probably written that on every other board, every other whiteboard in a classroom, because it's such a powerful quote and it's such an awesome way of just looking at sometimes things don't turn out. We've got to deal with that and we've got to do the next thing and then the next thing would be playing the clip from The Dark Night as what do we do when we fall, Master Bruce? We stand up and playing that. It was Batman so it was a bit more approachable to the kids, but knowing these little bits from movies and stuff to really just tie in and begin a conversation.

MAE: You reminded me of the montage at the end of Captain Marvel, where despite all of the “powers” she acquired through the accident, her true strength came from her just consistently standing back up no matter and it's just this – she gets knocked over, she gets insulted, she loses something like it's just a lifetime of getting back up. I was pretty moved by that one, too. I had a wet lap [laughs] after that one also.

MIKE: And I love it when movies can lead to these inspiring conversations that this still worthy scene from Endgame when Thor goes back to Asgard. He's still able to call Mjolnir and he's still worthy and there's a whole conversation. I've written a whole article based on that scene alone and I've seen people with tattoos of Mjolnir with still worthy engraved into it.

It's just this really powerful and moving scene that again, it starts a conversation and I can see a lot of people out there who can resonate with that scene. Especially when we look at worthiness as also our own inner worthiness and how we feel about ourselves. But also, in the context of Thor’s own story is that it wasn't worthy in just in general, it was worthy in the eyes of Odin. So at this point in the story, Odin had been dead for a long time, but Thor, in that moment, got – after everything he'd been through, he was not only still worthy of the hammer, but he was also worthy in his father's eyes, which was a big part of his own journey through the movies.

MAE: Yo! So after hanging out with you for a little while, Mike, there are like 47 people that I want to connect with you.

MIKE: [laughs] Go for it.

MAE: And I'm curious about what sort of engagement is welcomed, where are your widest open doors, where are you headed next, and how we support the amazing perspectives and work and experience that you have?

MIKE: I mean, the hardest part is, is that I'm in Australia and I can't work with Americans. The US and Canada is explicitly outside of my remit. In the USA, you've got to be registered state by state so even if I was in the USA, I could only work in the states I'm registered in and that is a whole process for each state.

JOHN: Yeah.

MIKE: I've been told it's expensive. And then it's tricky when I do stuff like the Reddit AMAs, because I get messages like, “Hey, I'm in Florida and I want to see you.” I'm like, “Well, I can't.”

But thankfully, I've used my superpower of networking to join a group called The Geek Therapy Community where it's a whole bunch of geeky therapists, sharing, resources, sharing ideas, and training. I've just got a thread in there saying, “Hey, look, I get approached by Americans every now and again, please tell me what state you're in and if you're open,” and always try my best to link people in when they message me. Currently looking for someone in Louisiana, but that one's being tricky. Yeah, it’s a really good group. It's really supportive. It's really friendly, and it's just really open to having a conversation about hey, look, I'm not really into this, but a lot of my clients are really vibing on this content, what can you share with me right now?

So the big one at the moment the conversations have been around, well, Minecraft will never be out of the conversation [chuckles] but also Goblin Slayer the anime and My Hero Academia are consistent topics, which is really cool. I have to sit down and watch Goblin Slayer because I haven't yet. But at the moment, I'm running well, I've got a Facebook page where I share nerdy memes and stuff. So one of my favorite ones is thinking about Spoon theory as spell slots from D&D.

JOHN: Mm.

MAE: What. [laughs]

MIKE: Yeah. I don't know. It's not a meme, but it's just, I don't know what it is. It's a screencap from Tumblr and this person's therapist reconceptualized string theory into spell slot theory, but also talked about hyper focus as a free action and a cantrip. So it’s a bit more complex.

MAE: What! Okay, okay, okay I’m totally nerding out right now and I want to make sure that if you would be willing to say what spoon theory is and what a cantrip is, some of these things, yeah.

[chuckles]

MIKE: Sure.

MAE: I love that we’re saying these words that I know!

JOHN: Hey! [laughs]

CASEY: Yay!

MIKE: And that's the point, that's what we're trying to accomplish here. We're trying to provide a common language. So for those uninitiated, spoon theory is a term used by people experiencing mental health and/or disability to describe their energy levels. You can look at any activity as you have a set amount of spoons—and this changes per day. Sometimes you've only got a 2-, or 3-spoon day and different tasks have a spoon cost. So doing the dishes could cost you 5 spoons. If you are only having a 10-spoon day, doing the dishes is going to take it out of you.

I actually saw a great TED Talk recently. It was about, I'm still explaining spoon theory, but also everyone knows what a burns, or no burns day is and it's a very similar concept. And then someone has adapted the sprint theory to the Dungeons and Dragons spell slots. So for the people who play D&D, spell casters in Dungeons and Dragons get a set amount of spells they can cast per day. So this really translates really well into, I've got a certain amount of things I can do in a day before I'm burned out and I need to take a rest.

And then you've got cantrips, which are minor spells, but you can use them at no cost. Sometimes there's things you can do if you're experiencing mental health, or you've got a disability that you can do that don't cost a spoon, it could be a hyper focus, or it could be a piece of self-care that just really does it for you, it's really nice, and it doesn't actually take an emotional toll to actually carry out this task.

JOHN: Yeah, that's fantastic.

MAE: Are there any other topics that you were hoping that we would touch on?

MIKE: So at the moment, what I'm providing is D&D therapy. I've got one group a week. I'm looking to expand that to two, or three groups a week. I'm looking at also branching out to different RPGs like, I'm really excited for the Avatar RPG. This should be coming out early next year. I've already got a quick start copy and that's looking like a whole lot of fun. I'm hoping to start a Star Wars RPG, or a Warhammer 40K RPG group because I was dead/not haunted, but heckled at a convention. Someone says, “I bet you can't turn 40K into a therapy RPG. It's too depressing,” and I did it and now I don't have a group to run it for.

[laughter]

But Warhammer 40K universe is a universe where your emotions become psychic energy, which can become demons and I really can't think of a better setting in which you go out and literally slay your demons.

MAE: Whoa, yes. I did not know about this – [overtalk]

CASEY: Wow, what a good framing.

MAE: And love that framing.

MIKE: That's the hope is to create a story. I've created a storyline where players are going to go out literally to slay their demons because we see in Warhammer 40K, there's actually demons that have arisen from specific experiences. There's a demon that was brought into existence when the first sentient life form killed another one. It's called the Echo of the First Murder and it's super depresso and it’s super gaff. But I love it because it gives you this idea that there is a demon out there that could be made up of what you've been through and you can go out there and banish it and seal it. You can go on this own adventure literally facing your demons.

CASEY: That sounds so powerful. I can't wait to hear how it goes when you get to do this on people.

MIKE: It'll be a fun one. See, that's kind of what I'm doing in the RPG world right now. I'm doing more gaming therapy so we're playing Civ, doing a lot of Minecraft because Minecraft is so easy to access. Minecraft, Roblox and Civ at the moment just to give for people who fidget. For neurodiverse people who like myself, you may have noticed on camera, I don't sit still. I do better as well if I've got something to do and so do some of the people I see. So we play Minecraft and we do things. We share an activity. It's the same kind of mindset that leads to just going out for a walk with someone and having a big talk. It's like, let's build a castle and go find some diamonds.

JOHN: Yeah. There's such a difference between two people facing each other. Even if you're in some therapeutic relationship, it's friendly, there is still that hint of confrontation. Like you were saying, you're both looking into screen. You're both going for a walk. Suddenly, you're both looking forward and it takes that level of pressure down. That's so useful.

MIKE: It really does. It's just a nice way of doing things, especially for kids and younger teens who, if they're being sat down and confronted with someone in the past, it's probably because they've been in trouble. So this way, it's just look, we can sit down, we can vibe, we can build something, and we can even use the game to power the conversation.

Minecraft is a great one because there's so many resources for it, but we can talk about filling needs here. What do we need? We can build little stations for mental health check-ins, which I've got on my page. Or we can even just ad lib, not ad libs, I do a lot of improv sort of stuff. We got attacked by zombies in one game because I never the play on peaceful and we got attacked by zombies. So we had to, very hastily, build some walls and we built a house that could withstand attack and punctuated that with a conversation, where do you go when you don't feel safe, or what can you do if you need to feel safe, and we talked about self-care, self-supporting, and self-soothing from that.

MIKE: Are you familiar with the book, My Grandmother's Hands, Resmaa Menakem’s work?

MIKE: No, I am not.

MAE: When you were talking about the Warhammer 40K and going out and slaying the demons that have arisen from certain experiences, Resmaa’s basically premise is that a lot of our current social justice challenges and racial challenges have to do with the fact that we have transferred experiences of trauma through physical by having children, like we physically inherit it. And the reason we haven't been able to solve a lot of these problems is that we are focusing on our thoughts about them. There's a whole transformation, a physical healing that if we can engage at that level, then we've got a shot at some of this intergenerational trauma stuff.

MIKE: Yeah. Intergeneration and epigenetic trauma is such a huge topic and it's something we are learning more about. It blew me away to first learn about it at uni, but it's also one of those topics that is, we were only really starting to see the effects and we're really only starting to get an understanding. In my knowledge. I could be wrong because it's not my area of specialty, but from what I am seeing, we've still got a whole lot to learn on this topic. It's going to be incredibly profound to just to start learning about the effects these things can have in the long-term.

JOHN: Yeah.

CASEY: Well, I want to define epigenetics for the audience. I studied this in undergrad. Epigenetics is like the genetics, like T, A, G, C codon pairs, but it's the part like how they wrap around spools in the body and then the spools might be tight, or loose. So different spools of DNA in your body are tighter, or looser, and that gets passed down generation to generation. And we can't measure it as well. It's harder to measure so we know a lot less about it than we do T, A, G, C DNA base pairs. Anyway, it's heritable. That's the main takeaway for here, but science nerd nugget.

MIKE:I think one of the big ones is that our experiences are things. As you said, they're heritable, we can pass stuff down and our genetics can change with us. I thought that was really, that was a huge read, especially when we talk about cycles and patterns of disadvantage.

JOHN: Yeah. There's not only the social machinery that's reinforcing the disadvantage, but then you've also got it coming directly into the biology as well.

MIKE: Mm. Thank you for the book. I'll have a look at that.

MAE: Yeah. I think you I'd really love it and if you do check it out, I totally want to talk to you about it. In fact, I'm finding it hard to not bring up a whole bunch more topics.

[laughter]

But we have been on a while and it might be time to transition to reflections. Even though I don't really want to right now!

[laughter]

CASEY: Yeah, me too. I've got notes of things I could bring up. We're not going to get to.

[laughter]

MIKE: I am always happy to come back.

CASEY: Oh, cool. Very good.

JOHN: Cool, man. I mean, I think that like you, Mae and Casey, I think we're all having lots of ideas swirling around in our heads and one of the ones that's popped up just as, as you were talking about specifically the work you were doing with RPGs, D&D, 40K, and all those. It just reminded me there's a Kickstart, it's just about out, an RPG called Coyote & Crow, which is set in alternate history of indigenous people in the United States. In an alternate history where colonization didn't happen.

MIKE: Hmm.

JOHN: Yeah. And they've built a whole structure around this and they're using all Native artists and writers and publicists, and then the whole thing. They're doing amazing stuff there.

But I think having context like that, again, allows you to – especially if you were working with someone who was indigenous, or with another disadvantage. Being able to use the structure of the game to talk about their experience of being indigenous and how that is one of the intersections that is affecting that person and there are just so many layers that you can go through with all this. It strikes me that there's such massive potential through all of it and it's actually interesting because for the longest – I've been in and out of therapy various times over the years, and I know that some therapists like to do roleplaying where you take on various people, or talk to certain people.

That idea had always somewhat terrified me perhaps, because the thing I need to work on is there. But now that I've been doing D&D for a couple of years, I have more experience with roleplaying in a less emotionally fraught context. So that gives me that little bit extra comfort with the idea of doing such a thing in a therapeutic context. And even more particular, if there was therapeutic context that was even spinning in all of the world of D&D, that seems like that would make me even more comfortable. So it's just really fascinating how bringing in all these extra concepts can cut through baggage and things for people to get to doing the work that is most can be good for them without just – and shortcutting so much of the fight you have to get there.

MIKE: It makes it easier to talk about something. Eevery conversation when I was youngest started with, “Oh, my friend. My friend is going through this.” It makes it easy to talk about something; it doesn't have to be about you. It does also lead to nuance. When you're an RPG therapist, you have to ask questions like, “Hey, is this just your character's tragic backstory [laughs], or are you going through something we need to talk about?” Asking that question has been an interesting one, because I do prefer that my players make as much of they can of themselves into their characters. But I also don't require it because they may not be ready yet, even to just admit something about their character could be huge for them.

But it is huge and I'm loving this. I'm a proponent and an advocate for social justice and I love seeing projects like this. I've been following it on, I can't remember what page I've been seeing that post on. I think it's called I'm Begging Play You to Play Another RPG is where that's being posted. I'm really into it and I've been really tempted to get some sort of qualification in teaching so I can lean more into an education perspective with these because there's an awesome opportunities for social and emotional education.

In my own campaigns, I use a Homebrew World called Advantasia and it's actually based on the – well, it's based on where I live in the world. It's not quite Australia. It's a typical, not European fantasy world, but continentally, it's similar to Australia. It's in the Southern hemisphere and stuff. But the weather cycles, the calendar years in Advantasia is the same one uses the indigenous people of the land where I'm living.

They don't have the four-season model. They actually have a season model that actually fits where I live. They've got a six-season model. So there's two months for every season and it just fits way better than the autumn summer, winter, spring seasons we have here. We've got Birak, which is December and January. It's just hot and it's dry. And then Bunuru is February and March and it's still hot, but it's also like a humid kind of heat. And then in April and May, we've got Djeran, which it's starting to get cooler. And then June and July is Makuru where it's cold and wet and there's stormy. And then August and September is Djilba and it's getting warmer, but it's still quite hot. It's still quite wet and windy. And then October and November, where we are now is Kambarang and it's longer, it's more dry periods, and we're kind of starting into the summer.

It's just a way more nuanced look at the world and I include this in my settings, so that not only can players learn about mental health, but they're also learning about part of their world, where they live, and how we can actually ways we can look at the world in a better way.

MAE: I love that; ways we can look at the world in a better way. Look at the world and ourselves [laughs] in a better way.

I think the thing that struck me the most out of this conversation, if I have to pick one thing, or one theme, it'd be, I really appreciate the way in which the pragmatic approach that you're taking of this is where people are, let's just hang out there. [chuckles]

MIKE: Yeah.

MAE: And regardless of what all the other philosophy, politics, opinions, blah, blah. It's like, well, how about we just hang with the people? So I really appreciate being reminded to continuously work on starting from there and connecting from there.

MIKE: Well, we have a saying --- well, as a saying it's a bit of a maximum therapy. It's called meet people where they are and that's often about not invalidating people because of the way they're seeing the world, or not belittling people because someone else might have it worse than them. It's just about understanding this person and how they see the world and just being with them where they are.

To me, what I'm doing is just taking that to its rational next step is especially during the past, let’s just say the past 18 months, has really highlighted a need for online services. A lot of therapists play Flash games like there’s browser-based UNO, or Battleship, or something and I'm just going, “Well, we could do that. We could also play Minecraft.”

[laughter]

This is meeting people where they're.

MAE: How about you, Casey? Do you have something that struck you, or that you're going home with?

CASEY: Yeah. I keep thinking about, I didn't want to talk about myself so much on this call, but I've been working on a board game for doing mental health skills for middle schoolers. But I was very happy to talk about the D&D themes today instead of that. But I keep thinking about how my approach is to help the middle schoolers talk to their friends in a structured way where the structure helps them talk about things they wouldn't normally be able to, or think to, or they wouldn't be prompted to.

I've play tested it a lot. It's really successful. People love playing it, but they don't always know they'd love to play it because it's not something they're going for already. I wish I could talk to my friends over a board game. So I don't know about the marketing side of this thing. It might be more helpful as a tool for therapists to bring out with a group of middle schoolers who want to talk to each other.

But anyway, my takeaway is also meet them where they are. That sounds so powerful when you just get on Among Us, or Minecraft with them where they're at, the barrier is solo and then they still get that engagement like they're fidgeting, or whatever that they need to do to get comfortable. That’s really powerful.

MIKE: I would love to see this board game. I think schools need more tools and that's kind of, I was working in schools and in my private practice when I developed my RPG therapy program. But it's also the kind of stuff that would be really helpful for schools and I would love to see that is anything which we can use to empower connection with people is incredibly – well, it's incredibly vital, but it's also very beautiful.

CASEY: All right, Mike, how about you? Do you have any takeaways, any insight you got today on the call with us that you're going to take with you?

MAE: It can be something you said, too. Doesn't have to be – [overtalk]

MIKE: [laughs] I've done a lot of talking today. Again, I think my reflection is actually from what you've just mentioned is that you could have something really special and this does sound something that's also really special, this board game you've designed. But the hardest part about doing something is helping people know you're doing it.

There's a bit of a negative connotation to networking and especially here in Australia, we're not too big on talking about ourselves in a positive way. We have cultural values against that, but I feel like there's a really important need for people, who are doing good work, to be able to talk about it in a positive way. Because I guarantee you, there's a whole lot of really awesome stuff being done out there, but people aren't talking about it because they fear being accused of being like self-aggrandizing, or looking for attention when at the end of the day, if we can build awareness that there's other ways to do things, or there's new ways of doing things, we can hopefully inspire and empower.

CASEY: I love that it comes back to networking, which is your superpower as we said at the very beginning.

MIKE: I was really tempted to not list that [chuckles] as my superpower, but I am continually told that it is. It's one of those tricky ones. We have a thing here in Australia called tall puppy syndrome. It's a person who is conspicuously successful and whose success frequently attracts envious hostility and it's just, what is it? The nail that stands out gets the hammer. It's just kind of this cultural value of just not being self-aggrandizing. There's also finding that happy medium where you are happy to talk about yourself and what you're doing in a way that gets it out there.

CASEY: Yeah.

MIKE: Because I reckon that's a whole lot of really cool stuff out there that isn't being talked about because people are a little bit shy, or just might not want to be seen as talking themselves up too much.

CASEY: And then getting over that hump of being shy, then you have to get over the other hub of finding the right people to talk to and that's the marketing and sales aspect, that's my head's been. I started my own business this year and I don't know much about marketing and sales.

MIKE: Congrats!

CASEY: Thank you. Well, I do now, but 12 months ago, I did so much less than I do now. [chuckles]

MIKE: I understand that. I went full-time in my practice 6 weeks ago. Until recently, I was working…

MAE: Congratulations!

CASEY: Yeah.

MIKE: Thank you. Until recently. I was just working in schools and then I went to a youth not-for-profit, and then 6 weeks ago, I just had this opportunity where I was getting emails daily. Like, look, I see two people a week, that's all I've got room for. Two people in a D&D group a week and then I looked at all the people who sent me an email like, oh, okay, I could go full time if all these people say yes. So I gave notice and it's been a hell of an experience.

CASEY: That's awesome. Congrats. I love this trend.

MIKE: Thank you.

CASEY: People are starting more small businesses. Another therapist friend of mine, she just started her own small practice. It's booming. I like this trend for our economy, too.

MIKE: Hmm.

CASEY: It's a trend. I hope it sticks.

MIKE: Yeah, and it's really cool because it lets people do their thing.

CASEY: Yeah.

MIKE: It lets people live their passion and their authenticity, and it creates this environment where we have a lot more diversity and people can be who they are. If we can make these small, innovative businesses work, we're going to see a lot more diversity in our services we can deliver because we're not tied to an organization that says, “You will conform,” or an organization that says, “No, you won't have a social media presence. No, you won't talk to the press about things.”

CASEY: You just got a great image in my head. We want to be rainbow pinwheel, not gray cogs.

[laughter]

I want more of those.

MIKE: That's very true.

MAE: I'm ready for that plan. Casey.

CASEY: It's spinning.

MIKE: One thing I see a lot of is, there's a D&D resource coming out of the Bristol Children's Hospital and they created the Oath of Accessibility. It is a Paladin subclass as the whole point is to create accessibility tools for D&D and it's awesome. They do some really good stuff, but they have this tagline and I think it's really special. It is, “Anyone can be a hero and everyone deserves to go on an adventure.”

JOHN: Aww.

CASEY: I love it.

MAE: Yes.

CASEY: What a great quote. That's true.

JOHN: That’s a great place to end it.

Special Guest: Michael Keady.

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