Greater Than Code

02:28 - Jonan’s Superpower: Jonan’s Friends

09:07 - How Developer Relations is Changing (DevRel)

22:41 - Doing DevRel Right

31:45 - Engaging with Communities & Networks via DevRel

40:22 - Internal DevRel

53:32 - Addressing Trauma & The Evil in the World

“I respect facts but I live in impressions.”

Reflections:

Mando: We are who we spend time with.

Rein: If you want to understand how someone behaves, you have to understand their environment and experiences.

Jess: If it works, it’s going to be obvious it works.

Jonan: Talking about the things that suck and talking about who you are in a real way.

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Transcript:

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JONAN: Welcome back to Greater Than Code. This is Episode 227. I am Jonan Scheffler and I'm joined today by my guest, Jessica Kerr. How are you, Jessica?

JESSICA: Thank you, Jonan. Well, I’m great today because I get to be here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Aw thanks, Jessica. And I'm here with my friend, Mando Escamilla.

MANDO: Thanks, Rein and just to bring it back around, I'm here with my friend, Jonan Scheffler.

Jonan Scheffler is the Director of Developer Relations at New Relic. He has a long history of breaking things in public and occasionally putting them back together again. His interest in physical computing often leads him to experiment with robotics and microelectronics, although his professional experience is more closely tied to cloud services and modern application development. In order to break things more effectively, he is particularly excited about observability as of late, and he’s committed to helping developers around the world live happier lives by showing them how to keep their apps and their dreams alive through the night.

Welcome to Greater Than Code, Jonan. How are you doing today, bud?

JONAN: I am great. I liked the part where I got to intro your podcast. That was a lot of fun, actually.

MANDO: It was fantastic, man.

JONAN: This bio, this guest sounds really interesting, if I would be permitted to say so myself as the guest.

MANDO: So we like to start off every podcast with our normal question that we ask every guest, which is, what is your superpower, Jonan and how did you acquire it?

JONAN: My superpower is my friends. They are my superpower and I acquired them after a long career in software and talking to a lot of humans. I don't know actually why, but it's been easy for me to make friends in software. I felt like early on, I found my people and then I just got lucky and it's going okay so far. I'm very fortunate to have them.

MANDO: Well, we're fortunate to have you, bud. It's interesting that you say this, I mean, just like Slack for operators, DevOps folks, and Savvy folks, there’s been a lot of discussion as of late on the quality and reliability of one's personal network in things like finding new jobs, finding new opportunities, learning and growing in your career, and stuff like that.

It’s been interesting for me personally, because my experience, Jonan sounds a lot more like yours. I was very lucky to find some strong communities of folks that were very welcoming to me. I found my people pretty early on, but a lot of the folks in this other community that I'm tangentially related to seem to have had wildly different experience. I don't know if it's like a software development versus operator kind of thing and in-person versus not in-person kind of thing. It's something that struck me as weird.

JONAN: I think it varies by community, too. I've gone to a lot of conferences for a lot of different languages and depending on the conference and depending on the community, I think that you're going to have a different time. I think if I were starting over again, I would probably follow about the same path—attend small conferences with tight focuses and get to know a couple people early on who seem to be having a lot of those conversations, watch for a social butterfly and tag along for a bit and you'll get introduced.

MANDO: I'm pretty sure that I met Rein at a local Ruby conference here in Austin. Is that right, Rein?

REIN: Sounds right. Sure, yeah.

MANDO: But I think it was one of the first Lone Star Ruby Conferences where we met.

REIN: Yeah, that sounds right.

JONAN: Yeah. I think speaking of butterflies, I also met Rein, I think at one of the very first conferences I attended back in the day. Being welcomed and seeing the application of the Pac-Man rule, where when standing in a circle, you always leave a space for a guest to join and someone joins and you open up again in-person back in the Ruby community in that day was, I think inspiring for me; directed how I decided I was going to be when I showed up here. So thank you, Rein.

REIN: It's funny. I remember when I was new to the Ruby community and not sure what to do. I was new to programming, too. I started going to the local Austin meetup actually and the welcome I got as someone who didn't go to college for computer science, someone who wasn't a professional programmer, someone who was just thought it was cool and thought maybe that I could get paid to do it at some point in the future really made a big difference in my life.

JONAN: Jessica, how did you get started?

JESSICA: Good question. Before I answer it, I noticed that we're talking about Ruby conferences and Ruby programmers and indeed, I learned Ruby in order to go to Ruby conferences so that I could talk to Ruby people because part of the superpowers that that language gives you is friends or buds back in the day, but still is because the Ruby conferences are still super friendly back when we had them.

REIN: Yeah.

MANDO: Yeah, that's a really good point. I was a professional programmer for probably 5, or 6 years before I started doing Ruby programming. I would say that for those first 5, or 6 years, before I joined the Ruby community, I didn't feel at all like I had any kind of community or group of people.

JONAN: What do you think inspires that in a community? I think strong leadership is part of it. Matt has certainly received his share of criticism over the year, but I think that fundamentally, he was trying to build a place where people focused on people instead of the glyphs that we type into our little boxes. I think that matters. What else do you think there is to that?

REIN: We here at Greater Than Code also agree with that sentiment.

[laughter]

JONAN: Seems to align, doesn't it?

JESSICA: Yeah, that focus on people and Ruby was always about programmer joy. It was always about the experience; it was always about being happy and there wasn’t that expectation that the optimal thing to do is to go in a corner and type.

JONAN: Yeah, I think it's very fortuitous timing that we're actually discussing Ruby so much on the 24th, which was the day that Ruby was named 28 years ago on February 24th, Ruby became the name of this language. So happy birthday, Ruby.

JESSICA: Aw. Yeah, happy [inaudible].

JONAN: It really has changed my life. I have regularly, whenever I've seen Matt at a conference, got up to thank him for my house and my kids' college education. Before I got into software, I did a lot of things, but none of them would have brought me either of those. I spent probably 10 years in factories and hotels and casinos. I was a poker dealer for my last gig before I got into software and the number of opportunities that Ruby opened up for me, I can't as long as I live be too grateful; I'll be paying it forward till I die.

JESSICA: Yeah, but not the language it's the community—the people, the friends.

JONAN: Yeah, exactly. It's the community. It's the people who welcomed me with open arms and made sure that they were contributing to my growth in a far more altruistic sense than, I think is reasonable to expect. I mean, I had nothing to offer in return except a good conversation and high fives and hugs and they spent their time in their energy taking me around conferences and making sure I met people and it was great.

REIN: I remember when you first went to New Relic and you were first thinking about, “Hey, maybe I could do this developer relations thing.” What I remember about that, in addition to your obvious aptitude at talking to people about things, is the help that you got, the advice, the mentorship that you got from your friends in the community. I remember at the time being blown away by that; by how many people were willing to just take an hour of their time to talk to you about what it was like for them as a DevRel and things like that.

JONAN: Yeah, and I'm still very fortunate to have those people who have helped me build this team here. When I did the onboarding, I put together an elaborate onboarding process. I was able to hire all ten of the DevRel engineers here at the same time. We spent a week doing improv training and having speakers come in as guests and I was able to invite all of these DevRel leaders from over the years to give a perspective on what DevRel was in their eyes, but it is today and always has been clear to me that I am only here where I am by the grace of the communities that I was lucky enough to join.

I wonder if developer relations is changing; if it's at a different place than it was when I started out. I feel like certainly, pandemic times have affected things, but all that aside, the segment of the industry is still pretty small. There are only maybe 10,000 people doing this work around the world. It's hard to believe because we're quite loud, right? [chuckles] We’ve got a lot of stages. You see a lot of us, but there are many of us and I think that the maturity of the discipline, I guess, is progressing. We are developing ways to measure the effectiveness. Being able to prove the value to a company is going to change the game for us in a lot of ways.

REIN: Yeah. I would love to talk to you about that at length, [chuckles] but for the purposes of this podcast, let's say that you're someone who wants to start a program at a company that doesn't have directly tangible make numbers go up in a business sense value, but you believe that if you're given the chance to do it, that you can show them the value. How do you get that opportunity?

JONAN: That's a really good question. Kicking off a developer relations program is, I think it's the same as building most major initiatives within a company. If you had an idea for a software project that should be undertaken, or a major feature that mattered to you, it's about building allies early and often. Making sure that when you show up in that meeting to have the conversation with the decisionmaker, that nine out of ten people in that meeting already know about the plan. They have already contributed their feedback; they feel ownership of that plan and they're ready to support you so that you have the answer going in.

I think the mistake that I made often in my career was walking into that room and just pitching my idea all at once and then all of the questions that come out of that and all of the investigation that is necessary and the vetting appears as though this wasn't a very well-thought-out plan, but getting the people on board in the first place is vitally important. I think also you have a lot of examples to look through. You have a chance to talk about other programs and the success that they've brought, the companies where they started off.

It's not a thing that you need to start in a big way. You can put a couple of people on the conference speaking circuit, or a couple of people focusing part of their week on outreach and community growth and see where it takes you. If you start to see the numbers, it becomes a lot easier case to make.

REIN: You were talking about how you're excited about being able to make this value more tangible in the future. What do you think is the shift that's happening in DevRel that’s making that possible?

JONAN: So I think there are actually kind of a lot of factors here. One is that DevRel had a division almost of method where some people, probably by the leadership of their companies, were convinced that what they should be doing is talking about the product all of the time. You're there to talk about the product and evangelize the product and get people to use the product.

That is part of your role, but it shouldn't be, in my opinion, the primary role that you play. You should be there in the community participating. In the same way that Rein stood in that hallway and welcomed me to Ruby, I need to stand in that hallway and welcome newcomers to all the communities of which I'm part and in so doing, build that group of friends and build that understanding of the community and their needs.

I develop empathy for the developers using our product and, in the industry, generally and that's invaluable intelligence. I sometimes think of ourselves as these like operatives—we’re undercover marketing operatives out there in the developer world talking to developers and just understanding them and it at one point, took a turn towards, “Well, I'm just going to talk about New Relic all the time,” for example. It feels good to see all that content and see all those talks. However, you're only talking to your existing audience. No one is Googling “what exciting things can I do with New Relic,” “seven awesome New Relic tips.” No one's searching for that.

They're out there looking at things that are interesting. They want to click on a link on Twitter that is about some random topic. Running Kubernetes on Raspberry Pis and soldering things to Yoda dolls. That's the kind of stuff that I'm going to click on in my free time and in that spirit of play, that's where I want to be engaged and that's where I want to be engaging people.

So I think there was this turn. That's part of it and then in reaction to that, I think that the teams who were doing DevRel well and actually seeking out ways to lift up and support the communities and gather that information for their companies—and yes, certainly talk about their products when the situation warrants it. But I mean, how do you feel about that person who shows up to a conference wearing a New Relic hoodie and a New Relic shirt and a New Relic backpack and says “New Relic,” the first 10 minutes you meet them, a hundred times? But you're like, “Wow, this is a friend who is here for my best interests.”

MANDO: Right, or every presentation that they give is 30-minute infomercial for whatever company.

JONAN: Yeah. So I think people are headed away from that and in response to that, you saw a lot of success from the people who are doing DevRel well. In addition to that, it's becoming to measure these things in hopefully less creepy ways. We can track the people who show up to anything that we do now. If I have a Twitch stream, I can see how many people were there; Twitch provides good stats for me. I can pull those stats out via an API, I can connect them to my podcasting for the week, I can connect them my blogging for the week, and I can show that my audience is growing over time.

So whether or not it is valuable yet, we're building the machine right now. We're finding ways to measure those things and that will allow us to adjust the content in a direction that is popular and that’s really just what we're trying to do. We're trying to give the people what they want. We want to talk about the things that people want to hear about.

I want to talk about the fun stuff, too, but I'm very surprised sometimes when I learn that hey, nobody wants to hear about my 3D printer API project with Ruby. They want to watch me solder a Raspberry Pi to a Yoda doll and that's great. I'm down for both of those things, I really don't care. But being able to adjust your content towards the sort of thing that is going to interest your community is really valuable obviously to developer relations and we're getting better at it. We have more data than we've had before and not in a way that, to me, feels like that is violating people's personal privacy.

REIN: Where do you think that DevRel ought to fit in a company's structure? Is it part of revenue? Is it a sales adjunct? Like, what is the correct role of DevRel?

J: I don't think it's part of revenue. I think that it leads to that. But in developer relations, we talk about orbits a lot instead of funnels. We talk about bringing people into the orbit. You generate content so that you generate gravity and you move people in the orbits closer to the company so, you can talk to them more and help them with their problems.

When you tie that to revenue, it changes the goal. Is the goal to be out there and help, or is the goal to get the cogs into the machine and continue turning them until they produce coins? When you tie developer relations to revenue, you become trapped in this cycle because look, we’re hackers. If you give me a number you want me to hit, then I can hit the number. But am I hitting the number in the most useful way? Am I generating long-term value for the company? Almost certainly not. 


So I think that actually the majority live under marketing right now and I think it makes sense. I think that developer relations people do themselves a disservice by not understanding marketing and understanding the role they play there. I actually think it belongs under its own organization. But if you try and think about that means from a corporate hierarchy perspective, that means that there's probably a C-level who is responsible only for community growth and C-levels by design, they have numbers, they have dollars that they are bringing in.

So until we get to a point where we can prove that the dollars are coming in because of our work, there's not going to be a chief developer relations officer at any company. But give me 5, 10 years, maybe I'll be the first CDRO.

MANDO: It's interesting to hear you. I didn't know that they were usually grouped under marketing, but that sounds right. In my most recent life, I worked at two different companies who did a combination of social media management, analytics platforms, and stuff like that. A majority of our customers at both of these places were in the marketing org and they were hitting the same kinds of things that you're talking about that developer relations groups are hitting. They're trying to provide numbers for the kinds of stuff that they're doing, but there's that inherent, not contradiction, but discord between trying to give customers what they want, but have it also not be infomercials.

JONAN: Yeah, and I think that that is a tough spot for DevRel teams. I think no matter where you stand in the organization, you need to be very close friends with marketing. They have a tremendous amplifying effect for the work that I do; what I want to do is produce content and I am uniquely suited to do that. I’m a person who can show up on the podcast and wax philosophical about things like developer relations. I enjoy that. I would like it if that was my whole day.

What you need to try and design is a world where it is your whole day. There are people who are better at that than you are; that's why you're there as a team. Your job is to get up and talk about the thing, explain technical concepts in easily digestible ways—a process called vulgarization, I guess, a more commonly used word in French. But I think it's very interesting that we vulgarize things.

I mostly just turn things into swear words, but the marketing organization puts a huge amount of wind at your back where I can come onto a podcast and spend an hour talking words and then the podcast is edited, tweets go out, images are made and it's syndicated to all the various platforms. If you can get that machine helping you produce your work in the background, you don't have to know all of the content creation pieces that most of us know. Most of us are part-time video/audio/any content platform, we mostly do it ourselves and taking the support of your organization where you can get it is going to be tremendously helpful in growing the team.

REIN: So if you can't tell, this is a personally relevant topic for and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the short-term pressures of there might be for DevRel orgs to produce numbers that the business likes and how you balance that with your long-term vision? What's the story you tell leadership that's effective there?

JONAN: That's a really good question. So I talk about this developer orbit as being almost pre-funnel work, that there are people that we have within the company who are real good at turning an email address into a dollar and turning a dollar into 10. There are people who have spent 20 years learning how to do that thing.

What I'm really good at is getting people to care in the first place and that's my job here. I describe it sometimes like an awareness campaign in marketing; this is the thing that you put the money on the billboards all over San Francisco and people spend millions and they'll go and get VC events, spend every dollar, making every billboard look like their logo because it works.

Because just making people aware whether or not they like the billboard, making people aware that you exist is a first step and I would rather that people complain about our product and complain about our company on Twitter than just not think of us because then you're irrelevant. You're not even part of the conversation. Being able to shift sentiment in the community and being able to hear people, genuinely hear people. It doesn't matter to them, when they're angry on Twitter, that they're factually incorrect. Wrong answer. It's your fault. Show up and just address it, “Hey, that sucks. I hate that. Wow, I'm sorry that happened. Let me see if I can fix it,” and go talk to the product team. So I talk about it in that way as this kind of pre-funnel work.

And then I talk about how we are measuring it and where we measure it as a team is this care orbit where we have a curiosity and awareness step that work in tandem, where people either have seen the words New Relic, or they've seen the logo, and this is awareness. Or they are curious and they've actually clicked on a thing; they've actually followed that down the rabbit hole. And sometimes, they may be aware because we sponsored a conference one time; they've seen us, they know that we exist, but they have no idea what we do.

So if they are curious, they're getting to a step where they could buy a free word association exercise, connect New Relic and observability, for example. And when they're doing research, I don't think there's a whole lot of interactivity we have there as a team there.

When I go and research product – think about how you'd buy a developer product. I hear someone say something three times, tail scale. I've been seeing a lot of conversation about tail scale lately. So I hear someone say tail scale three times and then I think to myself, wow, I should probably care about that thing because it's relevant to my career and I don't want to fall behind. In a couple of years, this may be the thing that everyone is using for whatever it does. I don't even know what it does. I better go figure it out and then I go and I do my research and, in that step, I'm reading documentation and I might have run across a blog post, but I'm certainly not watching webinars. I'm just not going to be in that step.

And then there's entry. I say entry instead of sign-up because I just want people close to us. I want them to enter the orbit. I want them to be bought in on the dream of the community and hopefully, we've expressed our values in a way that makes it clear that this is the place for them and we're talking about values and not features of a product. Think about how Apple has been successful. Apple is selling a dream. Apple's throwing a woman throws a sledgehammer through the screen in front of people and that's the dream. That's what you're actually buying is this identity, this tribe.

I think companies more often end up creating these bulleted lists of checkmarks. I saw one the other day that was probably 50 items long. Here are the 50 things that we do and look at those 2 checkmarks. Our competitor doesn't have those. Gotcha! I don't care. Prove to me that you value the things that I value. Sell me on the purpose and that's the kind of thing that we're really good about talking about.

And if you can demonstrate that in a boardroom, then your program will be fun, but you've got to measure it, you've got to show that people are making progress, and you've got to show growth over time. “See, look, we may not be pointing the megaphone in the right direction right now, but it's growing. We're getting a better megaphone. Is that enough for now?”

And then we can direct over time, our contact direction towards the place that is being most successful for us as a company and hey, maybe it's I just talk about New Relic all the time, but I'm willing to bet it won't be and when the time comes, I'll have data to prove it.

REIN: In the meantime, how do you know whether what you're doing is working? What are your feedback loops look like?

JONAN: My feedback loops, our feedback loops as a team right now, we know what we're doing is working when our total audience size is growing. This is kind of a sketchy metric because there are different values to different audiences.

For example, Twitch versus Twitter. If I'm going to follow on Twitter, then I follow on my personal account or I follow on the New Relic account because those both provide a place for me to use my voice to engage people. It's a much lower value engagement platform, though from a one follow perspective. 30,000 people I tweeted in front of, 5 will click or 5 will care about the content and that's great and maybe I'm really good at Twitter. I'm not, if I fail, I don't spend as much time on it as I should, but maybe I can refocus my content. I get more via the platform.

If you look at something like Twitch, however, someone follows me on Twitch, that means that every time I go live on my stream, they get a notification on every single one of their devices by default. I mean, you can turn it off, but what's the point in following someone, if you're going to turn off the notification; you want the notification. You're saying, “This is the content that I am here for, watching Jonan solder on this silly thing or teach people how to write Ruby from scratch. That's the stuff I signed up for. That's why I'm here on Twitch and I want to be a part of that.” Those have a kind of a higher value.

So there is something to weighted consideration across the platforms. But first of all, is your audience grow, just generally? Are you getting a bigger megaphone and more importantly, how are you doing it and moving people from “I'm aware that you exist” to curiosity, “I'm investigating you”? And that's a step when they're aware they've done something like click on a Twitter profile. It's a hard case to make that if they click on my Twitter profile and they see that it says New Relic, that they will have no idea what New Relic does. I have now at least made it into their brain somehow and they will say, “Oh, I've heard that name before.”

But the next step of getting people over to curiosity, let's say that we successfully get 10% of our audience over there and 1% of our total audience size, this quarter actually ended up creating accounts and that's where things get real hard because companies tend to have really entrenched MarTech, measuring marketing technology, measuring, and Google analytics setups.

And it's hard to bind that piece together to be like, “That signup? That came from us.” We did that and you need to stand up and say it loudly within a company because everyone else is. Everyone else is real excited to take credit for your work, believe me. You’ve got to stand up and prove it, stand up and say, “DevRel did this. DevRel was growing the company.” We're doing good things for the community. We're helping people understand how to use our product. They're caring more about us because we care about them first and here are the numbers to show it.

Did that answer your question? I tend to ramble.

REIN: Yeah, no it did. Can we do a thing? Can we do a little improv thing, Jonan?

JONAN: Yes.

REIN: Okay. So I am a chief revenue officer and I hear your pitch and what I say is, “Okay, so I get the DevRel increases engagement. So how much are you committing to improve conversion? How many percentage points are you guaranteeing that you'll deliver in the next quarter?”

JONAN: In the first quarter of our existence, I'm going to go with none. I would say in the second quarter of our existence, we will have developed a baseline to compare against and I can guarantee that we will be growing the audience by 10% month over month, over our previous audience size. As the audience grows, it is very directly correlated to numbers that you care about like, signups. If I talked to a 1,000 people, I get 10 signups. If I talk to 10,000 people, I get a 100 and that's the baseline. I mean, that's just the math of it. And if I'm doing a great job, maybe I get 15.

So if we want to actually do the math, give me a quarter to do the math. Give me a quarter to establish a baseline because I don't know where our company stands in the market right now. If I'm starting off here at this company and you're Google, I'm not going to have a hard time raising awareness, am I? I think most people have heard of you. If you're Bob's awesome startup and you don't have any awareness out there, then we have some different things to focus on and our numbers are going to look different. We're have a slower ramp.

But if you're asking me to commit to where you are right now, then I need numbers first. I need to be able to build the machine, I need to be able to measure it, and once I have those metrics in place, I can tell you what those goals should be and we can set them together and when we exceed them, we will adjust upwards because we are aggressive by nature. We like to win at these things. We like to be good at it because for us, it means that we're doing a better job of loving our people.

That's what success means by the numbers. The numbers that to you mean money. If we're doing DevRel right, to me, they mean that I am living with purpose. So yes, I can measure those things, but you’ve got to give me time to get a baseline, or the numbers that I make up will be meaningless and we'll be optimizing for the wrong things. How'd I do?

REIN: I’d buy it for a dollar.

JONAN: Yes! Sold!

MANDO: Yeah, I believe you. So tangentially related; you talked about Twitter and Twitch as two platforms that you're using to engage with prospective folks and grow and welcome the community. I was wondering if there were other places, other things that you use either personally, or as part of your DevRel work to do that same kind of stuff, or if you have specific types of interactions for specific different types of networks?

JONAN: Yeah, absolutely. I had left one of our primary platforms off of there, which was YouTube because we're still headed in a direction where we can make that a lightweight process of contributing our work to YouTube.

So our strategy, as a team, is to head for platforms that offer two-way engagement. I think that in our generation, we've got a lot of criticism for being the Nintendo generation. “Oh, you were raised by television; you have no attention span.” I have no attention span for TV news. I have no attention span for this one-way oration that has been media consumption my entire life because I live in a world where I have “choose your own adventure” media.

Where I can join a Twitch channel and I can adjust the direction of the conversation. Where I can get on Twitter and have a real conversation with famous people, because I am interesting and engaging and responding to them in intelligent ways, hopefully. When you tweet poop emojis at people in your software community as your only game, it's not as likely to drive engagement, but they're very engaging platforms and so, we're aiming for things like that.

YouTube being the possible exception. YouTube is still levelling up there. I'm not sure if you find out on the YouTube comments section lately, but it's a little bit wild in there. It's getting better; they're working on it. And those are the kinds of platforms that I want to be a part of.

So as far as new things go, I'm going to go with not Clubhouse. Clubhouse has one, got some accessibility stuff to work out, but two, in my opinion, stuck in a trap where they're headed towards that one-way conversation. Anyway, it may be a conversation like this podcast, which I love doing, but our audience isn't given an opportunity to respond in real-time and to drive the direction. Clubhouse is eventually going to turn into a similar platform where you have a hundred people in a room. Can a hundred people speak at once in the same conversation? I don't think so. So there's the accessibility piece – [overtalk]

JESSICA: In text!

JONAN: In text, they could.

JESSICA: Yeah, that’s the beauty of the combination.

REIN: Clubhouse needs to innovate by providing a text version of their application.

JONAN: Or when we get NLP, when we get natural language processing to the point where those kinds of things can become accessible conversations automatically, then it's different and people can contribute in their own ways. You can have a realistic sounding robot voice who’d read your thoughts aloud for the group. But beyond those, beyond Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, we're checking out TikTok a little bit, that's kind of fun content. It's a good way for us to reuse clips and highlights from our Twitch stuff without having to go through the old process of creating the new content and similarly, for YouTube.

If I get on my high horse and I'm waxing philosophical about why you should use instance variables instead of class variables, I can put that piece out and I can make a YouTube video about why you should use instance variables instead of fostered. That kind of content does well on that platform, but you need to consider the platform and I would say, choose a few and focus there, look for the ones that actually have high engagement.

Discord is another good place to hang out, love hanging on Discord. And then you've got to be blogging too, but blog in a place where you can own the conversation and make it about what matters to you as a community. We're real focused on learning and teaching, helping people become content creators, and focusing on the quality of software, generally. We're data people. We want to be talking about that.

So we have our own community on therelicans.com where we talk about that. That's just a instance of forum. It's just like dev.to, but we own it and we get to period the content a little bit in a direction that is valuable. You want to keep them loose when you're going in community so that you can let the community take shape as it grows into those values. But that's my recommendation for platforms.

MANDO: Right on. Thanks, man. It's funny that you bring up TikTok—not at all related how I've recently fallen down and continuing to fall down the TikTok rabbit hole and out of all the different types of content I see on TikTok, it is tech content that I have seen almost zero of. It’s just like, I don't know if there's just like a dearth of the content or if the algorithm hasn't set stuff up to me.

JONAN: Yeah.

MANDO: The algorithm is super good about all other kinds of things that I'm super into like, I'm inundated with cute dogs and goats and [laughs] you name it, but I don't know. Maybe the algorithm is telling me something about myself that...

JONAN: No, I mean, you just have to click on it.

JESSICA: Or something about tech content.

JONAN: I always just cause answer. Yeah. Jessica, you have thoughts on TikTok?

JESSICA: Well, TikTok is really cool but it t's just takes a ton of work to make a piece of content that tight, especially around something technical.

JONAN: Yeah. I think that's a good point, actually, that it's not as easy as it looks ever producing a piece of content. You may watch a video for 2 to 3 minutes. I once had a 5-minute lightning talk, but I did 65 takes on it. it took me maybe 20 hours to just record the thing, not counting the 100 hours of research I put into the actual content.

So depending on the piece of content and how polished you’re going to make it – TikTok’s initiating platform, though.

Look up Emily Kager. If you go watch Emily Kager’s TikToks, you'll head down the right path, I suspect into the good tech ones.

MANDO: Awesome. Thanks, man.

JONAN: I really like the ones that are explaining algorithms with M&Ms. That kind of video, I like those ones a lot. Here's how databases work under the hood. This is actually what in the endgame using toys or whatever is handy. Cats, I saw someone that worked with their cats and the cats are running all about it. [chuckles] It was fun.

MANDO: Oh, that's awesome and that's the kind of stuff that, I mean, I don't know what the time limit is on TikTok stuff, but our TikToks, if they seem to be about a minute to a minute and a half, it's not like you could do any kind of in-depth deep dive on something, but something like describe what Kubernetes with Legos, or something. It seems like you could fit some sort of bite-size explanations, or a series of definitions, right?

JONAN: Yeah.

MANDO: I mean, there's someone, whose videos I see all the time, who does these videos on obscure Lord of the Rings facts. She'll describe this intricate familial family tree of beings whose definitions have spanned not only the Silmarillion, but other – and she fits it all in a minute and a half. It's fascinating and it's amazing to watch. I'm sure, like you were saying, the stuff she's been researching and she knows this stuff. She spent probably years and years and user for life gathering this knowledge and gathering the ability to distil it down into a minute and a half.

JONAN: Yeah, and I mean, it's not even – look, I think a lot of people have the perception, especially starting out creating content, that you have to be the expert. You don't have to be the expert. You just have to do the work, go read about the thing, then talk about the thing. You're actually better suited to talk about it when you've just learned it, by far. Because you know the pain, you have a fresh memory of the pain and the parts of that API you're describing that were difficult to understand and once you become a Kubernetes expert, those things are lost to you. They become opaque; you can't find the parts that were terrible because the memory of the pain goes away. So TikTok is a good place to explore with that kind of stuff in a short-form piece of content.

I have a couple more recommendations for you that I'll drop for you in the show notes, too about the people on Twitter—@theannalytical is great at that thing, @cassidoo, and @laurieontech. I'll put them all for you in the show notes. But there are, there are some people you can emulate early on and if you're just starting out, don't be afraid to get up there on the stage. The bottom line is in life in general, we're all just making it up as we go along and you can make it up, too. What have you really got to lose? You're not doing it today. Tomorrow, you would still not be doing it if you don't try.

REIN: Continuing with my program of using this podcast to ask Jonan to help me with my personal problems, do you have any thoughts about internal developer relations? Or let me ask this a different way. There are companies that are big enough that there are teams that have never met other teams and there are teams that produce platforms that are used by application development teams and so on. What are your thoughts about building more cohesive and engaged developer communities within a company?

JONAN: Yes, do it. I've considered this a huge part of what developer relations needs to be doing generally. Binding those departments together and finding the connections for people and advocating the use of internal software, those internal tooling teams. This is why a lot of DevRel people have a background in internal tooling, myself included. It's just fun to be helping out your friends. That's why you get into DevRel. You like helping your friends and developers are your friends and they're my favorite people.

The point that I was making about internal developer relations is yeah, you should be doing it already as part of a DevRel team, but there are actually dedicated teams starting to form. Lyft, I think was one of the first people I heard of doing this where there's an entire team of people. Because the bottom line is DevRel is a very, very busy job. Because you don't have this marketing machine behind you working very effectively, you're probably doing a lot of the production work of your role anyway and it takes a full day to do a podcast well, in many cases.

So you're losing a day every time you spend an hour on a microphone. But if you're doing that and then you're going to conferences and then you're writing blog posts and then you're having the usual buffet of meetings and everyone wants to talk to you all the time to just check in and sync and see how we can collaborate; we need forms for that.

When people come to me and they want us to speak at their event, or they want us to collaborate on a piece of conduct, I have a form for that and once a week, the entire team sits down and we review all of those in a content review meeting and that guarantees that person, the highest quality of feedback for their project, all 10 of us, 11 of us counting myself, are going to look at that and give them the answers they need and we have guaranteed timeline for them. We have a deal that we will respond to you by Friday 2:00 PM Pacific if you give us the thing by Thursday morning, every single week like clockwork and that encourages the rest of the organization to engage you the way that makes sense for you as a team, instead of just little random ad hoc pieces.

So yes, it should be done internally. You need to make space for it. If you are doing external DevRel, too, but it's already part of your job and having a dedicated team actually makes a ton of sense. I would love to see more of that.

REIN: Let's say that I am a technical lead, or a senior developer and there's this thing that my team has been doing and I really wish the rest of the company knew about it because I think it could help them. What should I do?

JONAN: You should find marketing people. You're looking for the internal comms team in your marketing organization. There are people whose whole job is to communicate those things to the rest of the company; they're very good at it and they can tell you about all those avenues. We all have that internal blog thing, whatever. They're all pretty terrible, honestly, especially in larger companies—nobody reads them, that’s the problem—but they can help you get engagement on those things, help them be shared in the right channels, in your chat platform. That's the people I would work out to.

There are humans who are real good at helping you talk about your work and they're in marketing and it's a difficult place to engage, but look for your internal comms person. Failing that, make sure that your project is on point before you take it to people. If you don't have a read me that is at a 110%, that's your first step. Make sure that people understand how they can get involved and how to use the project and try it over and over and over again from scratch. Break it intentionally and see how painful it is to fix. Make it just the most user-friendly product you possibly can before you take it out there and you'll get better.

MANDO: This is something also that not just techniques and senior engineers should be thinking about management should be thinking about this for their entire teams and the people that they manage and lead. Because if you can provide visibility for the stuff that your people are working on and have worked on throughout the year, when you, as a manager, go to your management when salary reviews and unit reviews come up, it's much easier to make the case that your team mates or your people on your team should get the salary increases that you're trying to get them. If they have had the visibility for their work. If you can say, “Oh, remember this big thing,” and you can point to the blog post and you can point to the Slack conversation where 10 people congratulated Sam on her upgrade for Costco or whatever it is. You know what I mean?

JONAN: Yeah, and you have to talk loud here.

MANDO: Yeah.

JONAN: You’ve got to scream about it. Look, people are only going to hear 25% of what you say anyway, and it feels like bragging, but overcommunicate and often, especially people in management. I mean, really think about how many bulleted lists go across a manager's desk and how you want yours to matter. Better make it longer and more relevant and as detailed as possible so that some portion of it actually makes it through to their consciousness and they can communicate it on there's superiors. Superiors is a terrible way to say that; they're managers.

MANDO: They're managers, right? Yeah. This is something that I learned as I was going through management and something that was never taught to me and it's something that I advocate really strongly about. But if you're managing people, if you're leading people and you're not advocating for them and for their work, like you're saying, as loudly as possible to the point of possibly being annoying, you're straight up not doing your job.

JONAN: Yeah, you are. I learned early on in my career that the loudest people were the ones getting the promotions and having the career success, whether or not they were good, or they were actually contributing things that were value. I watched someone merge 600 lines of untested code against the objections of his coworkers and get a promotion about it. That's about conversations; it's not about quality.

REIN: Yeah, I also think there are things that companies can be doing to make this easier. So you can have a weekly show and tell email.

JONAN: Yes.

REIN: You can let people pitch stuff to it, you can track engagement with it, and see whether people are getting value out of it and try to make it better.

JONAN: And that's exactly it: you have to have a feedback mechanism so that you can adjust the direction of your content. We actually have plans, when we get our feet under us a bit, to do a morning news show like of us had in high school. Just 5 minutes in the morning where we take a question a day and explain it.

There are a lot of people who work at our companies who have no idea what a virtual machine is, or at what layer it operates, and how it differs from a container. Telling them the difference between LXC and VMs, that's a thing that DevRel people do well. So we can actually explain, I can take Kubernetes and I can explain it with M&M's in 5 minutes, and then I can invite people to come and talk to the devil to come hang out in the Slack channel. There's a Q&A form. We answer one of these every morning, maybe your question will be next.

By the way, here's some fun and interesting stuff that we're up to this week, come check it out. You can find this all on therelicans.com and we've got the internal page over here, and we've got this over here. And then you just have an opportunity daily to communicate this, what feels like a waterfall of work coming out of your team, but getting those daily touchpoints, or maybe weekly to start is a good place to go.

MANDO: I love the idea of morning announcements, especially as for specific teams. You assume that a certain size of an org to be able to do this kind of stuff. The place that I'm at right now, there's 4 of us total, so we're not going to be doing this kind of thing. But my last gig, there were thousands of people who worked there and I was in charge of the operations team.

JONAN: I actually think the morning news show is a really good way to do that, but you're right that in a smaller team, it's not as relevant. I would argue however, that you're doing it anyway, because with 4 people, you're able to communicate everything that you're all working on all the time.

MANDO: That is exactly what happens.

JONAN: And you don't have to scale.

MANDO: Yeah.

JONAN: But it's nice to be bought in on the dream and to feel like you're living your life with purpose and work is a huge part of our lives whether we like it or not. We live in this system and we get to choose every day. I choose to live a life that feels purposeful. I choose to seek meaning because I want to wake up in the morning and be excited to come to work. I want to help lift up the rest of my team so that we're out there making more developers who get to turn this into their dream, which we can't know or predict. I just want to help those people get over the line because I now have desperate it feels on the other side of the fence.

I mean, I worked 16-hour days for several years at 5 different jobs and I came home and the world was telling me to live myself up by my bootstraps. You’ve got to be kidding me. That's your American dream? Come on.

MANDO: Yeah, I got no more bootstraps.

JONAN: Yeah. I want you politician to go and spend 3 hours getting a jug of milk that you pay twice as much as it's necessary for it and have to take two buses to find. I want you to have that experience, how desperate and time consuming and expensive it is to be poor in this country and then lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Because it's not a thing.

We have a finite amount of motivation, of will in our day to spend and you've got to make the room. You've got to pay yourself first in that. Get up in the morning and write some code and then go exhaust yourself so your employer gets shortchanged. Your fourth job of the day, they're going to get a little bit less of your time and energy because you gave it to yourself first. That's how you're going to build a wedge to get into tech and I want to be there to help people do that thing. That's what I want to spend the rest of my life doing is making more developers and supporting them as that grow.

I mean, I can see dystopia from here. The tech is headed towards a place.

MANDO: Oh, yeah.

JONAN: We have 1% of people on earth able to program today and we're about to double the global access to high-speed internet. When Starling comes on board – they're launching 70 satellites a month now. When Starlight comes on board, everyone on earth will have access to hopefully low-cost, high-speed internet access. We will double the global audience for many of our services. That's going to be real bad for the world if that 1% who can program and control most of the money in power on the internet becomes half a percent. Historically, that has not worked out great for humanity. So we need to start loosening that up.

We need to make more developers yesterday by the thousands, by the millions. We need more people writing this code and helping us to turn this industry into a place that we want to be because the model culture is not going to make it. We will extinct us. We will eliminate humanity whether only the soul or in reality, if we continue down this path where we have a whole bunch of people collected in Valley somewhere, who are defining the rest of the planet. Facebook had no small part in recent revolutions around the world. That's tech. That's us. Whether you want to own it or not, you contributed to the culture and the software that built that monster.

REIN: And the other side to making more developers is not having work that chews up and spits out their desiccated husks at a profoundly troubling rate.

JONAN: It's true. It’s absolutely true and I think that that's equally, if not more important, that we're not feeding more to the machine. We have toxic spaces in our companies and in our communities and we define them. We need to change them. We need to create better ones. That's, I think a better option, even because you're not going to change that many people's minds. I think that especially this late in the game, for many people—people who have had success with their bad opinions—they continue to spout those bad opinions and believe them.

Make a new space. Make a new space and prove it. Show your community, the numbers. If you have another meetup, because the one you're going to has had 18 months of 18 white men speaking and mostly the same people, then make a new meetup and see if the community likes it better and I bet you, they will. I bet you, they'll come. If you build it, they will come. But we got to do the work to make these places better before we just bring people in and watch them suffer.

I can't do that anymore. I can't be that person in the world. For a while, I stopped speaking at code schools and bootcamps because I felt like a monster because I knew what I was setting these people up for. I was looking around tech and seeing the poison and I was bringing people, who I genuinely cared about, to the slaughter and I couldn't do it anymore. But I think that now I can do along the way is advise them how to avoid it, what red flags to look out for, how to find the good parts in between, and that's a better approach. It enables me to feel good about my work.

MANDO: Yeah. Building up that, I don't want to jump us to reflections yet, but the thing that I keep coming back to is the desire to help your friends.

JONAN: Yeah.

MANDO: And for me, personally, something that I've been struggling with for a long time now and it's really crystallized over the past, I don't know, year or so, is seemingly how few people have that desire. Maybe not have the desire, I think it's natural to have a desire to want to help your friends. But maybe there's so few people who see everybody as someone who is potentially your friend and someone that you want to help. It's like, they'd be willing to help the person that they hang out with every weekend. But they're going to step over the homeless guy who is standing in front of Target while they walk in. You know what I mean?

JONAN: Yeah, and I don't think that they're bad people. Like, I’m not actually a big believer in bad people; I think that there are good misguided people. I don't think there are a whole lot of humans on this earth, with the exception of maybe a handful, who wake up in the morning to do evil. Who wakes up and is like, “Man, today, I'm going to make some real bad days for those around me.” They mostly, I think, believe that they're contributing too good to the world and many of them are very misguided in those attempts, to be clear. There are people actively contributing harm every day, but they don't see it as such.

So we have that piece of the conversation and the other part, where I just fail to have empathy for other people, is probably in part about not having good experiences. When I reached out to other people, having a form of attachment in my life, maybe when I was younger, that was traumatic for me. That taught me that I could not trust the world to catch me when I fall; that I couldn't trust other people will be there for me and to show up. Because of that, I had to rely on myself and here I go again on my own.

This song I'm off on this walk and it's just me and I need to look out for myself because nobody else will. It's the hurt people hurt people. We saw a church sign when I was driving with my son when he was quite young and he said, “Hurt people hurt people. Why do they want to hurt people so bad?” So internally, in our family, this became a chant: hurt people hurt people instead of hurt people hurt people conversation.

But I think the part where we are perpetually enacting our traumas on those around us, because as a society, we've decided that addressing your own traumas, getting your own crap out of the way first is somehow a taboo subject. Like, just go to therapy, people. We just have to put mandatory therapy for people. I want to see a government program that institutes mandatory therapy for people. I'm sure the people will love that.

“Oh sure, everyone gets to see a doctor now. I bet you don't want people to die of preventable diseases either?” No, I don't. I want people to get over their collective trauma and stop harming other people because you were harmed and it takes work. Because you got to do the work if you're going to make the world a better place.

MANDO: Yeah, I don't know. I personally feel like it's difficult for me when it seems as though the trauma is ongoing. Without this turning into my own therapy session, it makes me sad to see how different I've become over the past year. Is it a year ago? I would've said the same thing that you did, Jonan where I didn't believe that most people were awful monsters hellbent on destroying me and everyone that I love. I don't know so much that I believe that anymore.

JONAN: I think

JESSICA: They don't think of themselves as monsters.

MANDO: Right, right.

JESSICA: They may be hellbent on destroying you because they really think that's somehow good are wrong.

MANDO: Right. At the end of the day, you're absolutely right, Jessica. How much of that matters? How much of that distinction matters?

JESSICA: It does matter.

JONAN: I think it does.

JESSICA: It matters in what we do about it.

JONAN: Yeah.

JESSICA: And I don't want to destroy them either. I do want to segregate them off in their own little world.

JONAN: Yeah. I love that.

MANDO: For me, the ratios make it work in the other direction.

JESSICA: Like you want to segregate off in your own little world?

MANDO: Well, just that there's way more of them.

JESSICA: Oh, okay.

MANDO: And so, putting them off someplace would never happen.

JONAN: Yeah. I think it's worth noting here that I am a large loud white man speaking from a place of tremendous privilege in that I maybe have experienced less of that “You don't get to exist.” Like, “You're not welcomed here in life in general.” Not even a maybe but that like over my lifetime, very few people have come out to me and just said like, “I wish that you weren't a thing. I wish that you as a human didn't exist on this earth, that you were never born, that your parents were never born.” I've not had that experience. I mean, I have when I've received somehow particular malice from someone usually as a result of my ridiculous jokes.

JESSICA: But then it’s personal which yeah.

JONAN: But then it’s personal and that’s [inaudible]. People who don't even know me. So yeah, I do. I speak from that position, but I think that this is another – gosh, I'm really not trying to be like let's all come together and have a conversation person because some are too far gone from that. But I think that I'm not ready to give up on humanity as a whole just yet, as much as I'm inclined to. I might be ready to give up on the United States, looking into options overseas.

[laughter]

REIN: I think for me, the reason this distinction is so important is because when someone claims that there's just evil in the world and these chaotic forces, it decontextualizes people's behavior from ideology, from culture, from socialization, from the worldviews that they have that mediate these behaviors.

So I think it's important to understand that people aren't just evil. People have certain worldviews and ideologies and that those manifest in these behaviors.

JONAN: And that we built the –

JESSICA: Which meant the ideology is evil.

JONAN: It makes the ideologies evil.

JESSICA: Yeah, which causes the behavior of the people to be evil. That if – [overtalk]

JONAN: And these are the systems that we build and perpetuate.

JESSICA: Right, exactly and if we keep blaming the people and saying, “There are evil people,” then we will never fix the system.

JONAN: Exactly.

REIN: The most profound example of this I am aware of and if this is too heavy, we can cut it out of the show is [laughter] when Jordan Peterson claimed that the Nazi's final solution was because they were just evil, chaotic forces. In fact, their worldview demanded it. Their ideology demanded it.

JESSICA: Yeah, there was nothing chaotic about that.

JONAN: No, it was pretty organized.

JESSICA: Yeah.

MANDO: Thanks, IBM.

JONAN: Yeah.

JESSICA: Did you say IBM?

MANDO: I said thanks IBM for their efforts.

JONAN: And Bosch and every other company, right?

MANDO: Yeah.

JONAN: I mean, the world would not be able to sustain its current population without the work of Bosch creating nitrogen out of the air and also, then the Nazis used it to get gunpowder when they had no access.

So we have a lot of those kinds of systems that we've built over the years and that's absolutely a part of it. You talked about the industries that are involved across these bridges. You don't get to show up to work, team and just be like, “I don't actually care about the impact that I have on humans. I care about the impact that I have on this graph.” You can't be that person anymore if we're going to make it and you can't walk around and point at those people and be like, “Yeah, they were fundamentally flawed from birth.” Whatever that thing means to you, you can't just say like, “Yeah, that person's evil. They probably had bad parenting.” Yeah, maybe they did. But I know a lot of people who had bad parenting or no parenting and turned out okay because they fought their way up that mountain. They overcame it.

JESSICA: And they found friends, it helps them.

JONAN: Yes.

JESSICA: It's not, “Fight your way up the mountain, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” No, it's, “Keep looking for a better place,” and by place, I mean friend group.

JONAN: Yes. Surround yourself with people who genuinely care about you and care about the things that you care about. I wish I'd learned that earlier in my life. Man, I hung out with some people who had different values than I did over the years and I changed my life just by finding a good friend.

JESSICA: Yeah. Because we are social animals and we really are the people we're closest to.

MANDO: Yeah, absolutely.

JESSICA: That's what makes sense with us. That is the world we live in. What was that John Gall quote from earlier? “I respect facts, but I live in impressions.” Especially the default appropriate behavior is whatever the people around us do ad that is what we will fall back to without active intervention and we only have so much of that willpower to combat in a day.

REIN: Oh, I've got a new thing for a fact that I just read. So this is from Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior and there's a diagram where reality minus meaningfulness equals facts.

MANDO: I’d buy that.

JESSICA: I mean, okay. But reality very broadly because when we're looking at more than what's just in front of us, it comes to us as facts and stories, but stories can lead us either way. Oh, manipulated facts can, too. But we still have to look for facts in order to realign our vision of reality and meaning with something bigger than we can personally see.

MANDO: Have y'all seen the movie In the Mouth of Madness by John Carpenter, back from the 90s? It's a super good kind of thriller horror movie, kind of Lovecraftian in the ancient ones are coming to take over and stuff like that.

But it's about this guy who, he's an author. His name is Sutter Cane. He's like the new Stephen King; super prolific and writes these kind of horrifying, terrifying books that are just sweeping the zeitgeist. And then something changes and it seems as though his books start affecting the people who are reading his books, not in the [inaudible] was a genius, I’ve been affected by it, but making them bleed from their eyes and go crazy affected.

So the movie plays around with these ideas of facts and reality as something that is mostly shared and understood as opposed to something that is concrete and stands alone by itself. It's super freaky and really good. My daughter and I just watched it again a couple of days ago so it's kind of fresh on the mind, but I highly recommend it. I think it's on Amazon Prime.

JONAN: I think I like this discussion because it speaks to weaving the facts into the narrative of your life. You need to leave the reality that you're presented with and the reality that people share with you, the facts into the story that is you develop that shared story we're all telling together.

REIN: Yeah. You need a Dirk gently belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of things sort of thing. Another thing is diagram is that phenomena minus interconnecting context equals objects. So the whole point, well, for me, what I take to be the point is you have the fact, but you have to understand them in context.

JESSICA: Yeah, the connections. And the weaving is really important because we can't understand anything top down. We can't understand anything bottom up, not fully. You have to weave back and forth.

REIN: By the way, Lewontin in his biology, his ideology lectures, talks about how the mechanistic approach to understanding the world didn't work, but the holistic approach and isolation didn't work either. So Jessica, exactly what you're talking about that you need both.

JESSICA: Yeah.

JONAN: All right. Reflections time. What do we do for reflections?

MANDO: I'll go first. There was a lot in the conversation, but right here towards the end, the idea of who we spend time with and we are who we keep that small circle of friends with is super important. I had this realization, Jessica, as you were talking about that that my deep-seated negativity that's been growing in me for the past year or so, it comes out more and more and it really only comes out with that small, tight circle of friends.

So I need to be very, very careful that I'm not turning into the toxic one [laughs] in my group and that might be a way to help me self-regulate this stuff. It’s not like I don't want to share it because I do because these people, they're my family. Like, I’ll lay down in traffic for them.

JESSICA: Is it something that emerges within the group or do you only see it in yourself?

MANDO: No, no, no. It's only in me. I mean, not only, but you know what I mean? Like it's what's more pronounced and sometimes, I feel like I'm convincing [laughs] them, which I don't want to do.

JESSICA: Because eventually, they'll reflect that back and it'll spiral.

MANDO: Right. Exactly. I don't want to turn them into me. [laughs] So I should be more careful and maybe listen a little more.

REIN: We started and we ended this conversation by talking about people helping each other and about friends and as I've been studying resilience engineering, what I realized that it's about is the ecology of human performance. If you want to understand how someone behaves, you have to understand their environment and their experiences and sharing adaptive capacity—people helping each other when they need help. So ecology of human performance and sharing of adaptive capacity.

There's a story in science, in social biology that humans are inherently aggressive and competitive and domineering, and that this explains and motivates and justifies social systems of domination and oppression and so on. And what, at least my experience tells me is that the reason their people are putting so much effort into asserting these things to be true, is that the plain evidence of our eyes is they're not true. That people are helping people, that that's what we're good at.

JESSICA: Something that stood out to me from early is there was a question about how do you convince people that something is valuable when it's not going to move the metrics that they're currently looking at? And sometimes what is needed, if it works, it's going to be obvious that it works even if it's not going to be measurable by what you're measuring now. Jonan had made the point that if you get enough people on board and everyone in the room considers this, obviously the right thing to do, then it becomes obvious in a social sense and that makes it easier to convince someone.

JONAN: I think these all tie together for me. I think talking about being vulnerable and understanding what it takes and how that is necessary to really build empathy on the other side, to just stand up and talk about the things that suck, talk about who you are in a real way and have the deeper conversation.

I'm sure it's happened to you all, but there've been plenty of times in my life where I sat down with someone and 5 minutes later, I felt like we were just opened like, this is just me and reaching that level of vulnerability, sometimes never comes for some people and that ultimately, to me is this kind of curve of self-actualization that humans are setting up for their lifetime, hopefully.

We can help people up on that and especially people who have had the kind of privilege that I've had, this wind at my back, and I'm not even just talking about all of the socioeconomic pieces. I'm talking about you. I’m talking about all three of you, you being my friends, being here to support me, you make it possible for me to hand that support onto the people around me and it's not actually a choice at some level. You have demonstrated as peers, the kind of behavior that I want to emulate. And I have no choice, but to spend the rest of my life, trying to offer that hand to the next person, who's going to come along and continue doing the good work that you all are doing.

So I am feeling grateful today, more than anything, for having been here and had this conversation. So thank you all.

Special Guest: Jonan Scheffler.

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01:49 - Kurt’s Superpower: Lifting Others Up: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

07:00 - “Self-Taught” vs “Self-Guided” vs “Self-Motivated” Developers

11:32 - The Intersection of Incarceration and Technology

22:15 - Having Privilege Working in DevRel to Raise These Issues

26:51 - Helping and Advocating For the Formerly Incarcerated

29:32 - The Interview Process as it Relates to the Formerly Incarcerated

36:26 - Always Be Applying (ABA); Technical Interviews and Fabrication/Bending Truths

45:29 - Problematic Binary Identities

47:07 - What can companies and hiring managers do? / Problems with Hiring in Tech and Tech Interviews

01:05:19 - Contextualizing Advice

Reflections:

Kurt: Community is what you surround yourself with.

Laurie: Having empathy and understanding as a hiring manager for people who have perceivably negative things in their background.

Jacob: Polyglotism and not being so gatekeep-y.

John: Being reminded of how terrible our carceral state is here in the U.S.

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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:

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JACOB: Hello, everybody and welcome to Episode 226 of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m joined with my co-panelist, John Sawers.

JOHN: Thank you, Jacob and I’m here with Laurie Barth.

LAURIE: Thanks, John. I’m excited to introduce our guest today, Kurt Kemple.

Kurt Kemple is a technical writer, speaker, and software developer living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He’s very passionate about the intersection of technology and incarceration. Currently, he works for Apollo GraphQL, as a Developer Relations Manager and when not working he can be found by the ocean or relaxing with his family, which sounds really incredible.

So Kurt, I'm going to have you start us off by answering the question we ask all of our guests, which is what is your developer superpower?

KURT: Well, first thank you for that awesome introduction. It's a pleasure to be here.

So diving into what is my superpower, I thought about this a lot and I'm not really someone who I feel has some innate skill or ability that really makes me stand out in any particular area. But I think one thing that I do really well is I care very much about lifting up the people around me. I work actively to generally help others more than I'm helping myself. I think the rising tide lifts all boats kind of mentality and I think that that is definitely something that sets me apart is I gauge my success by how successful folks around me are.

JACOB: That sounds fantastic. Was that something you felt like you've always done, or was it something do you consciously develop, or did it just sort of come around?

KURT: I think it evolved out of situations in my life. I've dealt with a lot of stressful situations and pretty tough upbringing and I think a lot of it is just finding opportunities to make sure people don't have to experience those things and not being so drastic that it's always in relation to something very life altering. But there's something about removing roadblocks for other folks that you have the ability to do that is very rewarding to me and I think I just started to realize that later in life that that's something I value greatly.

LAURIE: That's really interesting to hear because I think in a lot of areas of technology and in the industry, we often hear people saying like, “I had to do it, so you have to do it, too.” I've heard that with sort of the toxic interview, it's almost like hazing mentality and the tools may be abstracted, but if you don't know the super, super low-level piece of it, then you're never going to understand it the way I do sort of mentality. A lot of this gatekeeping stuff comes from that. So it's really refreshing to hear that you feel sort of the opposite of that.

KURT: Yeah. Like I remember very distinctly, many times starting out programming, like getting the response: RTFM. It's like, people, they don't want to help for whatever reason. They want you to – it's like almost like a badge of honor; forcing folks to figure things out for themselves. There's something to be said with taking on learning as your own responsibility, but part of learning is knowing how to get answers and ask for help when you aren't figuring it out and so, I definitely really cannot stand to see that kind of lift the ladder up behind me mentality, or pull yourself up by the bootstraps type mentality.

JACOB: So who are those people around you in your role with Apollo? Who are the people that you would measure the success of?

KURT: Yeah. So it's actually spread out across multiple things, but I'll start from Apollo. I'm a manager of the developer relations team so definitely my direct reports absolutely care about how well they are doing as well as the DX organization, it extends out to their world.

We're all part of developer experience and we want to make sure that things we're doing is helping lifting up the education team and DX as a whole. And then of course, that spreads out into Apollo, which is just by helping developers be successful with Apollo, we're actually helping a policy succeed.

But when we talk about developer relations, really that's just communities I'm involved with at all. So that could be anybody from the communities that I'm a part of, whether that's content creation, DevRel, things around GraphQL, or developments, it could be anything related to that. Pretty much any person that I have interaction with, I start to look at ways in which I can help them move forward.

JOHN: It's funny the phrase “bootstrap” is so embedded in our culture because it's coming from – it’s technical terminology at this point, but it's so interesting and I think important to think back to the origin of that phrase, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was satirical because it's obviously, not possible to do that for you. You can't lift yourself by grabbing your boots and that's the whole point, but it's almost like turned over on itself and becoming oh, that's just what you do as economic policy or a social policy despite the fact that it was originally the complete opposite of that.

KURT: Yeah. It's funny. I never really thought about that, but it's very true. They took something that was meant to be like satire, like, “Oh yeah, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and then turned it into something serious. I still view it as satire. To me, it's the silliest phrase ever, but a lot of folks take that very seriously.

JACOB: What else is satire or was originally satire was the word, “meritocracy”?

KURT: Oh wow.

JACOB: Yeah. It was basically like oh, the new aristocracy of people who think they're on top because of their merit; it's the meritocracy. It's something else I think about is the phrase self-taught; ex self-taught developer, self-taught engineer, or the million Medium posts of how I taught myself to code in 12 weeks. What does that mean, taught yourself? Do you have no interactions with any human?

JOHN: You didn’t think a human produced?

LAURIE: Yeah. The self-taught thing is actually really complicated and nuanced in my mind because a lot of people like to claim it and say, “Well, we're all self-taught because we all read blog posts and have to teach ourselves other things because as a developer, you're always learning new things and so, we can all claim that title.” And then there's the area of people who consider themselves self-taught, but they were working one-on-one through DMs with someone that is a working developer and they know really well.

But then there's actually a last category of people, which is what I feel the label was sort of designed for, which is they never had any formal classroom experience that taught them like, the variable goes on the left side of the expression. So they had to learn just those super fundamental syntactical things through reading and through example videos and potentially sometimes asking questions, but it was a very async process. I think that's what self-taught is designed to imply that there wasn't a curriculum laid out in front of them and that they didn't have a helping hand along the way.

I think there's something incredibly powerful about that and I hate the idea that it's been co-opted as well, everyone's self-taught, I'm like, “No, I got to sit in a computer science program and have teachers tell me what I needed to know in a certain order.” Was that necessarily the best way for me to learn? No. Did I have to go in and teach myself how to do things after that fact and for the rest of my career? Absolutely. But did I have some of those baseline foundational things conveyed to me based on someone who knew the order of operations of learning this topic? I did. So I am not self-taught in any sense of the word.

KURT: Yeah. I think that's very interesting point and what I've been using. So I'm the other end of that spectrum. No official – that's actually not true, I took intro or intermediate web development course when I was incarcerated. But this was basically, here's a book on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and good luck.

But aside from that, I had no real formal education, but I've adopted the term self-guided, which I feel is a better descriptor of that. Because it's more about guiding yourself through a curriculum to learn programming and it's like, you're pulling bits and pieces from wherever. You can find it to create your own curriculum is essentially what you're doing. But I did learn from lots of other folks along that journey, both through asynchronous communication and DMs, watching videos, reading, blog posts and stuff. So it's not like I was in a room with no outside influence and had a computer and was like, “I will code.” But I think I really like that term, self-guided, because that's a better representation, I feel like of what actually happened.

LAURIE: I love that and it reminds me of when I was in high school where you get to take independent study and it's sort of the same concept of you get to go in-depth on a topic, but you're determining what shape that takes and where you go and what you focus on.

JACOB: What successful means.

KURT: Yeah.

JACOB: And then no one will probably care, to be truthful. No one will actually care if you don't do it.

LAURIE: Yeah. Yeah, that's the other thing; self-motivated is a big part of that. Like, no one's grading papers or assignments. There's no papers in coding.

[laughter]

No one is grading assignments. You don't have deadlines that are imposed by other people. If you buy the course and you never watch a single video, the only one accountable for that is sunk cost fallacy of having wasted the money. There's nothing forcing you to power through and that's actually a great way to prepare yourself for coding on the job. Because it's like, technically, there's just this ticket and you need to be looking at it and feel the sense of oh no, I need to get this done because no one can actually force you to do it! [laughs]

KURT: Yeah. That's very accurate. [chuckles]

JOHN: Concurred. It sounds like from your bio there that the group of people that you consider yourself to be responsible for helping to lift up is beyond just the team that you're responsible for. So I’d love to hear more about the other groups that you're working with on that level.

KURT: Yeah. So, I think it's interesting when we talk about community and groups and to me, community is not like a thing with guidelines and boundaries, community is whoever you surround yourself with and so, to me, there is no React community, or GraphQL community. There's just people in my community who happened to know React, or GraphQL and I think it's an interesting way to look at community because it breaks down a lot of barriers.

But if we do talk about specific groups, I am very into the intersection of incarceration and technology and the reason why is because I myself am formerly incarcerated and getting into tech had such a drastic effect on my life. So it’s just naturally, I want to and again, a lot of this motivation for lifting others up stems from this. I feel like I am often sitting on a gold mine and I feel selfish when I know that there are people who were in a similar situation who are coming out of prison and don't have any idea that this industry exists, that they can have a future in it with some self-guided learning, some hard work, and a lot of perseverance. It's by no means easy, let's be real.

Coding is a very difficult skill, but most folks can accomplish that goal of learning it and it just feels like if I'm not actively working to help expose people, who are coming out of incarceration, find this industry and see if it's a fit for them, then I feel like I'm just like holding something that I should be freely giving away. I think a lot of where it comes with lifting others up is that feeling of, I'm holding something that other people should have access to and that's education, information.

When we talk about self-guided, it's actually one thing about picking your own curriculum that is anxiety inducing is, am I picking the right things to learn? The industry is huge and you could pick so many different things and I lucked out that I was introduced to something that was a good path into tech for me.

I would like to provide folks coming out the information that the industry exists, but also a little bit of guidance around some of the different ways that you can go and break into it. So I'd say that is definitely a community, or a group of folks in my community that I care deeply about is those who are transitioning from incarceration back into society.

LAURIE: I'm curious if – obviously, this is an experience and a community that a lot of us don't have a lot of insight into and it's great that you do and you have those connections. Can you talk to us a little bit about the kinds of things that we all can do to make that transition easier to support those groups of people, whether it's in an organization or outside of that?

KURT: Yeah. I'll say there's really two avenues where you can do a lot of good. One is in de-stigmatization. So it's sharing information about incarceration, figuring out who these people in the community are, building relationships with them, checking at your companies, and seeing if they're adhering to the laws around hiring formerly incarcerated folks.

A lot of times background checks will violate labor laws within states and companies don't check that. They say, “Give me the default. I want all the information.” It's up to the company to actually check and make sure that they have the proper configuration that they're not losing people based on laws.

A good example of this is in California, they can only look 7 years back on your record for criminal activity, barring certain types of activity. But for most things, only 7 years. However, there's companies that will do background checks and pull stuff up from way back. I had this happen with a company and I was like, “Hey, just to let you know, you're not allowed to pull up information from when you did. You showing me that you found my background is actually admitting that you're violating the state laws.”

Now here's where the problem lies. It takes people who are the ones, the vulnerable being affected by it to push this forward because our only recourse is to hire a lawyer and to fight it in court. I'm jobless, have just come out of prison; I don't have any money for a lawyer to fight some company, to do that and then do you want to go now work for a company that you had to fight for the job in court?

So it takes people who are not in that situation asking their employer, “Hey, what is our policy on hiring formerly incarcerated? What programs do we have in place to make sure we're not dropping them out of the pipeline?” That's a huge one.

And then the second one is most people don't really want to go back to prison. That's not always true. You have people who actually do want to go because it's a place where they can get more stability and safety and stuff than they can. That says a lot about the United States as a whole, but most people, they come into prison with high hopes.

I wasn't the only one in that web programming class like, I wasn't the only one learning how to train dogs, learning welding, carpentry, plumbing; taking every course that was available to me. There's a lot of other folks, too. But what people don't have and why recidivism is so high is there's no stability. So we get these skills. We get out into the world. We have no income. We have no job history for years because of this. Companies that would hire folks for the skills that we have learned are doing background checks and turning us down because of them.

So it's like yeah, we're learning skills, we're learning stuff, but none of it can actually be used until x amount of years after you get out and you're just kind of left floating there. So finding programs, local programs that are based in civil activities, providing housing, providing food, providing access to equipment and education, further education for folks coming out of incarceration. Those are the two best places that you can by far have a huge impact.

$50 worth of food can be the difference between somebody going back to prison or not. Because if they don't have it, they're going to revert to what they know and what they know is crime often, and then boom, they go back. Of course, if we look at who's the most affected by this, it's marginalized communities. So focusing on those communities is especially going to be impactful.

JOHN: Yeah. I would also imagine that the lack of a support system in the outside world is also a huge factor there. Like you were saying the $50, people that have a support system can probably make-do relying on other people that they know to help out, to get by through that part where they need that extra money for food. But if you don't have that, there aren't really any other options.

KURT: Yeah. It took me almost 3 years to land my first job coding as a software developer and I can pinpoint multiple times during that 3 years where I came very close to committing a crime again and that's wild to think about now. Now, I would never in a million years do anything, but I also have stability.

It’s just a living example, somebody directly in front of you just proving that the prison system, prison industrial complex is really just a money-making machine that is not incentivized in any way to help provide you with stability and keep you out of prison. Most of our prisons are actually owned by private businesses and private businesses need revenue and for a private prison, what do you think the revenue stream is? Prison labor, slave labor, me working for 14 cents an hour. That is how they make money. So what is the real incentivization, or real incentive, I guess, is the actual word to actually have programs to help people be stable when they get out? To provide learning and education around things they'll actually be able to get jobs for? To not have lobbyists literally fight to keep laws around hiring formerly incarcerated as strict and terrible as they are?

So the prison industrial complex literally sends people to Congress and have them lobby against improving these systems and then they pay people at the state level and it's just like all the way down. They pay judges to make sure they send non-violent offenders into the prison system. It's a nightmare of a system, but to circle back to that, that $50 makes a huge difference and can really be the differentiator.

LAURIE: For what it's worth, I appreciate you being so candid about all of this. I think it's a topic that some of us are tangentially aware of, but don't necessarily have the specifics. I remember some of this from my poly-sci degree and it was horrible then and it's worse now.

KURT: Yeah. It's not fun or pleasant, but I am privileged enough to be in a position to candidly speak about it and so, again, if we use manager speak, [chuckles] circle back to lifting up others and feeling like I'm holding onto something.

This stuff is really stressful. It's hard to talk about even with as much as I do, but I find that the DMs that I get from folks who are struggling and trying to get into tech. When they reach out to me and they're like, “I found your blog posts or this podcast or video and it gave me hope,” I'm going to keep trying that's that motivates the ever-living crap out of me and it far outweighs that pressure.

But another thing, too is not everyone is in a position to be able to speak about this. It's just, I've developed enough of a brand and identity in the industry. I have enough of a work background. The incidents have happened so far in the past now that they can't really be held against me for finding future work. So not everyone has that situation.

LAURIE: I'm curious if you feel like being in the developer relations space has impacted your ability to have those conversations and have those interactions and be more visible compared to some sort of a more IC coding role where you don't necessarily have the same kind of network effect based on the work that you're doing day-to-day.

KURT: Yeah. Oh, that's a really interesting insight. I mean, yes, the faster the audience grows that I can reach, clearly, it’s the more people I can reach with this message. So I definitely think DevRel has put me into a situation where I can reach more people faster because my network is growing faster than it was as an individual contributor. So yeah, a 100%.

I think it's also interesting to find the balance between like, we all know how tech folks feel about people being people and having lives outside of technology. So it's like finding that line of growing your audience while producing information about things or causes that you care about and stuff without causing a lot of churn in drop off is a feat in and of itself. Every time I tweet about prison or something like that, I watch my followers drop. It's just like you can set a clock to it. But it's an interesting balance to try to not overshare in that regard and just continue to lose audience because then that affects things like algorithms and how many people I reach and stuff. So it is interesting. I never really thought about that, though.

JOHN: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that like the way you talk about the work you're doing. At this point, you have the privilege to be able to talk about those things when so many people don't and that's certainly a powerful way to use that privilege that you currently have.

What you're talking about there is losing follower count, which affects your job a little bit and trying to balance how you're talking about these things without cussing yourself too much. But it's interesting that those are the costs that you're weighing about speaking out and you know what those are and you also know that so many other people can't speak out because their consequences are going to be so much more drastic.

KURT: Yeah, absolutely. When we start to look at this through the lens of bias in the industry. I am cis white dude; I have the benefit of like failing upwards. So it's like me going to prison, I get to spin it as this redemption story and I get to be the symbol of hope for prisoners coming out and breaking into tech. But it's not the same story for a lot of folks that I talk to who don't look like me or aren't basically white men. It gets really tough the further you get from that.

So I also want to call out, too that a lot of times, the privilege to be able to speak is based on literal white privilege; I always get the benefit of the doubt. It's interesting, but yes, I get the benefit of doubt. I get to fail upwards. I'm formerly incarcerated, who's now the DevRel manager of Apollo. But I know so many other formerly incarcerated people who are way better at this stuff than I am and they still haven't found a work yet.

So those disparities exist and when you compound other issues that the tech industry faces against that. Like, the hiring rate for formerly incarcerated Black women is like 4% or something ridiculous like that according to last statistics, from what I could find, which was about 2019. That's 4% compared to white males, which is about 43 or 44%. We have to take that into account, too. That privilege is steeped in white male privilege as well.

JOHN: It's like the prison association just magnifies all of those existing inequities.

KURT: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You're an ex-con, or a felon—I get to be formerly incarcerated, not a felon.

JOHN: Yeah, the language matters a lot.

KURT: Oh, yeah.

JACOB: So what are some of the details of how you're helping folks? It looks like you have, it’s a Twitch stream? I just pulled up your Twitter account just a minute ago, but tell me details.

KURT: Yeah. It's interesting. So when we think about helping people, I have stream, which I do a lot, a lot of blogging, involved in a lot of communities. Most of the work that I do. So if we're just talking about community in general, also the Apollo stream; I do a lot of streaming for them. My calendar is open; folks drop in there a lot.

When it comes to helping formerly incarcerated, that's a lot more scaled down and on a one-on-one basis because every single person has a different situation. Also, a lot of them can't come forward and say that they're formerly incarcerated. There's an entire network of folks. Some of them can and they have, but there's an entire network of folks who I'm working with regularly and just, nobody knows because they can't really share or express that information.

But I really focus on a couple of things, which is helping them figure out their path into tech, what it is that they'll like. So trying to get them guided on that, helping them build their network, teaching them about things like learning in public and how to do that. We work on freelance, because it's really hard for folks to get jobs, full-time employment so we focus on freelance work and how to look for red flags, clients, promote yourself, and stuff like that.

It's generally different for each person because it all depends on where they are on the scale of their education into tech, how stable is their environment at home. It's just a lot of things that go into it. I am working on starting a nonprofit to formalize this training, but it's very slow going. I just really don't have the time that I would like to dedicate to it.

Some other ways that I've been helping out is there's a really cool nonprofit project called The Marshall Project. They take a data-driven approach to exposing issues within the criminal justice system. I do a lot of stuff with that. I sponsor and support a lot of prison reform lawyers. They don't get paid a lot and stuff like that so monetary support for them, monetary support for the people who are coming out, who need that.

There's really where I spend most of my focus, but if you ask anyone, I'm available. If somebody wants or needs something from me, I try to make myself available I talk to a wide range of people from all different communities about all sorts of different things. But I don't really have a centralized way, a singular path into helping folks out. It's pretty disparate, honestly.

LAURIE: This is a slightly different topic, but it's something you touched on and what you just said. I'm wondering if we can talk about the interview process as it relates to being formerly incarcerated and revealing that information. Because I think one of the –

I had an interaction with someone a couple of years back who said, “I got all the way through the process. I didn't tell them they offered me the job and now I have to tell them because it's about to come up on a background check,” which the efficacy of that we can discuss for a long time. “But it's about to come up on a background check, what do I do? How do I have this conversation?” I think we all know that especially for entry level positions, there's thousands of applicants and the minute you give them one red flag, they're like, “Oh, well, we have 500 other people to talk to.”

So what has been your experience with talking to people going through this and how they can navigate what is already an incredibly stressful and difficult process, even not having some flags that unfortunately, don't get perceived the way that we wish they would?

KURT: Yeah, this is a really great question.

It’s the most – I won't say the most, it is an extremely stress and anxiety inducing situation. I've developed a system over the years from having dealt with this, but in the beginning, it was very chaotic. You would just get through the process; you don't say that you have a record, you don't come upfront and say it. You never do that. If they're going to do a background check, let them do it.

I've had situations where companies have made me fill out paperwork for background check and then they never, I guess, submitted it because they never came and said anything about it, or maybe at that job, they were following their state's laws and it didn't come back. I would say it's a multi-step process.

So first things first, never say that you have a background upfront. Second of all, is investigate the state laws around hiring the formerly incarcerated for that company for where they are located. Where is their business set up at? Understand those state laws?

The next thing that's going to happen is if you get through the interview process and they're going to do a background check, so what they always do—this is the most annoying thing. Oftentimes, you will sign your offer letter. You will have a start date. You will do all this and in there, it says contingent upon a background check. This puts you in this situation where, especially if you're at an existing company, you want to give them time. Do you put in your leave and throw all of your eggs into this basket only to then come on and then they do the background check and then it comes back and they fire you? It puts you in this just purely stressful situation for about two weeks.

But a couple of things that you can do to get ahead of it is I started doing things where I will message them and I get real creative and I'm like, “Look, I've had issues with discrepancies, with insurance and other things, not going through before I've signed my start date and then there were problems, disagreements. I need to know all the paperwork. I need to have that signed upfront and have everything taken care of before I will decide on a start date. I want to make sure I give ample time to leave.” So sometimes that will work and that will get you a lot closer.

When that doesn't work, the other thing that I do is anytime they're going to do a background check, you have to consent to it and part of that consent is they'll tell you the company that they're going to use. If I've made it this far, I will then pay out of pocket and go get my own background check from this company. For most of them, you can do that. Now what it is that even if a company reaches out, I will put them off until I get the background check so I can see what has come back about my record so I can better prepare my statement for how I want to discuss this with them.

If you make it through all of that and you get there, sometimes they just still are going to say no, or they'll just ghost you and I've had that happen to me, too. Just literally been ghosted and it's just hard, it's stressful. There's not a lot you can do with it. The best thing that you can do is understand the laws around the different 50 states, figure out which ones are the most forgiving towards you and your situation, apply for jobs—ideally, remotely—within that place. If you're in that position, a lot of people aren't in that position, but it's just stress-inducing nightmare.

One thing that I did do is I always had backups. I would have offers from multiple jobs and accept multiple offers, which sucks. But then if I get one, I stay in and I don't, but I would stagger the start dates.

LAURIE: Wow.

KURT: Yeah. I learned that from my 3 years of trying to get my first job because even trying to work at Target, Walmart, all these places I check yes on that have you been convicted of a felony in the last 7 years and I'd never hear from them. So I just stopped checking it.

I would get a job at Target. I would work there for three weeks and then they would be like, “Hey, background check came through. Wish you wouldn't have lied to us. You're one of our best workers, but now we have to let you go.” It's like, “Well, cool. You wouldn't have hired me anyway. I'll take my 3-week paycheck. I've already got a job lined up at McDonald's. So I'm going to go work there for three weeks now.”

My first 2 years out of prison, I had like at least 10 W-4s, at least 10, probably closer to 20 my first year and then I got a little bit smarter about places that I was picking through the second year so I was able to stay places longer. But you just have to do whatever you have to do or you have to resort back to crime, really.

That's always, my advice to folks is rolling jobs like, ABA. Always be Applying. Always be applying for jobs and lining them up so if they come at you, “We did your background check. We're going to let you go.” You can just go to the next place and you don't have to go so long without having income.

LAURIE: That sounds like an incredibly stressful way to live.

KURT: It is a very stressful way to live. Yeah, it absolutely is. And that kind of comes back to tech can change lives. Even my first job was a really crappy paying job doing pretty boring work, but I was so happy when I actually got my first job. It changed my whole life. Literally changed my life and then after learning about the industry, finally getting my job, talking to other industry professionals, I was able to realize how drastically underpaid and overworked I was. Slowly started to work my way out of that and up to a standard developer salary for this day and age.

I make money today that I never dreamed in a world of possibility that I would ever make in my entire life ever. Never thought that this would be the life that I live today and it can really change folks' lives and that's why I'm so aggressively trying to help folks.

LAURIE: It's interesting that you talk about Always be Applying. There was some Twitter threads stuff going around a couple of weeks back about that in relation to the tech industry and talking about you should always see what's out there and see if there's better possibilities. My first reaction was interviewing is the most stressful part of working in tech, who would voluntarily do that if they're not looking to leave a job?

I suspect it is slightly less stressful in some ways, if you're applying to retail positions, but more stressful if you're dealing with something like a record. Just having to have that in the back of your mind and always trying to find a new job and that new security is – I mean, we talk about people in tech who do it every 1 to 3 years and that already seems like way too often. Every three weeks is just unfathomable to me.

KURT: Yeah. It's like you said, it's a lot of stress. By the time you figure out who everyone is, you're onto the next place. You get so tired of hearing, “You're one of our best workers, but we have to let you go.” You can only hear that so many times in a year before you just never want to hear that phrase again. It's just very aggravating for sure. I will say that that was less stressful than tech interviews in my opinion.

LAURIE: Oh, that's damning!

JOHN: Yeah.

KURT: Yeah, that was way less stressful. The anxiety of technical interviews, especially when they're asking me questions about my background, because I have to fabricate basically 10 years of my life and that was one of the hardest parts.

So one of the hardest parts about having a record and not being able to share it, especially in an industry where everybody wants to know how you got there, it's very hard to build that lie around what you do and it starts to really weigh on you. I made me really depressed constantly having to lie. “Oh, how'd you learn how to code?” “Well, actually I was in prison and they had a course called Intermediate Web Page and I took it.” I can't say that. I can't say that.

So I have to fabricate and then I just bend the truth, which it was true. Like, “Oh, a friend of mine was going to take this course, I decided to take it with them.” That was true. I just left out that that decision was made in prison. It's like, “Oh, I got my first taste of it and then I just started buying books to continue to learn and use any opportunity I could in front of a computer to continue programming.” Also true. Just didn’t mention that for the next about year and a half, I didn't have access to a computer and I picked that back up when I got out.

Yeah. It's just about bending those truths and it's like, “Oh, well, where did you work?” Not a full lie, I'm like, “I did a lot of freelancing and consulting,” which I did. I did IT and website development and stuff, freelancing and consulting work, the little bits I could get. Doing a local plumber's website or something like that, helping somebody get all the viruses off their computer. Wonder how those got there. But it's stuff like that. So that's what I had to do. I had to fabricate this false history.

Part of me coming out and talking about this was also selfish. It was just very depressing and I was tired of lying all the time. I was finally in a position where I felt that while coming forward about this part of my life could still have negative impacts that I have enough of a time distance and enough of an identity that I could probably still have a future in tech.

That's what I did. I was at Major League Soccer and I let my team know and the people around me know and then I posted a blog post about it and that's really when everyone started to find out. This is only 2018, 2019. I got my first job in tech – or 2018. I got my first job in tech in 2013 so it was like 5 years, I went with only telling a couple people.

LAURIE: I was about to ask if you still have to lie because I feel like the minute you Google you, that's one of the first thing that comes up, this really incredible post about your experience. It's like if someone didn't check your Twitter, I'm questioning the due diligence that they did and just relying on a background check seems a little odd if they haven't even looked up your social media. Your public technical, social media, not looking to see if you have a Facebook with lots of beer cans behind you sort of thing.

KURT: Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. But you'd be amazed. I mean, people don't look at your social media first. It's interesting when we think about especially tech hiring; your resume in a pile and before you even get to that pile, you're just a resume that gets pumped through a system a lot of times. It's like until you build a network that is often yeah, you are a victim of that a lot of times. They're not going to know who you are personally before they see you on paper and that's very detrimental, but you would think they would do a little bit of research and look that up.

It's actually funny, you brought up a good point, which is if you search, you'll bring it up. I worked so hard to actually get my actual prison from North Carolina thing pushed off the first page and build a public profile and now it's right back at the top, but because I put it there. So that is really funny.

[chuckles]

LAURIE: But that matters, right?

KURT: It matters.

LAURIE: It’s like voluntary disclosure versus something that you don't have control over, that is a huge, huge difference. I’m thinking of the Meghan Markle thing right now, where everyone's like, “She sued because they published a letter with her father, but now she's disclosing her pregnancy,” and I'm like, “Yeah, very different! One she chose to and the other one, she did not.”

KURT: Exactly. Yeah, that's a huge difference. But it's just really interesting to think about that I'm back at the top of Google now for being formerly incarcerated.

[laughter]

But under much better terms and I get to tell my story and explain why. Not just be like a mugshot with some records.

JACOB: If you had asked me before this episode, “Have you ever worked with an incarcerated person while you’re working in tech?” I privately would have told myself, no. I mean, I probably would have said, “I'm not sure,” but I think my implicit bias would have said no.

KURT: Yeah.

JACOB: And I think this is making me realize I probably have and I think probably a lot of our listeners have, too and it just either a, it didn't come up at all, or b, was handled in a way that it didn't get around to the rest of the workforce, which is probably the best thing.

KURT: Yeah, there are some companies. I have found the companies that do you actually advocate for formerly incarcerated. They do it really well and only because I'm so vocal is why my team knows. Even at Apollo, they're very careful about it. We talked about my background actually coming up and then they were like, “Well, this wasn't supposed to show up, but even regardless, we're not going to hold this against you even if it was within the timeframe.” It was very nice and this is between us, it won't matter and I'm like, “Well, I've kind of let the cat out of the bag so it's not a big deal if it's between us,” but I loved seeing the approach that they took.

You're right, you probably have worked with people who were incarcerated before. It's a large percentage of people who have been to prison in the US. A very large percentage, way more than it should be and so, it's really interesting to think about, but you're right. It hasn't come up. Most people who have been incarcerated aren't going to just leap out and be like, “Oh, that's an interesting thing. Let me tell you about the time I was locked up and how this was.” They're going to keep that to themselves because you never know how people are going to take it. You just don't know how people will react and some people, even if they are cool with it, will still look at you differently and I've had situations like that happen and it's tough to deal with, but it's a part of life.

Again, I'm not trying to make this a sob story. I did things that put me in prison and I did my time and I I've paid my dues to society. Rightfully so. Well, there's a whole thing about the sentencing and what we should be doing in the US, but according to law, I paid my dues and I was released and really, the buck should stop there, but you don't stop doing time when you're released.

You continue to do it pretty much forever because the US again, we have the stigma around prisons and why do we have that? Because the prison industrial complex is pushing this agenda that we have a lot of crime and we need a lot of cops and we need to lock people up and people who come out of prison are in prison or felons and bad people and deserve to be there. This is instilled into us from the time that we're kids and that's why I say the two most important things are providing stability for folks getting out and helping de-stigmatize having a record and helping break down the prison industrial complex. It's the only way we see a future where this is not an issue.

LAURIE: This could probably be a whole other episode, but you saying that and talking about there are felons and they're bad people in there and it's instilled in us. It's the idea of a binary identity, which exists in so many different places in our society. There's good and bad, and there's right and wrong, and there's the reason that people hate using this term, because it's incredibly racist and problematic. It's black and it's white.

All of these things are rooted in the same ideology, which is that to simplify the way that our brain experiences life, we can categorize things into one is good and one is bad. That's not the way the world works and that's not who people are. People take bad actions and they take good actions, but that doesn't make them bad people or good people. A lot of the reason we do that is because we like to tell ourselves we're good people.

And I'm sure you've heard this phrase, I'm sure all of us have heard this phrase, but the phrase, “You didn't make good choices. You had good choices” is the same as the meritocracy argument, which is like, you had the ability to get somewhere because you started on third base, you had the ability to make all the right decisions and do all the things because you had stability and resources and comfort. Without those things, would you have made the same choices as the person that you're looking down on? Probably honestly, probably and you just have no idea what that's like. So I appreciate you pointing that out because I think we've had episodes in the past about binary identities and what problems that causes.

JOHN: So Kurt, you called out something that's pretty interesting that was going by and what you were saying earlier about how Apollo treated you when they found out about your record and the way they went through that. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about if there's someone who's a hiring manager, maybe in a small company without a giant HR organization and strict policies around the hiring. What is a good way for that person to handle when they find out through the background check that the candidate that they really like has a record of some sort like, what's the good path there?

KURT: Yeah. There's two things there. So I want to answer that question, but one thing I do want to actually circle back to very quickly, which is what you said about bigger companies with stricter policies. In my experience, it's actually the bigger companies that you have an easier chance of getting a job at. They have huge HR departments and law teams and want to protect themselves and we'll make sure that they're actually following the proper hiring laws and state regulations for wherever it is they are.

I had no problem getting a job at AWS, but when you flip it in reverse to these startups and they outsource their HR to these other companies, that is actually where most of the trip-ups happen because they don't have – well, a lot of times it's ignorance of the situation. They're ignorant of the fact they're violating hiring and labor laws and they don't even know.

So I just want to state that is something because that was something I learned, too that actually shifted my job search function was I would actually target more organized companies because I stood a better chance of knowing that if they did do a background check, it would actually follow the state guidelines.

But to answer the question, that's a really good point and a really good question, I mean and a tough one to answer. I think just number one is making no assumptions. There's a couple things and this actually kind of relates to some other stuff. So there's going to be – you can't be defensive. I've discovered that a lot of times when people find out that you have a background, they feel somewhat lied to and it's like, “I didn't come up front about it up forward,” but it's kind of a bomb when it lands.

Again, we have the stigma about people with records and then they see it, their first instinct is to be like, “Well, why don't you share this with me?” The obvious reason that it wasn't shared with you, but you might not be realizing it at the time, is because I don't know if it's going to matter getting this job. It's something that could hurt me and I don't want to reveal it until you've had a chance to get to know me. So just know that, the reason that they did not share it with you is because they wanted you to know them as a person and go through the interview process before you find out about something like this. They're just trying to get a little bit of empathy from you.

The second thing is to avoid things like feigned surprise, like, “Oh my goodness, I can't believe you have a record,” or “I never would have guessed that you would have a background.” Things like that, they start to split somebody's identity and make them feel like again, we talk about this good and bad binary and that's going to really cause them a lot of stress and anxiety. You want to avoid things like that.

And then the last thing to do is just to continue to treat them the exact same way that you did before you knew.

If you can do those things, that person is going to feel safe and they're going to have a great experience working with you.

JOHN: Great. That's super handy. I imagine that there's some people out there having that question like, “Oh I've never been in that situation, but what's the best way to handle that?” So it's definitely good to know.

LAURIE: Totally outside the episode, but Mandy Moore just released a screenshot of a place that wanted to interview her about her entire career and she said she wouldn't talk about the abuse allegations against her ex-husband and they canceled the interview and they said it would be essential to the story. She said, “If you only want me for my trauma, when I have a 20-to-30-year long career, then I have no interest in having this conversation,” and how upsetting that was. It’s like one person is not their worst – I mean, not even a mistake. Like, one person is not their association with another person's bad actions.

KURT: Yeah. That actually brings up a really interesting topic, too, which is people trying to take advantage. When you talk about lifting others up, I often find myself in situations where people are just blatantly trying to take advantage of me and my willingness to help folks. That happens all the time.

JACOB: How so?

KURT: Just a lot of things like, private companies will want me to do webinars or talks on things about breaking into tech and just different topics, or ask me for access to my network or do I know formerly incarcerated folks who might be interested in contract work? I can tell that they're asking because they feel like they could get them for a cheaper price. You know what I mean? They're not going to have to pay them as much and it's like a lot of shady business practices and stuff like that. I get that on the regular. It's pretty frustrating.

LAURIE: Oh my gosh. It's Women in Tech in a different outfit. [chuckles]

KURT: Yeah.

LAURIE: It feels the same hearing you explain it. I'm like, yup, yup, yup, yup.

KURT: Yeah. It's been an interesting side effect of this.

JOHN: Yeah. That reminds me of we had Veni Kunche on the show a while back talking about the diversified tech system platform that she's built and how people paid to post jobs to her audience. But she does a lot of work to vet those companies to make sure that they're not going to just come in the door and be kicked out again in eight months because there's no support for actually having those sorts of people joining the team.

So it's such an important trust relationship there with the community you represent, especially because most of them need to be somewhat on the DL as being part of that community. It's like, if you're a Black woman, it's no surprise that you're a part of that community, but it's still so important for you as someone, who's much more public and representing them, that you have to be so careful about who you're connecting to.

KURT: This has been one of the biggest holdups for me starting this nonprofit and providing training is there's a lot of issues with exposing people through this. So it's like the end goal would be for them to leave and be able to seek training, or employment, but the real problem comes afterwards when you are trying to help them seek employment or freelance jobs. It's like you have to disassociate your network and attachment with them from that nonprofit. If a lot of people know that I'm doing that nonprofit, then they're going to automatically start to assume everyone who I provide through my network is going to be coming from this program. So there's just like a lot of things.

I've been very much trying to figure out how do I prioritize these folks and vulnerable people, in general and I think a lot of that has to do with, I don't know, I'm like why I've been so hesitant to move forward with this? I don't want to start a nonprofit with the best of intentions, but that the impact of that nonprofit ends up being more harmful than good and it's like, who does that really benefit?

That's why so far, I've been sticking with this more kind of like one-on-one. I know it doesn't scale well, but that's okay. If I help some people that's better than helping no one, first of all and second of all, helping a few people and having that be really beneficial to them, as opposed to helping a bunch of people and it might end up good for you, or it might end up bad for you and we don't really know, it seems very risky to me.

So I think it's why I've been working very slowly at that and really trying to figure out what does that process look like once they're done training because there's still a lot of unknowns there.

JOHN: Yeah. It's a conundrum that most training programs and diversity programs don't have to deal with because most of them, they want to highlight the intersections of the people that come through their program because that's part of what they're after and raising the profile there and you have the exact opposite situation, which is how do you smuggle them in before prejudges?

KURT: Exactly and so, completely flips the game on its head. I think it was you Laurie, that tweeted if you had your salary, your developer salary and you could do anything, what would you do? I would actually become a prison reform lawyer. I think the real goal is to stop the flow of folks going in. The band-aid is helping folks come out. The real work is stopping folks from going in to begin with, but I can't go back to school for another 8 years to become a lawyer and then move forward with that direction.

So that's what I want to talk about. I've been helping sponsor prison reform lawyers and look for ways to get involved with that. I've offered volunteer time to The Marshall Project to help with them and their data collection efforts and stuff like that. Again, taking myself out of the center, the nonprofit I'm very centered in that scenario and I feel like I can have a bigger impact in more areas by just contributing as opposed to being the creator of the thing. So right now, that's kind of where my mind is at while I feel out this nonprofit and see if I can develop something I'm comfortable with, from that.

LAURIE: I was just going to say, I was doing that math and you just said 8 years. Does that mean you have your GED? This may not be a thing that I know.

KURT: Yeah, I have my GED and no college education. I went to college for a little over a year for graphic design, but could not afford to go anymore, so stopped and then that's like my education. In order to get a law degree, I would first have to get a Bachelor's so I need 4 years of college—I don't know how many of my credits would be transferable from graphic design—and then I would have to go to law school afterwards and then still deal with certain states. If I can even take the test for the bar, or be on the bar being a convicted felon, which in most states you can, but there are still states where you cannot.

LAURIE: So the reason I asked and it wasn't to do the math, but it was more, that is another community that you belong to that, I think perhaps in the past had a very different set of opportunities available to them in tech. And as tech has become higher paying and we've done a lot more recruiting from the Stanfords and the MITs and Harvard and Yale and all of those things, it used to be, you could break in – it goes back to the self-taught like, you could break in without any undergrad degree and now that's getting harder and harder and harder and harder.

So I'm curious if—obviously, it's hard to decouple those based on your experience because you were formerly incarcerated and you didn't have that formal Bachelor's degree. But have you seen situations in which that has been a different community that you're a part of, or that has impacted the opportunities that you can pursue?

KURT: Yeah. I wouldn't be able to separate maybe if I went back and thought about it, but in my mind, every time I've been ghosted has primarily been – well, it stopped me from not applying to a lot of places. That's for sure.

It's blocked me from feeling confident enough to even apply and that was definitely in the beginning before I knew the industry and how bad most job application postings are and realize that the requirements they often ask for are way beyond what you actually need to do the job. But I didn't know that. So I would see like needs a Bachelor's degree and I'd be like, “Nope, not applying to that one.”

So I guess, I did miss out on a lot of opportunities just from that. But most times, I feel like if it came down to decision and I went through the interview process and they did a background check—I just always assumed it was the background check that I got ghosted.

JOHN: Yeah. Usually, if the degree is going to be a factor, it's right at the front of the process.

KURT: Early on, yeah. But it could be a deciding factor, especially with entry-level folks. Two people made it through the interview process. They both did really well. It really comes down to what the person who makes that decision cares more about, do they care more about this on paper or some sort of like behavioral give that seems this person would be better to work with. It's like, what do they care about and so, it can definitely have huge effects.

This gets into a whole another discussion, but that's just the tech industry and hiring in general is just terrible.

LAURIE: Broken!

KURT: Beyond broken. Yeah. It's just like you know?

[chuckles]

The fact that it can come down to whether or not you get a job based on the preference of the person who's looking at the things in front of you is just super problematic. But I definitely feel that I'm sure, there's a lot of cases where people would see one has a degree, the other does not and they're going to go, “Oh, taking the CS grad anytime, because we're about to go write all these algorithms.”

LAURIE: Kurt, do you know my favorite story about ridiculous things that should not be a thing?

KURT: Oh, I can't wait.

LAURIE: So I was interviewed for a job, internal transfer. I got the job. They sent the paperwork to HR and HR said, “Sorry, you can't hire her because she has a Bachelor of Arts and Mathematics, not a Bachelor of Science and Mathematics.” Literally not even joking, this is a real thing that happened.

I was halfway through a Master's of Science in Computer Science because I was annoyed by the fact that they cared that I had a Bachelor of Arts and they said, “So because she doesn't have the right degree, she needs to have the right amount of courses that would be equivalent to the degree.” In that case, that was 16 computer science or math specific hard science courses, which is more than the Bachelor's degree was required!

So if I had that, I would have had a Bachelor's degree of Science and Computer Science or a Bachelor's degree of Arts and Computer Science, because I went to a liberal arts school and they are not accredited to give Bachelor's of Science regardless of what your major is. So on the scale of ridiculous things that happen in tech, just add that as a fun story to remember.

KURT: It's like what goes through their heads? It's like, “Oh, well, we must adhere to this policy because clearly, the policy makes more sense than somebody who has worked here, has a proven track record of doing their job well, has already moved to the other team and everyone is cool with it, but wait a minute, you don't have enough credits.”

LAURIE: I got blocked. I didn't get to move. To be fair, it was the federal government so that's sort of how the world works, but still.

KURT: Yeah. Still, it shouldn't work like that and it's symptomatic of the ridiculous hiring process that we've developed as a tech industry. It just like, I don't know, I've worked in construction. I've worked in the restaurant industry. I've worked at a lot of other places and none of my interviews have ever felt really like somebody was trying to prove that they knew something I didn't, or like catch me in a gotcha. You know what I mean?

This is what I mean by tech interviews are more stressful than even when I was interviewing at all those other jobs combined, because I never felt like I was being interrogated and that's the difference. Honestly, tech interviews feel a lot like when I was actually being interrogated. That should tell you something. It just feels like they're constantly trying to trip you up, trying to get you to say something that disagrees with what you said five minutes ago, prove they know something that you don't. Does all of this sound familiar?

LAURIE: I mean, Kurt, if you're a personal brand is that you're kind and you help people and you were formerly incarcerated and you do cool things now, you know that mine is just railing against tech interviews, so.

KURT: Yeah.

[laughter]

LAURIE: This is a known thing.

KURT: Well, that's amazing. But it's a very aggressive interview process. It often pits folks against each other as opposed to working with each other. I just have never been a big fan of tech interviews.

LAURIE: Terrible for anyone who has ever had anxiety in their life or deals with any kind of PTSD or trauma. Yup. No, it's really –

My favorite tweet about this is that Tatiana explained that she felt it was equivalent to – it was an abusive relationship and that it's string you along for seven interviews and then they're like,” Oh, well you don't have the skill that we need,” except you would have known that I didn't have this skill because it was on my resume and it's been in every conversation, but you just put me through all of this just to say no, because you told yourself that it was better for me and you were giving me a chance and all of these things.

A lot of people came back and they were like, “That's going to step too far,” and I was like, “You know what? I honestly don't think it is.” It really is that bad and that's horrifying and it's why so many people stay in toxic work environments because the idea of going through a toxic interview process doesn't feel like something they can possibly do.

KURT: Yeah, and those folks who are saying it ain't that bad are probably the ones who are normally on the other side of that table, so. [chuckles]

JOHN: Yeah. I always find I have to hold my tongue when people are in otherwise, decent situations or even when they're in bad situations, my automatic recommendation is, “Well, start looking for something else,” but I always have to back up from that and not say that because if there's any sort of difference in privilege between us, I can't give that advice because it's such so much more work for them than for me. So I have to be very careful.

KURT: Yeah. That's another really awesome point and something that I have worked a lot on over the last 2 years in helping folks, which is contextualizing my advice and making sure that anything that I share comes with the statement that this was my experience, it may not be your experience, and then also reach out to other folks who share similar situations to you to trust, but verify this advice and make sure that it lines up with their experiences as well.

Also, why I always try to connect people that I'm working with to people who are more representative of them than myself, if we're that far off. It's hard for me to share advice with a Black woman because I don't have that lived experience, I don't know a lot of the issues that they'll hit and even being as aware of the harm that I can cause in my privilege as I am, I still will cause harm. So it's about connecting folks; a big part of what I do honestly, is just connecting folks quietly.

JOHN: Yeah. That's a good point. When you're poised to give advice, having that second thought of, “Okay, I can give this advice, but I need to put all the caveats on there to point out that this may not be your experience.” But then being able to follow that up with someone else in your network who is going to be able to give something much more accurate and representative is I think is a really useful second step there.

KURT: Absolutely.

LAURIE: This was a conversation probably a few months back where people had a similar association with people coming out of bootcamps right now and people trying to enter the tech industry right now. Anyone who did it even 3 years ago probably doesn't have the relevant advice or lived experience to understand what it's like with the oversaturation of people coming in with very, very similar skillsets.

Especially true in the frontend area because there's so many bootcamps that have just popped up in the React space specifically, because there are a ton of jobs that are needed there, but there also need to be senior resources to help those junior resources—I hate the term junior. But it's a similar thing where it's like, “Yeah, I did it 5 years ago.” “I did it 10 years ago.” The amount of time in which your experience is relevant is getting shorter and shorter and shorter every day and it's very, very challenging to tell someone, or give them advice on this is how you stand out in an interview process, this is how you stand out in a resume when you just have no idea what the current environment is like.

KURT: Yeah. It's interesting because it's repetitive. I call this the JavaScript bubble and l it's popping. It's at the point where it's popping.

LAURIE: Hey!

[laughter]

KURT: It is. We're meeting the inflection point where there are so many people, it used to be that getting a job doing JavaScript development was a bit easier because like when Node first came out and JavaScript aren't being used in all these different places and we started building entire frontends, SPAs in JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. Everyone started to learn JavaScript and we saw this with UX designs.

I don't know how many folks remember this, but there was a time when UX design was first coming to be a thing. It was a very high paid, very sought-after role, and then a lot of schools started to focus curriculum on UX design and eventually, so many people entered the industry and eventually, enough people will become senior in that industry. That runs out right. The market flips.

Now it becomes, there's too many people for the jobs that are available and while I think JavaScript, we're getting there, but eventually, this is going to happen as well. All the boot camps focus on JavaScript. All of this is coming out. Those people who came out of boot camps 2 or 3 years ago are very close to becoming seniors and it's like, eventually, we're going to hit this inflection point where choosing JavaScript as your starting language might actually not be the best opportunity anymore.

I think—here's my little prediction—is that really things like Python and Rust will probably be the most beneficial over the next few years, Python for the machine learning and AI stuff. Almost all of that is written in Python or R for data science. And then Rust just because it's becoming the next JavaScript. You're being able to run it in a lot of places. It's also way faster and a lot of other things typed and stuff.

So that's my prediction is that eventually, a couple of years, JavaScript jobs will be much harder to get even at senior level and the easier path into tech will be less about frontend and more about machine learning and backend development with Rust.

JACOB: My prediction is that companies that can somehow figure out a way to hire the roles they need without firm requirements on prior technology experience are going to excel. So it’s like I need Python developers, but I can hire former Ruby developers, then suddenly, your pipeline gets so much bigger.

KURT: Absolutely.

LAURIE: It's interesting because Rust, specifically as a language – so I've done Python, Java, JavaScript, and PHP for a little while and those comparatively, I consider them siblings. Rust, to me, is much closer to a C type language. It requires a lot more knowledge of what's happening under the hood when you're coding it and it's a great language, really great air handling all of that, but there are pieces of it that are just harder than using something like JavaScript, harder than using something like TypeScript. So it's going to be really interesting to see that evolve.

Kurt, I agree with you. I think Rust is going to be everywhere, but I think Rust is going to be everywhere in the tooling and systems space. So many of those software technologies are open source and therefore, aren't funded and actually getting a job that pays you to write in Rust is going to be – I'm interested to see how it evolves. I think you may be right, but there's this really weird kind of give and take of where Rust excels and where we tend to pay people to build proprietary things, and I'm very curious to see what the overlap is going to end up being.

KURT: Yeah, that's very true and again, this is based right on my experience and what I've seen. I'm just thinking about the emergence of FOSS, which is Financed Open Source Software. Us, at Apollo specifically, we're using Rust for a lot of things in our backend and UCLI is built in Rust and those are people who are paid to write open source software.

I think as the emergence of FOSS continues to grow, combined with the flexibility and adoption of Rust, I do think that it stands to be a pretty good – Now I did say backend, but I should step back. I don't mean APIs. I don't see a lot of APIs written in Rust. Much more of like what you're talking about; systems infrastructure, command line tooling, stuff like that. I just kind of bucket all of that into the backend. Probably shouldn't.

LAURIE: I call it middle end.

KURT: Yeah, middle end. There you go.

LAURIE: It's the backend of the frontend. It's the tooling ecosystem. The other reason I call it that is because it's really hard to describe what the heck I do every day.

[laughter]

It's not frontend, it's not like CSS, and it's not backend. I don't touch databases anymore. I don't make fetch calls. I build middle end. [chuckles]

KURT: Yeah, that's funny.

LAURIE: We need a better term for it though, because no one can describe it and it's a very large, ever-growing set of software that needs to be built. It's basically software that allows other developers to be productive.

KURT: And just to touch on what Jacob mentioned before, I completely agree that companies who are smart enough to recognize not about the technology specifically are just always going to excel. And those who are even willing to have polyglot environments and let teams figure out what is the right technology stands so much of a better chance to be successful in just about anything.

JACOB: Yeah, it's the environment to know that when I hire someone with not the specific technology that I need them to eventually do, are they going to be successful? Because I don't actually know what that means, but I think that's a really challenging question.

KURT: It is, but I think a good example of this might be a backend engineer. You're familiar with caching and why that's important and performance, database operations, and how you structure and organize your APIs. It's like remove Python and drop in Ruby or Java or anything and all those principles still remain and are very important and yes, the surrounding technology has changed, but you've also surrounded them with a team of people who are extremely familiar with that technology.

There's something to be said that is definitely in my opinion, easier to ramp up in a new language in an environment like that than it is to completely adopt a new part of the stack or something where it's like the underlying things that are important and that you just have to understand and have experienced dealing with. Those are really heavy.

JOHN: Yeah.

LAURIE: I agree with all of that except Rust. Rust is my exception to everything right now because it's such a mindset shift and mutability and ownership [chuckles] is just such a wild thing that doesn't exist in any other language. I'm sorry, I'm being a total nerd right now.

But no, I absolutely agree and I think anyone can learn any language. I think people can read Rust if they know JavaScript. I know how to write five lines of Rust so this isn't even me gatekeeping something I understand. I'm saying I don't understand it yet, it's hard and I've learned a lot of different languages over the years.

I used to do exactly what Jacob was just implying because I was a consultant and so, I had to learn whatever language the client was using. I've done that for PHP and I've done that with Python and Java and that sort of thing. I actually don't think I could do it with Rust. I really don't think I could, unless I was given a couple months to sit down and study. It's hard. It's awesome, but it's hard.

KURT: That's fair. I mean, that is also transitioning levels of abstraction when we go from something like JavaScript to Rust, which is very valid. I had to spend a year working in C++ and it was horrible for me, personally, just for me. I don't like being that close. I want my garbage collected for me. I don't want to know what I've put into memory. I really don't care. I mean, I care about performance, but I don't want to be responsible at that level for it. I had a lot of issues with C++ and memory leaks, just going to say.

LAURIE: Yeah, I've never had to learn a C language and I think that's part of why Rust is so hard for me. I always assumed Java was very similar to C and I think in a lot of ways, it is, but the automatic garbage collection is a really big distinction between languages.

KURT: It really is. That's funny.

JOHN: So at the end of every episode, we like to do what we call reflections, which is each panelist and guest get to chance to reflect on the things that they enjoyed most about the conversation, or the ideas that they're going to be thinking about for days afterwards. So who'd like to start with that?

KURT: I can take it. I’ve got something that I've been thinking about. We started off talking about community and I said something that I've been running through my mind since, which is communities are things that you’re a part of. Community is what you surround yourself with and I think that that's been an interesting distinction for me and has helped me break down barriers between different parts of my life and make it easier for me to connect those different parts of my life.

It's something that I think I'm going to express probably pretty soon in some form of writing or another because it's just a change in mindset that I think has been really beneficial to me and allowed me to be more of my whole self, especially online, than I had been previously so.

LAURIE: I think my takeaway is that we all know and have experienced the fact that interviews can be a bit of a landmine depending on who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. Having empathy and understanding both, as a hiring manager, or someone who's involved in making these choices, or someone who's a fellow perspective candidate for roles. Having empathy and understanding for the fact that this is infinitely more challenging to navigate if you have things in your background that employers have not previously looked kindly upon.

Knowing that those people not only have to navigate that, but they also have to know their legal rights in a country that isn't really great about providing that and that if you get an opportunity in the future and you look up those rights and you know the fact that they shouldn't be able to look x number of years in your background, even if there's nothing there for them to find and you can push back on the behalf of someone else in the future. You can have an impact and paying attention to knowing those rules when you aren't required to know them can be really important and really helpful.

JACOB: So we talked a little bit about polyglots and some one thing that really appealed to me to the job that I'm in now is during the hiring process, they seemed pretty not concerned with specific technology I was talking about. That was really a positive for me. So we write Python in my job and what I'm thinking about is what's work that I can do on team that if we hire somebody new who is new to Python would be able to get up to speed as fast as possible? What are the implicit idioms of Python that could be made more explicit? Or what are the things that could be done that make it not quite so gatekeeping?

And then that what that transition needs to is another thought is okay, I was thinking earlier about how there's probably someone at my company who was formerly incarcerated and I just don't know it. What are things I could do on my team that would make their life better in some way, but without them having to tell me, without I need to actually know who that specific person is? What are some things that would just make their life better working with me?

JOHN: Yeah, I think coming into this conversation, I'm aware of how terrible our carceral state is here in the US. But I think it's also valuable to get Kurt's perspective on that and to be reminded, on a personal level, what that experience is just to help keep that concept alive in my mind so I can be more aware of the people that are in that situation and ways that I can make that easier for them.

Also, to do simple administrative things like checking in with my HR department and finding out what their policy is on these things, if nothing else, just to know and even more, if there's ways that I can push back on those to say that that's not really something we need to care about, like, why is that requirement there? So I think that’s really helpful for me to keep in mind.

Thank you for joining us, Kurt. This was a fantastic conversation.

KURT: Yeah, my pleasure. This was a blast. I really enjoyed talking with you all.

Special Guest: Kurt Kemple.

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03:31 - Uncovering Patterns

13:22 - Taking Care of People as Whole People

28:43 - The Tech Industry: Now vs Then (aka we still have A LOT of work to do)

45:59 - The Messaging Around Diversity and Inclusion

51:26 - Changing Mindsets

Reflections:

Rein: Capitalism and White Supremacy are the same thing. The Invention of the White Race.

We have an obligation to not just make it possible for people to exist in the industry, but to also make it healthy.

John: It’s always great to have these conversations as reminders.

Tim: Figure out why something makes you uncomfortable. Look and uncover the pattern underneath that in yourself. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable. If you run away, you’re never going to grow and things are never going to get better.

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JOHN: Hello, everybody. This is Greater Than Code, Episode 225. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Rein Henrichs.

REIN: And I’m here with our guest, my friend, and Dungeons & Dragons party member, Tim Banks.

Tim Banks has a career spanning over 20 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started as a US Marine in avionics. Upon leaving the Marine Corps, he went on to work as a government contractor. He then went into the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores.

Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with engineering groups in his current role as a Principal Solutions Architect at Equinix Metal. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, having won American National and Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu championships in his division.

Hi, Tim!

TIM: Hi! Good to see everybody in here.

REIN: Yeah, I did that on the first take and I'm very proud of myself.

TIM: I am so, so proud of you. That was amazing.

REIN: Tim, it's time for the question.

TIM: Right.

REIN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

TIM: So my superpower is using empathy to uncover patterns that people haven't seen in the past and I think that's a superpower because a lot of people can look at something, there's a lot of folks out there that can see a pattern just on the surface like this does that, this does that, this does that. But when you really talk to groups and you talk to people, you can see some common things that aren't necessarily things that are going to have an output or a metric, but you can see how people feel about a thing. And then when you get enough people who feel a certain way about a thing, that's not going to be a coincidence, it's going to be a pattern. So finding those patterns is my superpower.

As far as how I acquired it, it's hard for me to say. The easy way to say is over time, but over time and myself being a person who necessarily wasn't listened to, or seen, or heard trying to explain how things are, why things are the way they are without having metrics. So having been on one side of that equation, I've been able to see people on the other side of it.

REIN: So Tim, you said “to uncover patterns.” Can you say a bit more about the word uncover? Because I feel like that might've been a specific choice that you made to use.

TIM: Yeah. There are typically, as we see with anything else, especially being tech or people that like to take things apart, I'm sure as we all did as kids, there are things that you see on the surface. There are things that you see, this pattern or this thing happening here, but you take the face plate off of something, or you delve down below the API, or you delve down below the operating system and there are so many other things that are happening beneath that.

If you kick over amount of dirt and you see an ant hill, the ants have their own system, how they do things down there that you don't necessarily create, but you're just going to see it and you have to uncover a few things. You have to move things around. You have to look below the surface to see some of these patterns that happen just below the surface that bring the things at the surface to fruition.

REIN: This reminds me a lot of I guess, it's a mantra that I learned from Virginia Satir, which drink if you're playing that game, make hidden things visible, make the covert overt and make the general specific and related to you, me, here, now, and the current situation.

TIM: Yeah. I think that's actually a good – I had not heard of that one before, but I do like that a lot.

REIN: So when you say uncover, that makes me think, make the covert over.

TIM: Yeah, I think so. I like that. It's interesting because people sometimes think that things are covered up to make them hidden and it's not necessarily, they're hidden like someone has hidden them so you can't find them. A lot of times they're hidden in plain view.

You don't find them because you're not looking for them and when you actually start to look for some of these things, some of the underlying causes, you'll be surprised what you find. It's like a lot of us here have done RCAs on things and oftentimes, if you do a good RCA, you're going to go through a few levels and different layers to find what the actual root cause. Like, most of the times the root of something is not at the surface, it's way down. So you actually have to go down and dig to uncover these things, to really find out what's at the base of something.

REIN: So since this is the show where we talk about the social side of things, I want to ask you about these things that are covered that are maybe covered for a reason and maybe that the reason that they're covert is that people are trying to protect themselves and they don't feel safe to make them overt. So do you think about these situations and how do you go about making that safe to talk about?

TIM: So I do think about these situations and there's a couple of reasons why. First, obviously, is in the professional world you can't always call people out immediately for things. Even if you know that there's something that's a lie or something that's not right, there are the political reasons why you have to be tactful or you have to be very deliberate and cautious about how you uncover these things because even if people aren't necessarily intentionally hiding things, or it is their mind that I must hide this as he'll feel safe, people's egos are the number one obstacle, I think to innovation.

Someone has staked out a claim. Someone has a territory. Someone has some domain that they have, that they are a gatekeeper thereof and it is their ego that makes sure that you have to pay homage to them or to that ego in order to get anything done. So figuring out what they're protecting, whether they're protecting their job, whether they're protecting their ego, whether they're protecting levels of influence so that they can rise in their career. You have to figure out what that is, that what that thing is that is important to them so that way you can make sure that it's either protected, or you can make sure that there are more than one person that have access to that thing so you can make your way.

At personal levels, there are things that people cover up because they don't feel safe and doing the work of trying to make them feel safe so you can talk about these things, I think that's the hardest thing that we do in the industry. Solving technical problems is easy compared to solving people problems, or cultural problems, or societal problems because those are the problems that we've had for millennia that we, collection of people in a common industry, are trying to figure out.

Saying to somebody, “Hey, I see these patterns here of work, or absenteeism, or productivity, or whatever it is and I need to know what it is that's going on so that we can fix that,” and make them understand that you are there to help them and there to fix that problem, whatever it may be, that takes some work on the part of the person who's trying to uncover that pattern. It takes vulnerability and it takes confidentiality. It takes empathy. Especially if it's something that you've never dealt with before.

Someone's going to tell you, “Hey, I have this problem,” and you're going to say, “All right, well, I know leadership or I know management or unknown this senior technical professional here, but I don't know the answer to this problem, but I can say that I will help you find it and then we can work together on it.” And a lot of people don't like to say, “I don't know the answer.”

We see a lot of people that are very technically savvy and because they're very technically savvy, they are now considered to be experts in all kinds of domains. Nobody in particular—Elon Musk—but there are people that are looked to be some kind of great genius just because they happen to know how to code something, or architect something. I think when you display the vulnerability of saying, “I don't know.” Or you are upfront about your problems or upfront about your struggles, it makes people feel safer about being upfront about theirs and then you can go through the work of trying to solve those problems.

Well, first of all, identifying if it's a pattern, and then solving the problem that's causing those patterns.

JOHN: I like that you use the metaphor of anthill earlier on in this, because rather than when you describe something as pattern, it's very abstract and feels like an object. But when you talk about an anthill, it's individual entities working together in a system. It's something that exists on its own, made up of other individuals. It's not just some object that we can examine and I think that brings it into thinking about it in a different way and much like the way you've been describing how you talk about these things and how you work with people. Very humanizing and I like that.

TIM: Yeah. I do think there's a lot of us when we're looking at an organization, whether we're looking at a society, or government, or whatever it is, a neighborhood even all of us have the role that we play whether we're aware of it or not. It's a role not necessarily either we're assigned, that we signed up for, or that we just have by nature of and by coincidence of our birth. But we all do something that contributes in some way to the organizations that we're in.

When we look at that as that – okay, that role covers a lot of things. No one is just one thing; no one is just a software developer, or no one is just a cashier at a grocery store, or no one is just an artist. No person is monolithic. No one is defined by their job save except maybe the police and that's not a slam—they're always at work apparently. But there are all these things that we have that yes, as you look at an ant farm, this one ant does all these various things, but they have this contribution to the colony as a whole. And I do think that when we look at it as a pattern, if we look at one individual person and all the things that they do, it is important to see that they are more than just a worker.

We are not ants. We're not that specialized. We have all kinds of things that we contribute to. So like the colony metaphor breaks down there just to understand that all of us have different things that we do outside of just what our role is to make money or to contribute. We all have dreams. We all have hopes. A lot of times, the fact that these dreams or hopes have been unrealized or worse yet, they have been forcefully deferred by the society as a whole affects that role that we have. It affects how we view ourselves. It affects how others view us.

That's what we bring when we sit down at our desk every morning, that collection of all those things rides along with whatever your skills are, that is it's not compartmentalized. As much as people may want to say they can't compartmentalize these things, you can't. You can’t contain it forever. So when these things start to manifest themselves in different ways, we as people—whether we are neighbors, whether we are leaders in government, whether we are coworkers, whether we're management—need to do whatever we can to make sure that these people can become a whole and they can thrive. When people thrive on a personal level, they thrive on a professional level. Maybe not at the job that they're in, maybe not at the company that they're in, but wherever they end up, when they thrive as people, they are going to thrive as professionals.

REIN: I also want to throw in another element of the ant colony metaphor, which is that ant colonies are dynamic. They're constantly changing. Tunnels are caving in, new ones are being constructed; the colony itself changes over time. You were talking about the complexity of a person in a given moment, but their roles within the company are also constantly shifting based on how they interact with other people.

TIM: That's true; how they interact with other people and how the companies need change. I mean, no company is typically monolithic in and of themselves. They always have to be growing, they have to be thriving, and they have to be moving into different segments and as that happens, your roles change within that company.

What's been being kicked around Twitter these past few weeks is people talking about like, “I don't understand why people leave jobs,” and I was like, “Well, yeah, they leave jobs because they want to go do other stuff.” People don't like to stagnate, typically and people who do like to stagnate, most companies don't want to keep them around. So stagnation is not really in human nature. As resistant as we are to change, we are all extremely adaptable. It's built into our damn DNA so we tend to do that well.

I do like the fact that people are dynamic, or if you look at what maybe people had expectations of what 2021 was going to be in 2019, it's clear that a lot of things have changed due to the various circumstances around the world—pandemic, social uprising, Nazis, whatever it is. We've all had to make some big changes and even though it sucked and it has sucked, we're still here.

We are in the new normal because we are adaptable and so are the dynamics of our existence lend ourselves to the fact that our roles are constantly changing. What does it look like when you were a working parent 2 years ago versus what does it look like you're a working parent now? What does it look like if you were a single person with a job 2 years ago versus if you're seeing a person with a job now? So many things have changed and it speaks to the fact that we are adaptable.

That all said, if you're looking at how we can improve and make better for people, we can't look at the ideal state or the state we were in 2019 or whatever it was. We have to look at how things are now and then we had to look at what we have learned in the past year, year and a half will prepare us for what's yet to come because we know that shit is always going to roll downhill. So we have to figure out what have we learned here and what can we do next?

I think a lot of the things that we still need to embrace is how to take care of our people as a whole people, and not just employees and not just take care of how they can contribute to us. How many commits can they do? How many tests can they write? Or anything like that. We need to take care of their needs as people and when we take care of their needs as people, they are more likely to be able to take care of us, our needs from them as companies and orgs.

REIN: What Russell Ackoff always says when people talk to him about total quality management and all of these things about how to improve the quality of your business, what he always says is, “The quality that matters is quality of work life.” The quality of the lives of the people who are doing the work.

TIM: That is absolutely true. It's absolutely true. Some of the worst cases of burnout that people ever have, some of the worst working environments, it's because they do not treat their people like people. They treat them like any other resource, like print, toner, cartridge, and the people personally as people cannot thrive and people burn out that way. People have a hard time setting and maintaining boundaries around their work life.

Yay, capitalism. That's one of the things that we start from. It's like, if you want to get ahead, you’ve got to work real, real, real, real hard. Well, yes, to some extent, but the higher up you go, let's be honest that “hard work” looks way different. You're working hard on a yacht apparently, or you're working hard on a vacation to Paris apparently, but the people that are actually doing the labor to enrich the people higher up the chain, those basic human needs for rest, relaxation, recovery, they're oftentimes not being met and I think that's a fucking shame.

REIN: Yeah, and if something is particularly incumbent upon leadership to show that by example and to encourage that behavior because I think lower down in the ranks, if they've probably been punished for any sort of thing like that, or they've seen people punished for that kind of thing, they're going to be highly resistant to doing that unless you can prove that it's safe for them to do so.

TIM: Oh, absolutely. I think it's interesting when you talk about what it is for a person lower down in the rung and the common gatekeeping tactic you see is “Well, they've got to pay their dues.” They've got to suffer through this role so that way, they can make it for other people or they can be a better employee going forward. That is so horribly bassackwards.

I mean, you really want to nurture junior folks. You want to nurture people coming into the industry. You want to nurture people who are just starting. You want to mentor them. You want to give them knowledge and guidance. You don't want to push their nose into the grindstone. I don't know what you're trying to accomplish there. That's fine if you're in the Marine Corps. That's fine if you're going into the military service. That's obviously, a consequence of the choice you made to join. But if you're not doing that, you don't need to punish people at the bottom ranks, really

You should be, as a leader, like you said, modeling those behaviors, but you should also be making sure that they can thrive, whatever that looks like. Thriving for a junior person doesn't look like giving them a half hour lunch break and watching them clock in and clock out. It doesn't look like monitoring their bathroom breaks, or some of the stuff that I've seen the junior folks have to do. These people are whole people, they are not servers. They're not computers. They're not billed by the hour like that to perform X number of tasks. They really have to be nurtured and they have to be guided and mentored.

The other thing we have to take into the fact is that not everybody learns the same. People are neurodivergent. So what productivity looks like for some persons, it’s going to look completely different for another person.

For me, the worst thing I had as a senior person was to be expected to sit down and work 4 hours, take a half hour break, and then work another 4 hours straight. I have ADHD and anxiety and that is torturous for me. Now I did it and some people will turn around and say, “Well, I did it. So you can do it. too” like the motherfuckers that talk about student loans. But I would say, “I had to do it and it sucks. So I don't want anyone else to have to go through that.” That's what we should be doing. We should be iterating on our practices as an org, iterating our practices as a society to say that, “Oh, well, just because I had to suffer, that doesn't mean that you should have to as well. We should actually fix that so that you don't have to go through that.”

Typically, in capitalism, that's how they say you're supposed to do. A 2021 Ferrari has more features than the Model T because you add features, and you add features, and you add features. So I don't see why we can't do that for the people that actually build these vehicles, or build anything else for that matter.

REIN: There's a study that whenever this topic comes up, that I refer people to, because I think it's really, really good. It is from Kahn in 1990 and this is interesting because this is the study of the “Engagement of the Human Spirit at Work.” So even the idea that in a capitalist country, you could get a grant to study the engagement of the human spirit at work is amazing to me. But the idea is that there are three psychological conditions that relate to this. What I wanted to do was list them and then get your thoughts.

TIM: Sure.

REIN: Add them, change them, do they resonate with you? The conditions are meaningfulness. Do I find meaning in the work and my job title, my tasks, and so on? The second is psychological safety. And the third is the availability of emotional and psychological resources and this includes things like, am I emotionally drained at the end of the day? Do I wake up looking forward to going to work? Am I being supported by my manager or my supervisor?

TIM: I like all of those. I think those are all really good, but I do think it overlooks the financial aspect and the reason why I say it overlooks the financial aspect is because those things are important for how you feel about your work. But if you are struggling financially, your ability to deal with the normal rigors of work are significantly decreased when you have to then go home and figure out how you're going to make the ends meet. Are you living paycheck to paycheck? Are you going to pay off debt? You're trying to figure out how to take care of your children. You're going to have to figure out how to do all these other things.

Your overall capacity is reduced because you have these other concerns as well. So I think it cannot be overstated, the impact of making sure that people's needs outside of work are met to make sure they can also, you can also take care of the needs inside of work. But going back, I do think those are very, very important aspects of people feeling spiritual engagement at work.

I think the meaningfulness and the psychological safety to me are the two most important. You can do meaningful work, but if you're getting harassed all the fucking time, it's not a great place. Or you can have a great loving and nurturing environment, but you're just toiling away in dumb anguish and it's like, “Oh, well, I don't know why I'm doing this job. Everyone's super happy and I'll stay here for a while because I really like everybody, but I don't really get any meaning out of what I do.”

So I think I like that list. I would just add a fourth one talking about making sure people are financially compensated to make sure their needs are met plus, plus.

REIN: And actually, the study doesn't consider that and I think you're right that that's a huge oversight. There's a second study that attempts to quantify these relationships to say how much each of these influence engagement and the result is that meaningfulness was the highest correlation, but the way they did this is interesting. They did a quantitative survey and the survey would include different sections with questions on for example, rewarding coworker relations with questions like, “I feel worthwhile when I am around my coworkers.” I think we should be asking questions like that more often. I think that the engagement surveys you get in the modern world are superficial.

TIM: Oh, they absolutely are. They absolutely are. Well, I mean, it goes back to a lot of topics we have in observability. What are your metrics if whatever you measure is what you're going to do?

I learned this lesson working in tech support call centers right out of the Marine Corps where if they're going to reward you for the number of calls or they're going to – the primary metric is the number of calls you took in a day. So people were going to do whatever they can do to take the most number of calls, then to like, “Oh, then we're going to do NPS scores after that.” But they set the NPS score pretty low and saying, “Well, we just need you to answer the calls. They don't have to be that good.” That's what you're going to get.

If you were measuring things like, “Oh, did your manager make you feel good this month?” If you ask that and they answer honestly, maybe they made you feel good once a month or something like that since the last one, but primarily, they made you feel like crap. That's kind of what you need to ask. I do think the interpersonal relationship aspects, they're hard to quantify because it looks different for everybody and even the nature of the questions are different for everybody. What that question looks like to a cis, white, straight male is going to look way different to say, a queer Black woman.

REIN: What if the question is: “I feel a real kinship with my coworkers and I'm like a little, eh about that one?”

TIM: Yeah, that goes back to that we're a family thing and I don't necessarily like that at all because we aren't a family. You can't fire your family or lay your family off.

REIN: But then there were questions like: “I believe that my coworkers appreciate who I am,” and I like that one a lot.

TIM: That's a good one. The appreciates who I am, that speaks to being a whole person and the more that we can be whole people at our jobs, the better off we are going to be. If you have to bite your tongue, if you have to cover your tattoos, if you have to make sure your hair is undyed, or you have to wear clothes that you don't necessarily like because they’re considered “professional” whatever that means. That the more that a person has to distance themselves from who they are as a whole person, probably the less happy they're going to be in that environment. Less safe they're going to feel in that environment.

JOHN: Yeah, I find that there is a gap between the rhetoric about bringing your whole self to work and the practice of building a space where it's safe to do that. Like I myself know some things that can lead us in that direction, but I don't feel like there's a great playbook on building that all out.

TIM: There really isn't and part of the reason is that the tech industry started out, by and large, as an artifact of the US government, US military, which is never not really known for being very welcoming and safe for people outside of a certain demographic.

You talk about what the industry looked like when I got in back in the late 90s, IBM had just stopped requiring people to wear suits to work and they were allowed to wear polo shirts and khakis. That look was what you had. It was the “business casual.” Couldn't have long hair, couldn't have accessed piercings, no visible tattoos; not unlike dress codes or appearance regs that you would see in the military.

So you make everybody look like the stereotypical white guy, essentially, because this is what you have to wear because some old white guy said, “This is what people should look like.” Those things are hard to break because who still has power in those things and it's a self-perpetuating society. People that do not fit that mold do not last in that industry, or the people that do last in industry had to divorce themselves of who they are so much that it becomes hard to break that mold once you get into places of power, because you can very quickly be run out for rocking the boat too much and it was very, very self-standing.

This is the one thing that I think came out of the .com bubble burst after Y2K and the early aughts was that it broke up a lot of these big companies, big old legacy companies and you saw a lot of smaller startups come out. A lot of these smaller startups that came out of it maybe had a different way of thinking because they weren't run by 70-year-old white guys who were defense contractors.

But I do think, when we get into that, if you look at what a person in the tech industry looks like in 2021 versus what they look like in 2001 is dramatically different. I can have my hair long. I can expose my tattoos. I can have a beard. I can say, “I'm a queer, ADHD, Black-Mexican man,” whereas such a thing would be dangerous career-wise and maybe even personally, 20 years ago.

I remember in the industry when the first person that I knew personally came out as being transgender and the harassment that she had to go through was horrifying, but it was considered perfectly normal in 2001. We have come a long way, but that just speaks to what a shitshow it was before. Not that we're doing great now, because we have so much farther to go and we are still here in 2021 seeing all white panels, all white male leadership, diversity being heralded when you bring a white woman onto a board or when you bring a gay white man onto a board. And that ain't it chief. That is not it. We have so much more to do and the hard part about that is convincing people that you can't rest on your laurels. Convincing people that you haven't done enough in the first place. Convincing people that there are still problems.

That goes back to what you're saying about some of these questions, about some of these metrics that we have about people in the workplace. The questions that you have to ask on these to really get an idea of where you are, have to be uncomfortable. They have to be uncomfortable. They have to challenge people's safe spaces and not just a safe spaces of other people who are marginalized, but certainly, the safe space of the people who are overrepresented.

It goes back to talking about, “Hey, do you realize that you have gotten where you are largely by privilege?” or that you've been able to fail up, or that doors have been opened to you that haven't been opened to others, or bars have been lowered for you that weren't as lower for others, or even at the bar wasn't lower, the bar was not raised for you like it was for others? People don't like to hear that. People get very upset when you challenge the notion that maybe they haven't had to work as hard as other people have to get where they have. If you tell somebody, “Well, you got here because you had a fair amount of pillars to help you along the way.” People don't like to hear that.

Now I will very much, I've said in the past I may be Black and I may be queer but I'm still a man so I have some privilege that goes along with that that women and non-binary folks have not been able to enjoy. I typically don't have to go to a conference and worry about whether I'm going to be sexually assaulted. God help the person that tries at least with me. But that is a worry and a concern that people have to have going to a conference that's supposed to help their career and that's a big detractor. That is a big obstacle that people don't realize that they have and then worse.

I mean, heaven forbid, we even talked about motherfuckers that actually do the harassing there that are still allowed to enjoy their place in the industry, that are still allowed to hold positions of power, positions of influence where they can continue to do this. Not even just keep their jobs, but they keep being by to back these places and they can continue to perpetuate that kind of harassment and making the industry hostile to brilliant people.

But it's funny that I will say that here I am on a podcast and every podcast I've ever been on with the exception of one – well, no, all the podcasts I've ever been on hosted by all white people. Every last one. Some have had white women in them, but it's all white people. So when we talk about these subjects, it still comes from a certain perspective that white folks aren't going to have, or that men aren't going to have. It's good that we're talking about it, but we need to do something about it. We need to have more of these voices routinely, not just in our panels at tech conferences, but in our normal, everyday consumption and I think that's important.

We talk about what do these things look like? What are the patterns we're seeing? If you look at a tech company, especially in Silicon Valley, tech companies look like the neighborhoods. It's not very diverse. People refer their friends, people refer their coworkers, or they have these things about what was that Google employee letter? “We only want people with Bachelor's from Stanford or Ph.Ds. from these places and no one else gets accepted.” Those places are already quite exclusionary in and of itself. They list no HBCUs on that piece of paper, because they don't value HBCUs. They don't value schools that allow people of lower economic or lower in the socioeconomic strata to attend. It's literally self-perpetuating, that kind of gatekeeping.

These people who pass through these gates erect those exact same ones and only the people that fit that mold are going to go through it and you never fix the problem. We do not do enough to break those gates down. We don't do enough to model that kind of behavior that we should be expecting. It's good that we're talking about it, but we need to be more about doing it.

REIN: Yeah, and our whole panel for this show is majority not white dude, but it might not surprise you that the people who most often have the spoons and the privilege to take time out of their workday to do this podcast are the white dudes.

JOHN: Yeah.

TIM: Yeah. But I think when we talk about going forward, it's one thing to see a pattern and I think people who, if they're looking, they can see what it is, but what do you do? Do you just throw up your hands, go, “We tried, it's hard to do, so we're not going to do”? “Ah, all right, we gave it a shot. We asked some folks, but they can’t do it.” Or what do you do?

I've seen a couple of folks, to call out the good behavior when I see it, I know Ashley McNamara when she had said that she was going to step aside from doing conferences, she was like, “Don't talk to me about conferences. Go talk to underrepresented minorities about these roles. Don't talk to me. I'm not going to take it.” I've seen folks that will say, “I'm not going to speak at this thing if it's an all white panel or if it's all male panel.” “If you're not paying your speakers, especially of color, to come, I'm not going to do these things.” That's how we see it in action.

Holding the people that build the platform accountable to make sure that everyone has access to it. I think the thing that the pandemic has taught me that I've seen, for the most part, is a lot of these conferences have become free or very, very low in price because there were virtual, a lot more people showed up. People that couldn't necessarily go before and sometimes, it was harder even for them like you mentioned before Rein, just to get off of work and now they can kind of manage to do it in between because they don't actually have to leave.

So when we get to a point where we can have in-person conferences again, I think it behooves the organizer of these conferences that if they're really serious about doing something about being more inclusive about breaking these patterns, not to have them in Silicon Valley, in the most expensive real estate on earth. Have them someplace less expensive to lower the cost for people, if they charge it at all.

If anything, you cannot tell me that AWS cannot put the cost of an entire – AWS, Microsoft, all these panels’ sponsors cannot put the cost such that you don't have to charge people for a standard price of admission. You can't tell me that they can't sponsor it to the level where you can pay your speakers, especially women, underrepresented minorities, people of color, like that to come in and appear and talk about these things. Especially if it's a topic on which they have to do the emotional labor for.

That's what I want to see us do to break some of the patterns that we're seeing, to make things better for everyone else, and then once some start doing that, that is going to be it. Once you start modeling that behavior, you're going to see other conferences do the same, where these big trillion-dollar companies that are sponsoring these orgs or sponsoring these conferences can actually put some money into it so that more people can come.

I don't really have a good understanding yet as of why that hasn't happened and I'm sure folks who organize conferences will probably have plethora of reasons. But I feel like the time has come to do these kinds of things and if it means we have fewer conferences, okay. Move them more virtual, it's fine.

REIN: Yeah. I have liked that some conferences are starting to do two tier tickets where if the company's paying, you pay the higher price and if you're just an individual or whatever, then you're paying a much lower price, and then usually, there's also some sort of scholarship program again, to try and bring people in.

But I think you're right. Especially if it's the much more company focused things like AWS re:Invent or whatever, why is there a cost to attend that? Even for the tickets, but on top of that, there's all the travel, there's taking time off work, there's childcare; there's so many other attendance costs to going to a conference at a place that even if the tickets were free, there's still a huge barrier there.

TIM: You could even go as far as say some of these venue choices. You go to a place like D.C., or New York City, or someplace that have HBCUs, those HBCUs have [inaudible] and conference centers. You don't have to go to some Richie rich hotel. Why don’t you give Howard some money to use their facilities? Why don't you do it in the [inaudible] area? Why don't you give Home by the Sea Hampton University some money? Or Atlanta?

Any of these places where you have – or some of these are just lower income schools that serve underprivileged communities, give them the money to host these conferences. Not some hotel. Have it catered by minority-owned businesses, have something, do some things to get more people in. Like, have scholarships for HBCUs CS students where if you're a student—junior, senior—looking for internships where they're like, “Hey man, you know what, come to this conference, we’re not going to charge you and we're actually going to give you a stipend for travel.” That's doing something and it is almost the peak of intellectual dishonesty for people to try and act like the money isn't there because it's there. We've seen time and time again, all these earnings calls coming out, all these market caps going up and up and up and up. The money is there; just people don't want to open up them purse strings, I guess.

REIN: Before the moment passes, I do want to point out that you call this podcast out for not doing enough to schedule things so that all of the panel can attend. I gratefully appreciate the rebuke and we're going to go work on that.

TIM: I appreciate that and I appreciate you for giving me a space that I feel safe to say that. That matters. Like, if you want to do something, give people space to talk about it and don't get butthurt when they say something.

REIN: So when you were talking about white person dress codes and the need to assimilate into that, I was reminded of this thing that actually just was published by CNN about a Maori representative in New Zealand’s parliament who was objected for refusing to wear a tie.

TIM: I think he called it a colonizer's noose?

REIN: He did and when they changed the rule and he was allowed back in, I am still thinking about what he said, which is, “The noose has been taken off our necks and we are now able to sing our songs.”

TIM: It's true and it's a big deal because I know for me as, especially as a young Black male, it is imperative for our survival to not be threatening and I'm not overstating that. It is imperative for our survival to not be deemed as threatening. If you go into a workplace and you don't have a comfortable appearance whether your hair's cut close, you can't have dreadlocks, you don't want to have anything that's let's say, too Black. You have to look a certain way. Your car has to look a certain way. You can't listen to certain music. Can't talk a certain way. Those are the guardrails which I had to perform under and I say perform early on when I was early in the industry, because that's what was expected.

You would see when the few Black people in an org would get together and the white folks weren't around, we would relax and it looks a whole lot different. If you're a fly on that wall, you would look and sound a lot different because we could be who we were and the problem happened was that you would see, you'd have to go out there and you'd be like oh, man. “Hey, Tim you have a blah, blah. You don't really sound Black.” Hm, okay.

REIN: You’re so articulate.

TIM: Oh yeah, that's a good one. “You're so articulate,” “You know a lot of words,” and that kind of stuff. The problem with that is that in order to do that, in order to assimilate into that culture to make a living, you have to do that and then we have to go back to our communities and hear about it. Hear about selling out, hear about – and it's one thing to get a job. People like to see people succeed, but what they don't like people have to do is change who they are in order to succeed. But that's what was expected of us to fit into this predominantly white culture. White people didn't have to change. Not really.

I can't recall how many dudes I saw walking around with mullets. Even to this day, you see guys walking around with khakis, the polo shirt tucked into the belt, the mullet, the wraparound sunglasses. That has been unchanged since like 1985. But Black people now are starting to be able to be our whole selves, but how many didn't last in the industry because they couldn't? There's a lot and that was just for being Black. Heaven forbid, people who are gay, people who are trans, people who were immigrants first generation, or immigrants that really had a hard time. It's not great. We have not done, this “progressive tech industry” has not done a lot. Did not do a lot early to be welcoming or to do anything, really towards inclusion. It had to be done kicking and screaming by people who have kicked down the doors and I think, honestly, we really need to be.

I am grateful that you are kicking down the doors for me and I've done my best to kick down doors for people behind me, who've come after me. But we need to keep doing that and I don't think we acknowledge really, how bad it was because it's uncomfortable. Especially the folks who are still in the industry that were part of that. You catch a lot of these high-tech level CEOs, C-levels SVPs who say they've been in the industry 20 plus years. They were complicit.

No one was talking about that. They want to talk about what they're doing now, but no one wants to come up front and be like, “Yeah, I actually participated in this. This is the things that I was doing back then.” Or “I didn't speak up for whoever, whoever.” I guarantee you, if people had an honest disclosure of all that, you're going to see that. It talks about what US history looks like if we don't whitewash it. If we're really honest about it. We can prevent making the same mistakes, hopefully because we don't have this narrative that we were great all the time.

Companies are the same way, managers are the same way, people who are long in the tooth of this industry are the same way and I think it's important that we talk about that especially when we talk about even now. You take salespeople, that is a good foray into tech for people that don't have a technical background, especially people of color and women and they still have to look like they're fucking bankers to sell a SaaS to people who are wearing hoodies and boardshorts to work. That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense.

REIN: Can I share a hot take with you, Tim?

TIM: The hottest of takes, please give me lava.

REIN: I'm getting really frustrated with the messaging around diversity and inclusion that works and the fact that we have to use it, which is look how good this is for the business and I have a huge amount of respect for the people who do that work, sell that message. A lot of the people I've talked to who are doing this are Black women and they know how to get it done better than I do, but it must be grading to not be able to just say, “Look, we do this because it's right. We do it because it's just.”

TIM: It's because the people that they have to placate in order to get this signed off on. Who are they? They are, by and large, white men and to try and give a message to them of doing it just because. People who are a hundred millionaires, billionaires sometimes, if you don't tell them it's going to be good for their bottom line, they're not going to do it. For the most part.

Then there are some folks that I'm sure that wouldn't, but in the most part, you're talking about raging capitalists that will be glad to cut off. That would be the same people that didn't offer health insurance to their employees because they didn't have to. The same ones that give them shitty healthcare, but the executives get really, really nice healthcare.

The stratification of the value that you hold to the companies is very apparent in the benefits package, pays, and other kinds of things they offer them. To expect them to do it for altruistic reasons is the peak of naivety. So yes, the people that can get those people to sign off on a diversity and inclusion program are fucking miracle workers.

REIN: Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not mad at them for choosing that messaging. I have a huge amount of respect for their ability to be pragmatic and use the messaging that gets the job done. I mad that that's what they have to do because of how the system is. Because of how racism is.

TIM: I wished we could live in a society where we can say, “This is the right thing to do so we're going to do it.” I've talked about this before, where you look at that AWS Leadership Principle of leaders are right. There's no impetus on doing the right thing. You can say, “Oh, I was right about this.” Well good, congrats on your fucking jeopardy win. But do you do the right thing?

Doing the right thing is an ethical question. Do you do the right thing? Not for the business, right thing for the business. There's no parenthetical after that, there's no qualifying clause. If you are ethical, you will do the right thing and if that right thing isn't necessarily good for the business, okay. That's fine. All right. There's more money to be made and if your business cannot withstand you doing the right thing, then you're probably a shitty business in the first place.

REIN: It’s not a means, it’s an end.

TIM: Exactly.

REIN: Okay. Well, there's my hot take for the episode.

TIM: That was like medium hot. That was like jalapeno hot.

JOHN: It's something we've all noticed, that language always comes up the moment you start talking about DE&I.

TIM: What I think for me, the hurtful part is when I watch these things especially as you see these things like what you're seeing at Google because of fucking course, Google is that when people really start to move the needle, when people start to make a real impact, the powers that be get uncomfortable and then they start to let people go and they replace them with someone that they are more comfortable with. They don't realize that the discomfort that they feel is what's supposed to happen and you can make it very, very simple for them.

If you were to talk about this as a digital transformation, as we say, it's like, “Oh, well, we're going to go from this monolithic gigantic system that we’re running on to microservices, cloud-based API, stuff like that,” and people say, “Well, these old school database administrators are very uncomfortable with it and they tell them.” It’s like, “Hey, well this is how it is now. You're going to have to deal with it, or you're going to probably have to find a different way to get the industry, because this is the way it's going and it's better for everyone involved.” They explain all these benefits and they tell people that discomfort is part of this journey. You're going to have to learn to swim in new waters and things are going to be different, but they're going to be better overall once you get on the other side of that, but they can't apply that to them fucking selves when it comes to about diversity and inclusion and I don't get it.

JOHN: I mean, that's the privilege that they haven't had to be practiced at being uncomfortable in those situations, or even if it's a little bit of technical discomfort versus the much more impactful discomfort that comes when you start actually talking about race.

TIM: Yeah, there's a level of introspection that they haven't had to do and they are seemingly unwilling to do. That's the part that's most frustrating; the people that have the least to lose in this are the most unwilling to change.

REIN: Oh, do you think it's worthwhile if what we're talking about here is a change in mindset? It's a change in what these people strive for, what they want and I think that that change is incompatible with let’s call it, white supremacy and capitalism. So do you think that it's worthwhile to try to pursue that, or do you think we have to continue doing these pragmatic things?

TIM: Well, first of all, I would say that white supremacy and capitalism are redundant, but I would say that we cannot change the minds of the people in power with anything other than pragmatic reasoning because if we could, they would have already. There has been more than enough reason, appeals to emotion, consequence, societal collapse, all these other things that we've seen, especially these past 18 months or so.

A reasonable person would say like, “You know what,” or all the people who are reasonable about this and who are ethical about this have already changed their minds. At this point, anybody who doesn't see the need for it, the self-evident need for it without for the justification for business reasons, but the self-evident need for it will not be convinced. So you have to appeal to pragmatic reasons until they leave the industry.

REIN: This is a Kuhnian paradigm shift: the people with the old views have to die or otherwise go away and be replaced.

TIM: Essentially, that's it and so that's why it's so important for us to nurture the junior folks coming into the industry and the people who are mid-career to make sure that people who understand this, to make sure that the people who are underrepresented, and to make sure your LGBTQ, your people of color, any manner of folks that are not properly represented or that have been heretofore unsafe in this industry, stay in the industry by any means necessary. To make sure that the industry can change in the long run.

It is incrementalism and as unpopular as it is in some circles to say, “Oh, we can't just change everything right now because we're inspired to do so.” I'm sorry, you don't steer a ship that quickly. This is a large thing we have to change. The industry is a lot of people and it's a lot of money. So you're going to have to change it a bit at a time and the only way to bring that change about is to bring and keep people in the industry that can affect that change.

REIN: And for those of us who are more securely in the industry, whether it's because we're white dudes or we have experience, whatever it is, we have an obligation to do what it takes to keep them around you.

TIM: You absolutely do and you also have an obligation to continue to push on the folks that don't see the value in keeping them around. Very openly. You have to use your privilege. You have to use your privilege to speak to power. You don't have to take anyone else's voices. You don't have to pick up someone else to sign a waiver on his own, certainly, but you have to keep them from being silenced and that is the important thing that we need to do. If you are a straight white male in this industry and you have seen the necessity of the industry being more inclusive, diverse, and to have a good sense of belonging, then what you have to do is you have to check your peers when people speak.

REIN: And not just keep them around, but make it possible for them to thrive.

TIM: Absolutely, absolutely. They have to have strong roots in the industry. They have to feel like they're safe here, that they can grow here, and that they belong here and then when they do that, that's when they can affect change.

JOHN: Yeah. That is how you keep them around, either that, or you don't want to them to have to rely on just complete bloody mindedness to have the perseverance to go through all of the pain to stay in the industry. You want it to be them thriving in the industry. Like you said, they can be the tomorrow's leaders that can start that real change.

TIM: The last thing I want to do is also say, I want to make sure that when we talk about doing that thriving, that again, we're talking about not just taking care of them in the workplace, but taking care of them as whole people. I will beat this drum every time I can get on, we cannot let, we cannot let women leave this industry. We cannot do it. We're losing too many women because they have to make the choice right now in 2021, in this pandemic, as to whether or not they have to be mothers or whether they have to be career professionals and it’s bullshit. It is bullshit and it goes two ways with that: we're not supporting mothers and we're not supporting our fathers. We can support our fathers, then they can play a more active role in raising their children and Mom doesn't have to take care of everything.

Now obviously, work can't influence whether a father is a piece of shit father or not and there are a lot of them out there, I'm going to be honest about it, that won't change a diaper, that won't clean the house, shit like that. We can't do that, but we'll at least avail them the opportunity and not have them use work as an excuse.

So we have to change the way we do business to make sure that working mothers can be whole people so they don't have to choose between raising their children and doing work. If we don't protect these women, and the reason I say that is because it is the women of color that are the most susceptible to having to make this choice, because they have fewer resources outside of that, typically.

So we need to protect people. We need to protect these people so that they can stay in the industry and we need to do that now. Because we are bleeding off too many women as it is like way, way too much. And that goes beyond whether or not we're actually treating them as they should be treated like equals, like the brilliant engineers they are in the conference rooms. So that's a whole other problem. We need to tackle that too, but we need to at least keep them from saying, “Hey, I’ve got to leave the industry because I got to take care of my kids.” We should be fixing that and we should be fixing that yesterday.

JOHN: Yeah, that’s part of bringing your whole self to work is the other selves that you're taking care of. Like, if you can't have that baby on your lap for the meeting, then you're not going be on the meeting and then it's snowballed from there.

TIM: Absolutely. Absolutely. When we start coming back, whatever that looks like post-pandemic, think about what they did in World War II and beyond to keep women in working. They had daycares, like the companies had daycares. But why fuck can't we do that now? We have so much money. You mean to tell me Amazon can’t have a daycare at the facilities You mean to tell me that Microsoft can have a daycare facilities? You mean to tell me that fucking WeWork can't have WeWork fucking daycare that companies pay for? Like, there's no reason for it. People just don't want it and it comes down to greed and it’s bullshit.

REIN: So maybe now is a good time for us to do reflections. I usually have two things, I guess, that's my pattern now. One is I wanted to point out that Tim said that capitalism and white supremacy are the same thing and I didn't want that one to go under the radar either. If you're a white person who doesn't know what Tim is talking about, I can recommend a book called The Invention of the White Race. Maybe Tim has some of his own recommendations.

My reflection is that we have an obligation not just to make it possible for people to exist in the industry, but if we're dragging them through the barbed wire that is this toxic garbage industry, we're hurting them, too and so, our obligation is to make it healthy.

JOHN: Yeah, I think that's really just been reinforcing a lot of my own thoughts on things like, I don't know if this is a reflection other than just it's always great to have these kinds of conversations as reminders. These are thoughts that happen, but sometimes they happen in the background or you're not quite sure to connect them to action and continuing to have these conversations to continually remind me what the priorities are and what the other perspectives are is incredibly useful to me. So Tim, if nothing else, I appreciate you spending the time talking with us, talking to me in specific about your perspective on this. So thank you.

TIM: I want to take a moment again, to acknowledge and thank you all for giving me a space and a platform. I know it's difficult sometimes to hear criticism especially if you're doing what you think is right for someone to say, “Hey, well, you can do better.” It's hard, but I think it's important for us also acknowledge that growth is uncomfortable. Improvement is uncomfortable.

One of the things that I learned in jujitsu, if it has taught me anything and it's something that I've reinforced in my life, is that adversity makes you thrive in some ways. Not adversity for adversity’s sake, but when you exercise harder, you get stronger. If you run faster, run harder to get faster. If you spend more time being crushed under a 300-pound man, you get better at jujitsu.

In this context, the more time you spend listening to some of these things, the voice of the people that have been marginalized and it makes you uncomfortable, figure out why it makes you uncomfortable and don't figure out how to disqualify the person talking. Think about why you're uncomfortable, look and uncover the pattern underneath that in yourself and in your world and how you interact with it, and then once you find that pattern, fix the problem. Once you do that, you can then help others do it. But you have to at first be comfortable with being uncomfortable and to do, if there's maybe sound a little cliche, but it's true. If you just run away from that feeling, you're never going to grow, you're never going to improve, and things are never going to get better.

JOHN: Thank you so much for coming on the show, Tim.

TIM: I appreciate it, John. Thank you all for inviting me. I’m honored and humbled.

Special Guest: Tim Banks.

Support Greater Than Code

02:31 - Karen’s Superpower: The Ability to Simplify Things

05:55 - Better Allies – Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces; Triaging and Curating Research

14:15 - Maintaining Anonyminity (at first); Prove It Again Bias

26:09 - Culture Add + Values Fit

32:11 - Network Effect: Venturing Beyond Homogenous Networks

41:58 - Doing This Work is Everyone’s Job

48:12 - People to Follow

51:13 - The Decline of Gender Parity in the Tech Industry

58:15 - Making Statements and Changing the Status Quo

Reflections:

Rein: Getting better at praxis: for every white dude with a beard you follow on Twitter, go follow 10 Black women in tech.

Damien: How bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens.

Chanté: We’re all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Today you might be the ally, tomorrow you may be the bridge.

Arty: Expanding our homogenous networks. Change takes courage on all of our parts.

Karen: Turning period statements into questions or adding “until now” to those statements.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep 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:

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REIN: Welcome to Episode 224 of Greater Than Code. Take two.

So full disclosure, we recorded this or more specifically, didn't record this conversation so we're going to do it again.

I'm your co-host, Rein Hendricks, and I'm here with my co-host, Damien Burke.

DAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here with my co-host, Chanté Thurmond.

CHANTÉ: Everyone, Chanté here. And I'm here with Arty Starr.

ARTY: Thank you, Chanté. And I'm here with our awesome guest today, Karen Catlin.

So after spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice-president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears.

Today, Karen is a leadership coach and a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books: "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking."

Welcome, Karen to the show!

KAREN: And it is a pleasure to be back with you and to be having this conversation today. Thanks so much for having me.

ARTY: And we very much appreciate you being here again with us.

So our first question we always ask at the beginning of the show is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

KAREN: Okay so, my superpower is the ability to simplify things and I joke that I think I acquired this superpower simply as a coping strategy because there's so much information out there. We're all bombarded with things and maybe my brain is just not as big as other people so I constantly am trying to simplify things so that I can understand them, remember them, convey them, and so forth.

And I'll share, I think it served me well, not only as I embarked on my computer science programming school and just trying to like grok everything that I was trying to learn as well as then entering the field initially as a software engineer. Again, simplifying things, divide and conquer, break things down into those procedural elements that can be repeated and generalized.

Certainly, then as I moved into executive roles as a vice-president of engineering, you're just context switching all day long. Again, I just had to simplify everything that was going on so that could really remember things, take notes on things, and make decisions based on what I thought I needed to do.

Yeah. So that's my superpower.

ARTY: That's a great superpower. So in the context of the workplace and you've got teams trying to things out, maybe a design problem you're working on, trying to solve. How does simplifying things come into play in a team context like that?

KAREN: Well, it comes into play a lot of ways. I'm remembering one example where there was some interpersonal conflict between two people and I was hearing both sides, as one does, and talking to them both. I got them both in a room because they just weren't seeing each other's point of views, I thought, and they were just working at odds to each other.

Hearing them both talk, I was able to say, “So at the heart, this is what we're all trying to do. This is what we are trying to achieve together,” and I got them to confirm that. That was the first step in simplifying just the discussion. They were getting a little emotional about things. They were bringing in a lot of details that frankly, weren't necessary to really understand what was going on and I was able to focus them on that shared purpose that we had for the project. It doesn't even matter what it was.

Actually, it was so long ago now I can't quite remember what the issue was, but I remember hearing afterwards one of the people say, “You are so good at simplifying things got down to the heart,” and I'm like, “Yes, I am. That's my superpower.”

ARTY: It sounds like even more than that, or maybe a slightly different frame of just the example you just gave. It's not only simplifying things, you are distilling the essence of what's important or what someone is trying to say, and getting at what's the underlying message underneath all the things that someone's actually trying to communicate, even if they're struggling too, so that you can help two people may be coming from different directions, be able to understand one another. That's pretty powerful.

KAREN: Well, thank you and I love the way you've just framed it, Arty and oh, those are big shoes to fill. Woo! I hope I've been able to do that in a number of different settings as I think back, but that's yeah, it is powerful. I think I probably still have some stuff I can learn there, too.

CHANTÉ: Arty, thank you for teeing up this because what I am curious about in relation to what Karen just mentioned as her superpower, which I think is amazing, is obviously, you have authored a number of books. When it comes to allyship, it sounds like this is a great time where we can get somebody to distill and to simplify and not to oversimplify because there's an art to it. But I would love if you could maybe take us down the pathway of how did you arrive at this moment where you are authoring books on allyship and maybe you could give us a little bit of the backstory, first and then we could get into the superpower you've used along the way in your tech journey.

KAREN: Okay.

CHANTÉ: And how you're coaching people.

KAREN: All right. Chanté, thank you. Yes, I'm happy to.

So the backstory, first of all, I never set out to become an author, or to become a speaker, or this expert that people tap into about workplace inclusion. That was not my goal. I was doing my job in tech. I was a vice-president of engineering at Adobe. I was leading engineering teams and realizing that there was a decline happening before my eyes in gender diversity.

Now I started my career in tech a long time ago and I started at a time when there was sort of a peak period of women studying computer science in the United States. And so, when I started my career, it wasn't 50-50 by any means, but there was plenty of gender diversity in the teams I was working on, in the conference rooms I was in, in the cube lands that I was working in and I saw a decline happening.

So while I was still at Adobe, I started our women's employee resource group—goes back gosh, like 14, 15 years now—and I've started mentoring a lot of women at the company and started basically, being a vocal advocate to make sure women were represented in various leadership meetings I was in, on stage, at our internal events and conferences, giving updates at all-hands meetings, like well, thinking about that. I love doing that work so much and loved doing that work less so my VP of engineering work, I must admit.

So about 9 years ago now, I decided to do a big change in my career pivot in my own career, I started leadership coaching practice. A leadership coaching practice focused on helping women who are working in tech in any capacity, any role. But women working in this industry, I wanted to help them grow their leadership skills so they could stay in tech if that's where they wanted to be and not drop out because they felt like, “I just can't get ahead,” or “I'm seeing all the white men get ahead,” for example, “before me.”

So I started this coaching practice. I soon realized, though that I had a big problem with my coaching practice and the problem wasn't with my clients—they were amazing. The problem, I don't think was me. I think I'm a decent coach, still learning, still getting better, but decent. And realized the problem really that I was facing is that before I could truly help my clients, I needed to make their companies more inclusive.

All of them were working at tech companies where the closer you get to the leadership team, to the C-suite, to the CEO, just the mailer and paler it got. With all due respect to anyone who's male and or pale, I'm white myself, anyone who's listening, who's male and/or pale, like that's just what the demographics were and still are in most of our companies.

Also, that coupled with this mentality of, “Hey, we are a meritocracy. People get ahead in our company based on their merits, their accomplishments, the impact to the business.” When in reality, that's not what happens because if it were then the demographics across the company would be uniform, regardless of what level you are at. So the white men were getting ahead more than others.

So I was like, “I need to make their companies more inclusive. In fact, I need to make all of tech more inclusive to really help my coaching clients,” and yeah, laugh, right? A big job, one person over here. Now, what's the first thing anyone does these days when they want to change the world? You start a Twitter handle. So I started the Twitter handle @betterallies. I started in 2014 with a goal to share simple everyday actions anyone could take to be more inclusive at work.

In hindsight, I was leveraging my super power as I started this Twitter handle. I leveraged it because I started looking at the research that social scientists do about diversity in the workplace and not just gender diversity, but diversity of all kinds. The research that shows that they were uncovering, that shows the challenges that people of non-dominant genders, as well as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, identity, age, abilities, and so forth. What are the challenges these people face in the workplace as they navigate that?

Others are doing this great research and I really am—and this builds on what Arty was saying—I used to think I curated this, but really, I was triaging the research. I was triaging it to simplify it, get it to its essence, and figure out with all this great research that gets published, what is someone supposed to do with it? How is the average person who works in tech supposed to take action with this great research that's out there?

So I triage and curate and I do it not just based on the research, but also what I'll call cautionary tales that appear in our news, in our Twitter feeds, and so forth. I'll give you two examples to make it real. One is based on research. There's research that shows that men interrupt women more than the other way around and so, based on that research, I go over to Twitter and I type in something like, “I pledge to notice when interruptions happen in the meetings I attend and redirect the conversation back to the person who was interrupted with a simple, ‘I'd like to hear Chanté finish her thought,’” and something like that that's research-driven.

Then the more, the cautionary tales that pop up in the research or in the news that we consume, I remember a few years ago when there was so much that was coming out about Uber and its non-inclusive workplace. Just one of the many things we learned about was that the CEO at the time and founder, Travis Kalanick, he was using the nursing mother's room for his personal phone calls. That's not cool because then the nursing moms can't get in there to do what they need to do. So I would go over to Twitter and just a little bit of snark added, I was like, “I pledge not to use the nursing mother's room for my personal phone calls unlike Travis Kalanick at Uber,” [chuckles]. That kind of thing.

So I'm just tweeting a couple times a day. I start getting Twitter messages to this anonymous Twitter account—by the way, it was anonymous at the time—and these Twitter requests would be like, “Hey, does anyone at the Better Allies Initiative do any public speaking?” and I'd be like, ‘The initiative? Huh, it's just me tweeting a couple of times a day. Okay.” But I wanted to speak about this topic and I want to retain my anonymity. So I would write back and say, “Yes, one of our contributors does some public speaking. We'll put you in touch with her,” and I go over to my personal Twitter account type something in like, “Hey, I'm Karen Catlin. I contribute to Better Allies. I love public speaking. What do you have in mind?”

So I started speaking on this whole approach of everyday simple actions people could take, the Better Allies approach, and every time I gave a talk, someone would ask, “Hey, Karen, do you have a book? Because we want more of this.” For a few years, “I kept saying, no, I don't have a book. I don't have a book. I don't have a book, sorry.” But I did finally write my book. In fact, I've written two books on the topic—"Better Allies" and also, "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring.” The Better Allies book, I just released a second edition. It's been out there for 2 years. I've learned so much that I wanted to do a full update on the book. So I've just released that a few weeks ago.

CHANTÉ: I have a follow-up question then, because Karen, you mentioned that you wanted to maintain your anonymity when you started off that handle and I would just love to hear maybe why that's so important when you're doing this work of allyship and accomplishing in this space?

KAREN: Yes, and I don't know if it is important for everyone—and I'm not anonymous anymore. I have claimed credit for this. As soon as I published my books. Writing a book is a lot of work; I'm going to claim the credit. But I didn't in the beginning because okay, I'm going to say this. A lot of people thought it was a man behind the Twitter handle and I must admit, I was kind of channeling white men that I have worked with over my career and thinking about what would they really do? What could I get them to do?

All of my tweets are first person, “I pledge to do this,” “I will do this,” I'm going to do this,” and there were people I have friends even who were like, “Hey, have you seen this @betterallies Twitter handle? I wonder who's behind it. I'd like to interview him for my podcast,” That type of thing.

So I think that there were people out there who thought it was a white man behind the Twitter handle and I was comfortable with that because not only was I channeling these white men I had worked with in the past, but I also think that there's power in men listening to other men. I'll just say that. I have actually gotten speaking engagements when I've said, “I'm a contributor.” They're like, “Are there any men who could speak because we think men would like to hear this message from another man.”

So anyway, that's kind of why I started out with that anonymous Twitter handle and with this character behind the scenes of this fake man. [laughs] But now it's okay. I say that I curate it, it's me, and I'm comfortable with that. I still do it first person because I think that white women can also be allies. We all can be allies for others with less privilege than ourselves in the workplace and I think it's important for us, everyone to be thinking, “This is a job I can and should do to be inclusive at work and to look for these everyday situations. I can take ally actions and make a difference.”

ARTY: How's that changed things like, revealing your identity and that you're not actually a big white dude?

[chuckles]

KAREN: I know. Well, I never really said I was a big white dude! Or even a small white dude, or whatever. But I think it's fine. I claimed the association with the Twitter handle when I published my book and it was just time to just own it. It's not like people stopped following me or stopped retweeting or anything like that. It's only grown since then. So Arty, it's a good question, but I don't know. I don't know.

REIN: And this is more than a little ironic because when you were talking about your coaching—and I'm going to read into this a little bit, but I think you can confirm that it's backed up by the research—to appear equally competent or professional, women have to do more and other minoritized groups have to do more. So what I was reading in was that part of the problem you had with coaching was that to get them to an equal playing field, they had to be better.

KAREN: Yes. What you're describing, Rein is “prove-it-again” bias and this is well-researched and documented. Prove-it-again means that women have to prove themselves over and over again where men just have to show potential. This often happens and I'm going to give you just a scenario to bring it home.

Imagine sitting in some sort of promotion calibration discussion with other managers in your group and you're talking about who gets promotions this cycle. Someone might say, “Well, I'd like to see Arty prove that she can handle managing people before we move her to the next level.” When Arty, maybe you've already been doing that for a few years; you've already managed a team, you've built a team, whatever. “I'd like to make sure she can do this with this additional thing,” like, make sure she can do it with an offshore team or something. “I want to see her do it again.”

Whereas a man's like, “Ah, Damien's great. I know he can do the job. Let's promote him.” Okay, totally making this up. But you see what I'm saying is that this is what the prove-it-again bias is.

So whether it is women have to be twice as good or something like that, I don't know if that's exactly what's going on, but they have to deal with this bias of once again, I have to prove that I'm worthy to be at this table, to be in this conversation, to be invited to that strategic planning meeting, to get that promotion, and I don't want to coach women to have to keep proving themselves over and over again. Instead, I want to change the dynamics of what's happening inside these organizations so it is a better playing field, not just for my clients who are mostly women, but also, anyone out there who's from an underrepresented group, who might be facing challenges as they try to navigate this world that really has been designed for other people.

ARTY: Wow, that's really enlightening. I'm just thinking about this from a cognitive science perspective and how our brains work, and then if you're making a prediction about something and have an expectation frame for that. If I have an expectation that someone's going to do well, like I have a dream and image in my mind that they'll fit this particular stereotype, then if they just show potential to fit this image in my head, I can imagine and envision them doing all these things and trust that imaginary dream in my head.

Whereas, if I have the opposite dream in my head where my imagination shows this expectation of this person falling on their face and doing all these things wrong, I'm already in a position of having to prove something that's outside of that expectation, which is so much harder to do.

So this is the effect of these biases basically being baked into our brain already is all of our expectations and things are set up to work against people that culturally, we have these negative expectations around that have nothing to do with those actual people.

KAREN: Thanks. Arty, have you ever read the book, Whistling Vivaldi?

ARTY: I haven't. I am adding that to my list.

KAREN: It explores stereotype threat, which is exactly what you've just described, and the title, just to give you some insight into this, how this shows up. The title, Whistling Vivaldi, is all about a story of a Black man who had to walk around his neighborhood, which I believe is mostly white and got just the concerns that people didn't trust him navigating this public space, his neighborhood.

So what he would do, and I don't know if it was just in the evenings or any time, he went out to walk to be outside, he would whistle Vivaldi to break the stereotype that he was a bad person, a scary person because of the color of his skin. Instead, by whistling Vivaldi, he gave off the feeling that he was a highly educated person who studied classical music and he did that so that he could navigate his neighborhoods safely. It's awful to think about having to do that, but this book is full of these examples. It's a research-driven approach so, it's a great book to understand stereotype threat and combat it.

DAMIEN: So in the interest of us and our listeners, I suppose being better allies, you spoke about stereotype threat and gave an example there. You spoke about prove-it-again bias and specifically, with prove-it-again bias, I want to know what are ways that we can identify this real-time and counter it in real-time?

KAREN: Yes. With prove-it-again bias—well, with any bias, really. First of all, reminding yourself that it exists is really important. At Google, they found that simply reminding managers, before they went into a calibration, a performance calibration meeting, probably some rank ordering exercise of all the talent in the organization. Before they started a calibration meeting, they were all given a 1-page handout of here's the way bias can creep into this process. That simple act of having people review the list of here's the way bias creeps into the process was enough to help combat it during the subsequent conversation.

So I think we have to remind ourselves of bias and by the way, this resource I'm describing is available as a download on Google's re:Work website. I think it's R-E-: work. There's a re:Work website with tons of resources, but it's available for download there.

So that's one thing you can do is before a calibration meeting or before you're about to start an interview debrief session with a team, is remind people of the kinds of bias that can come into play so that people are more aware.

Other things, and I'll talk specifically about hiring, is I am a huge proponent of making sure that before you interview the first candidate, you have objective criteria that you're going to use to evaluate the candidates because otherwise, without objective criteria, you start relying on subjectivity, which is code for bias. Things will start to be said of, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit,” which is code for bias of “They're different from us. They're different from me. I don't think I'd want to go get a beer with them after work,” or “If I had to travel with them and get stuck on a long layover somewhere when we can travel again, I don't think I'd enjoy that.” People just instead say, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit.

So you get away from that by, instead in your objective criteria, looking for other things that are technically needed for the job, or some values perhaps that your company has in terms of curiosity or lifelong learning or whatever your company values are. You interview for those things and you figure out how you're going to measure someone against those objective criteria.

Other way bias creeps into interviews is looking at or saying something like, “Well, they don't have this experience with Docker that this other candidate has,” but really, that wasn't part of the job description. No one said that the candidates needed Docker experience, but all of a sudden, because one of the candidates has Docker experience, that becomes important.

So instead of getting ahead of that, make sure you list exactly what you're going to be interviewing for and evaluating people for so that the bias isn't there and bias, maybe all of a sudden Docker becomes an important thing when you realize you could get it. But it may be that it's the person who seems the most like the people in the team who has it and that’s another – you're just using that as a reason for increasing that candidate’s success to join your team because you'd like to hang out with them. You'd like to be with them. You would want to be getting a beer with them. Does that help, Damien?

DAMIEN: Yeah, that's very helpful. The framing is an absolutely pre-framing before an evaluation, before an interview what biases can happen. That's a wonderful tool, which I am going to be using everywhere I can. And then what you said about culture fit and really, every subjective evaluation is, I think the words you used was “code for bias.” Like, anytime you have a subjective evaluation, it's going to be biased. So being able to decide in advance what your objective evaluations are, then you can help avoid that issue.

Culture fit is just such a red flag for me. You said, I wrote down the words, “culture built,” right? Decide what the culture is – because culture is important in the company, decide what the culture is you want and then interview and evaluate for that.

KAREN: Yeah. Oh, I love that. Build the culture instead of just fit the culture. I've also heard people say, “If you ever hear someone say, I don't think they'd be a culture fit, respond with ‘Well, I think they'd be a culture add,’” or Damien, to quote you, “I think they build our culture instead of just fit in.” Really powerful, really powerful.

CHANTÉ: Yeah. I agree with you all and Karen, I'm not sure if you knew this, but one of the many things I do, which takes up most of my life, is I'm a DEI practitioner and I have a firm, and I also work in-house at a company, Village MD, as a director of DEI there.

So one of the things that I talk a lot about is culture add and one of the things I'd love to see more companies do is to think about like, basically take an inventory of all the people on your team and try to identify where you're strong, where you're weak, and look for the skills gap analysis, basically and say, “What don't we have here,” and then, “Let's go hire for that skillset or that expertise that we don't have that we believe could help us build this thing better this year.”

That's going to require people to do that exercise, not just once because your team dynamic shifts usually a few times a year. So if you're a high growth company, you should be doing that probably every quarter. But imagine what the difference would be if we approach interviewing and promotion building from that lens instead.

KAREN: Yeah, and Chanté, the way you framed it is amazing. I love it. You said, “What do we not have that we need to build our product to deliver to our customers?” I don't remember the exact words you used, but that I think is important because I've also, in conversations I've had around culture fit and culture and everything, someone say to me, “Well, wait a second, Karen, what if you we're evaluating a white supremacist? It's clear, there are white supremacists and we don't have one of those yet on the team. Does that mean we should open the doors and let them in?”

That's when it's like, you can use the way you've just framed as “Well, if we're building a product for white supremacists, then yeah, probably.” But to be more serious about this, it's like what's missing from our team structure, from the diversity within this team, that is going to allow us to deliver on our product, on our offering better? I think that's important.

Another lens to apply here is also you can still do values fit. Make sure people fit with the values that you have as a company and that should allow you to interview out people who don't fit with your values and just to use that example of a white supremacist. That would be the way to do that, too.

REIN: I think it's really important to say that ethics still matters here and values fit as a way to express that. One of the things that I would maybe caution or challenge is—and this isn't a direct challenge to you, Karen, I don't think—but it's been popular in the industry to try to remove bias from the equation. To do debiasing training and things like that and I think that that's the wrong way to go because I don't think it's cognitively possible to remove bias. I think instead what we should do, what I think that you're talking about here is being aware of the biases we have. Accounting for them in the way that we hire, because the same heuristic that leads to a bias against certain demographics is the one we use to say, “We don't want white supremacists.”

KAREN: Yeah. Plus a hundred, yes. [laughs] I agree. What I was going to say, Rein to build on what you just shared is that it's important to see things like color, for example, to understand. Even if you feel you're not biased, it's important to see it, to see color, to see disability, to see someone who is going through a transition, for example, on their identity.

It's important to see it because that allows you to understand the challenges that they are facing and if you say, “I don't see color, I just see them as their new identity, post-transition. I don't see their disability; I just see the person,” it negates the experience they're having, as they are trying to navigate the workplace and to be the best allies, you need to understand the challenges people are facing and how you can take action to help them either mitigate the challenge, get around the challenge, whatever that might be, or remove the challenge.

ARTY: So you're not being empathetic to the circumstances by pretending that they don't exist.

KAREN: Yes. Well said, yes.

REIN: It’s the idea that you can be on bias that I think is dangerous. I want to call back to this idea of a meritocracy; the idea that every choice we make is based on merit and that whatever we choose is indicative of the merit of that person is the bias that is harmful.

KAREN: Woo, yes. I can't wait to refer to that. I can't wait to come back and listen to you. What you just said, Rein that is powerful.

REIN: Because becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? We're a meritocracy so everything we've chosen is means – if we chose someone that means that they have merit by definition. There's no way out of that trap.

KAREN: Right on.

CHANTÉ: Yeah. When you say that, it makes me think, too of just the sort of committal to always transforming and iterating. So if you come in the door saying, “Listen, there's no way we can eliminate bias all the time.” We're going to make the assumption that we're always being biased and therefore, what things can we put into place and what tools can we use? What resources can we leverage here to make sure that we're on a pathway for greater inclusion, greater accessibility? Therefore, making our organization more diverse and more innovative.

I think, like Rein, I just want to really underscore that because that is something that I've had to really try to lead with versus add to the conversation later. So I'm appreciating that you brought it up today. Thank you.

REIN: It’s like some of the choices, some of the evaluations we're making are subjective. We can't make them objective in every case; I think what we want is a framework that allows us to do these subjective evaluations in a way that accounts for bias.

DAMIEN: So that's amazing. Where do we go from here?

ARTY: One of the things we talked about last time with regards to various people getting promoted, this effect of maler and paler as you get closer to the C-suite, is that one of the effects of that is when you're sitting down to hire someone, well, who do you know? Who's on the list of people that I know within my network? So one of the huge biases we end up having isn't necessarily a cognitive bias, it's just a effect of where our attention has been and who we've been hanging out and who we have relationships with that are preexisting.

These existing network effects also keep us in the thinking and stuff and making decisions within the context of those networks. We promote people that we know. We promote people that we have relationships with. So even just some of the dynamics of if you've got existing C-suite dynamics that is dominated by men and you've got these dynamics where it’s difficult for men and women to have relationships for various reasons, things that get complicated, that those sorts of things can end up creating a self-reinforcing effect, too.

I'm wondering what are some of your thoughts on some of the ways that we can expand our networks and expand the people that we know to shift some of those systemic effects?

KAREN: Yeah. Most of us have homogenous networks. Homogenous networks meaning people who are just like us because we have something in common with them, whether that is hobbies that we share, music we like talking about, food we like to go out to enjoy whatever we have things in common. So most of us end up having a –and it's true. Most white people have networks that are full of other white people and this also is friendship circles. There's again, social science research out there that shows that we tend to have networks full of people just like us.

As you just were saying, Arty this impacts so many aspects of work in terms of who we hire, who we recommend, who we promote, who we even ask to take on some like stretch assignment or tasks such as giving the update at the all-hands meeting for our team, or going in and exploring some new technology that might be on the horizon that we could leverage. Who are we going to trust with these stretch assignments are people that we know and the people that we know are the people in our network. So it is important to look to diversify our network. There's so many ways to do this.

When I give talks, I share some of these ways. One is literally when new people join your team or from a different demographic than you, get to know them and get to know their work and their career goals and down the road, look for how you might be able to connect some dots. But really, take the time to get to know people who you might otherwise just like, “Oh yeah, they're joining the team, whatever,” but set up that virtual coffee or whatever.

The other thing you can do is join Slack groups or other discussion forums at your company for people from that demographic. After checking first, if you'd be welcome and invited, of course, but many of these groups will be open to allies and if you are wanting to join that discussion groups so that you can sort of understand the conversation, understand the challenges, get to know some of this talent. That's a great way to do it.

You can also go to conferences that are designed for members of other groups that you're not a part of. Again, asking first permission, if you'd be welcome as an ally, but in tech, there's so many of these, but there's lesbians who tech, there are Black women in tech or Black coders conferences. There are Latinas in tech. Meetups and things like that. So there's so many opportunities to go and hear incredibly talented speakers talking about the technology and the projects and the work that they do and it's a great way to expand your network.

I'll share my favorite hack that I do when it's in-person and I'm going to a meetup or an event. I'm an introvert, I will let everyone know that. It's hard for me to go into a networking group like the meetup that's happening and there's some pizza and some drinks before it starts, or that conference reception. It's hard for me to go into a room like that.

So when I do, I quickly scan the room and I look for someone who's standing by themselves or sitting by themselves, who is from a different demographic and I go over and say, “Hi.” That's the easiest introduction for me as an introvert is to go find someone who's all by themselves and maybe feeling a little awkward that they're all by themselves too and it's a great way to strike a conversation and again, to expand my network, meet some new people, not just my friends that might be coming to the same event.

DAMIEN: So one of the things that I want to call attention to, too with what you're saying there is that this marginalization and privilege is self-reinforcing. You don't have to have – even though we all have cognitive biases, they aren't actually necessary for marginalization and privilege to self-reinforce and in fact, because that actually takes effort to undo these things. If we just go along, if we pretend not to see color, or whatever, we are actually reinforcing the problems that exist.

KAREN: Yeah, and Damien, on that note. In my book, and it's also a free download on my website, betterallies.com. I have a list that I've curated of 50 ways you might have privilege in the workplace. I like people to read through this list and think about all the ways they have privilege that others might not. The top of the list are “I'm a male,” and “I'm white,” and those are the top two things. But then it gets into more nuanced things and nuanced things being, “I'm not the primary caregiver for someone else.” Well, why is that something we should be aware of as allies? Well, when you're the primary caregiver, that means you may have to drop things at a moment's notice to take a child or a parent to a doctor's appointment, for example, or you might be interrupted in your work. So there's privilege when you don't have that caregiving responsibility.

Another one is that you actually have budget enough spare money so that you can do after work outings with a team that aren't company sanctioned. Like, “Yeah, I can afford to go out to dinner,” and gosh, this all sounds so weird now with the pandemic and how long it’s lasting. But “Yeah, I can go out for drinks or dinner with my team after work and pay my way,” or “I can do that whitewater rafting trip on the weekend that people are getting together with.” Even though it's not company work, it's still networking and that builds bonds that builds relationships and sure, work is going to be discussed.

It also includes things such as “I am not holding a visa,” which means that I have confidence that I maybe can take some risks with my career. “I can move teams, move to another manager, try something new out because I have confidence that I'm not going to potentially lose my job, which means losing my visa, which means losing my ability to live in the United States.”

So there's so many ways that we have privileged that I think at first blush, we might not realize and I think building on your point, Damien it's important for us to understand this privilege so that we can be understanding of how and why we should be diversifying our network and getting to know people who have different levels of privilege than ourselves.

REIN: And if you're like a white dude who's like, “This is a lot to keep track of.” Yes. When you don't have them, it's obvious.

KAREN: Yeah, you can be oblivious. Otherwise – not that you would be, Rein. I'm not saying that, but one can be very oblivious.

REIN: I’m probably oblivious of like, at least 30 of them, so.

DAMIEN: For people who are marginalized every axes, we really cannot be unaware. It's dangerous. Those of us who were unaware of it, suffer disastrous consequences. So in places where you are privileged, if one of the privileges is to not be aware of it and yes, it is a lot to keep track of and yes, as everybody else has to keep track of that stuff.

KAREN: Yeah, and building on what you both just said, this is just like technology in some ways and let me explain what I mean by that. Let's not take it out of context because there's some nuanced stuff I'm about to share. But in tech, there are so many areas of specialty, whether that is in data science or product security or accessibility related engineering or internationalization engineering and, and, and like, there's so many areas of expertise.

And Rein, you’re like, “As a white guy, how am I supposed to keep track of all of this?” Well, it's hard. I get it because the field keeps changing, things keep getting innovated on or brought to the surface and the same thing, I'm sure that Chanté sees this in the DEI space. We are learning all the time about how to create more inclusive workplaces where everyone can do their best work and thrive. It's the same as like what am I learning about writing the right kind of code that is going to have lasting impact, that is going to not cause incidents over the weekend [chuckles] when we all want to be doing something else? When it's not going to down the road because technical debt that is going to have to be retired?

So yeah, it's hard work. I don't mean to say it's not, but we need to make sure we have people who are thinking about this around us, who are reminding us, who are teaching us the best practices so that we are getting ahead of this versus falling behind.

REIN: One of the things you said last time that I really want to make sure we bring back up is that doing this work is everyone's job.

KAREN: Yes. Yeah, and Rein, I think we got into that conversation talking specifically about product security, software security. You can have a team of people who are software security specialists/experts. In fact, when I was at Adobe in my department, that was one of the groups in my department was cross-engineering product security specialists and they know this stuff. They are paying attention to the landscape. They know when those zero-day incidents happen and what the response is like, and what bounties are being paid and they know all of that because they love it. They're paying attention to it, but they can't solve the problem for the whole company. They cannot make sure that every piece of code is hardened so that the viruses don't get injected. There aren't security violations.

What they need to do is educate others, be there to support them when things go bad. But it's really about educating every engineer to be using the libraries the right way, to be allocating memory in the right way, whatever so that we don't have those security violations and it's the same thing with being inclusive.

I have so much respect for anyone and Chanté, it sounds like you do this work, but like, you are responsible for diversity at a company and are looking top down at what are the measurements we're going to have? What are the quarterly or annual goals that we want to have to improve our diversity? How are we going to measure that, make it happen?

But we also need people in every corner of the organization, in every code review meeting, in every interview debrief, in every casual hallway conversation, or a chat in a Slack, we need all of those people to realize they have a role to play in being inclusive and have some awareness of what it looks like to not be inclusive. What someone from a different demographic is experiencing in a way you might not and what are some of the ways you can take action?

So I see so many parallels there and I firmly believe, it's something I say all the time like, you don't have to have the words “diversity inclusion” belonging on your business card to make a difference. It's inclusion as a job for everyone.

CHANTÉ: Yeah. That's one of the things I wrote down that I wanted to make sure that we directed folks to. I love that on your website. That was one of the things that before I ever even knew you were going to be a guest here. That's why I started following you. I love that and I want to actually dive into that because one of the things that I hear often from people when I'm doing this work, they're like, “You're so good at this.” I'm like, “Yeah, but this is a skill that you have to work towards.”

So it's just like any other thing you want to make a lifestyle. You have to wake up that day and make a decision. If you're somebody who wants to eat healthier, then you wake up every morning and you have decisions to make. If you are a yogi like me, you might decide that you want to get on your yoga mat or you might want to pick up a book and read the philosophy instead. So it's a lifestyle.

I'd love it if you could maybe tell us a little bit about your journey because it's humbling to hear that you got into this work knowing that you wanted to coach women in tech, but you didn't necessarily aspire to be thinking about and writing about allyship, but that became a part of it. So what are some things that you did early on, or what are some things that you're doing now in terms of showing up every day and being a better ally?

KAREN: Yeah. I think that one thing you have to be comfortable with and it's hard, but I do this a lot is being an ally means realizing you're going to be wrong some of the time, because you are constantly stepping outside of that comfort zone that is just so safe—"I know how to navigate this kind of conversation, using these kinds of words and everything”—and you have to keep stepping outside that comfort zone so that you are taking some risks and you're going to make some mistakes. You are.

I make them pretty regularly. I might put something in a newsletter. I send out a weekly newsletter called 5 Ally Actions with 5 ideas and things people can take and I get emails back from people who disagree with me or say, “If I had written that, I would have changed it slightly this way,” or whatever, and I'm comfortable with that because I approach everything with this mindset of curious, instead of furious. I want to be curious about why someone's giving me the feedback and what's underneath there and what can I learn from it as opposed to getting furious at them for giving me feedback and like, assaulting my expertise, or whatever, or my voice.

So curious, not furious, I think is an important thing here and I want to give a shout out. I learned that phrase from a podcast I was listening to and it was Kat Gordon, who has something called The 3% Movement, which is all about getting more gender diversity in the creative industry, like the ad industry. So hat tipped to Kat Gordon for that.

So getting back to you got to get comfortable with making mistakes and when we make a mistake, acknowledge it, apologize. Heartfelt apology, folks. Apologize and then figure out what you're going to do differently the next time. That's what it's all about.

So the journey is real. No one ever gets an ally badge or an ally cookie. In fact, I will tell you, I recently searched on LinkedIn in job titles for ally. I was curious to see how many people put in their job titles. There are people out there who have claimed it and I don't think that's right. Unless someone else has told them that, in which case, okay, someone else has said, “You are an ally,” maybe you can put that in your title and claim the badge, but it's really not about that.

It's about being on a lifelong journey really, to be inclusive, to keep learning, to keep understanding how things are changing, and not putting the spotlight on yourself. Opening the doors for other people and just stand right behind that door and realizing that it's not about you. It's so hard to do this at times because we all want to be like, “Hey, look at the cool thing I just did for somebody else.” We want that feedback, but being an ally means stepping out of the limelight and letting someone else shine.

CHANTÉ: Those are great. Thank you so much, Karen, for that. I want to ask one more question since we're there. In terms of not making it about ourselves and not necessarily centering ourselves and taking action in the moment and not giving ourselves the allyship title, if you will, who are some people that you either align yourself with or that you learn from, whether it's up close and personal or from a distance? Like who are people that you feel are providing you with gems and knowledge so that you are then sharing with folks like us, that we can at least either put in the show notes or give a shout out to?

KAREN: Yes! Oh, I love this. So many people. One, I will say right off the bat is Minda Harts. Minda Harts is a woman, a Black woman, and she wrote a book called The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Get a Seat at the Table, I think is the byline. She and I spoke on a panel together a few months ago and I learned so much from her. I learned a lot from reading her book about the experience with Black women in the workplace, but then also, on the panel and since then, I feel that we have a nice professional, Twitter kind of friendship going on, which I just value so much. So I learned from her and what she shares all the time.

Another person I learned from is Jeannie Gainsburg. Jeannie Gainsburg is an LGBTQ educator and wrote a book called The Savvy Ally and The Savvy Ally is all about – the funny thing is she and I connected. We realized we went to college together or the same class, but we didn't know each other in college, but we have the same mindset of understanding something and then distilling it into how an ally can show up. With her perspective, it's all about being an ally for the LGBTQ community and I've learned so much from her. In fact, I've quoted both Minda and Jeannie in my second edition pretty heavily.

I also have learned a lot from David Smith and Brad Johnson. They recently published a book called Good Guys and their approach is also incredibly similar to mine, but they focus completely on how men can be allies for women and they don't focus on other aspects of allyship. But very much I learned about, they're the guys who are talking to other guys and basically saying, “Hey dude, it's your responsibility as a man in a professional setting to be an ally.” Like, it's part of your job to meet with the women on your team and sponsor them and support them. So, they tell it in a real way.

Oh my gosh, I feel like I learned from so many other people, too and I'm forgetting, I'm not thinking holistically. So anyway, those are four people it's nice to give shout outs to.

CHANTÉ: We put you on the spot so thank you, Karen. [laughs]

KAREN: Okay. Here's another one. Corey Ponder, he works in tech, but he also does speaking and writing about diversity and inclusion on the side and he is a Black man. I just learned about his experience and perspective in such a real, raw way and I value that a lot.

DAMIEN: Karen, I'd like to ask you a bit about something you brought up really early in our conversation today. You mentioned that before you got into this work with Better Allies and that sort of work, before you became a executive coach, leadership coach, you noticed a decline in gender parity in the tech industry. Can you talk about what that decline was, how it might've happened?

KAREN: Yeah. So first of all, Damien a question for you. Were you surprised when I said that?

DAMIEN: [chuckles] Well, no, not at all. I actually just today read about one of the earliest computers at NASA which is a woman, a Black woman, that the astronauts explicitly by name depended on, for example, Apollo 13. So I wanted to hear your story about what happened.

KAREN: Yeah. Okay, okay. I asked only because there are many people who, when I just drop that into the conversation, they ended up coming back to it minutes and minutes later or towards the end of any kind of interview. At any rate, what happened?

So I have theory and actually I gave a TEDx talk about this, exploring the theory. I won't do all 20 minutes of my TEDx talk, but when I decided to study computer science, I was a senior in high school trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life kind of thing, what I wanted to study in college. My father said to me, “Hey, well, Karen, you're really good at math and you enjoy making things. You're always crafting and sewing and knitting, and you like solving problems. I've just been reading this article about this new field called computer science which seems like it would combine all the things you're good at and maybe you would enjoy making software and by the way, this is what people earn in this field.” [chuckles]

I have to admit, I grew up in a very humble financial household and so, I wanted to make sure I could support myself and earn a living when I graduated from college. So I'm like, “Okay, I'll study computer science. I'll learn how to build software.” That was 1981, the year I graduated from high school.

Now get this, I had never touched a computer. Okay, we didn't have – I mean, 1981 was the year the IBM PC was released into the field. The Macintosh did not come out until 1984. So in my home, we did not have computers in the part-time jobs I had after school and summers, no one had computers and certainly, we didn't not have computers in my high school where I could learn to code where it would probably would have been in basic.

This was a situation for many people across the United States. Going to college in the early 80s, if you wanted to study computer science, many people were coming with no experience. Maybe a little more than me. Maybe they had taken that basic class, but very little experience. It was almost like a level playing field at that point and we were encouraged to pursue this.

My graduating class from college, I went back through my yearbook not too long ago to count, there were 38% of the computer science degrees went to women in my class and that statistic 38% is very similar to what was happening across the whole United States. According to the Department of Education, the year 1985, when I graduated from college, 37% of all computer science and information science degrees went to women. So that was pretty good.

Now, fast forward 20, 25 years and that number dropped to a low of about 17%, I think and the overall number also went down of how many women were getting these degrees. And now, you don't have to have a computer science degree to work in tech necessarily, but in many tech environments and tech companies, the engineers are incredibly valued and are very visible and are paid very well. They are an incredibly important part of any tech company.

So my point is that there used to be a lot more women computer scientists and it did drop. I do think it's this level playing field that I started at, but the decline happened because I believe a society, we as a society, started thinking and encouraging our young boys to get involved with robotics, with tinkering, with coding classes, with summer camps where you might learn to do coding or programming robotics.

We encouraged our young boys more than our young girls and over time, that meant that a girl, if she wanted to go to the summer coding camp in her neighborhood, would show up and see only boys there, or see only a very small number of girls and be like, “Well, maybe this isn't for me.” Or coding assignments in colleges that were much more aligned with masculine interests and more feminine interests. Things that might be more – oh, I don't even really want to get into stereotypes. I don't even want to go there, but things that would be more appealing to an 18-year-old boy than an 18-year-old girl who just have different interests and just became self-fulfilling.

What we're seeing now though, is that graph is moving in the right direction. The numbers are inching upwards because there's been so much focus across the United States – and hopefully, around the world, but across the United States, in terms of gender diversity is important in this field and we should be welcoming of all and we're making changes to all of these programs and encouraging our young girls to study this field, get involved with STEM, and pursue it when they get to college and beyond.

DAMIEN: Yeah, you avoided giving an example so I'll give one that you reminded me of, which is for a very long time, the standard, the most common image used as an example of compression algorithms was that of a undressed woman and so, we can –

KAREN: Lena. Her name is Lena. Yes, actually I know her name. She was someone when they were working on an image compression algorithm like, “We need a picture,” and someone just grabbed the Playboy magazine from their cube, took the centerfold out, and used that.

REIN: You do.

[laughter]

Or at least as you did. The effect here is really interesting and also, really, it makes me very sad, which is that computing became seen as a prestige job. Once men realized that there was something to this, it requires expertise, they decided that they were going to do it and when they did—there's research that shows this both ways. When men enter a field, it raises the prestige and increases wages. When women enter a field, it lowers the prestige and decreases wages.

KAREN: Yeah, that's a problem, but real. I don't mean to at all disagree. It's a real problem.

ARTY: Just curious. Do we reinforce these things by saying them as a statement like that with a period versus bringing it up as a question?

REIN: Yeah.

ARTY: I'm just wondering.

REIN: What I’m trying to do is describe and not be normative, but I think that's a valid point.

ARTY: In my life coaching thing recently, we were talking about statements with periods and it's really easy to define the world of expectations of ourselves, define the world of expectations of everyone else for all time and all affinity as a statement with a period. As we go and do this, it creates these reinforcing effects, and then we go and do things and enact behaviors that reinforce those belief systems.

So we're sitting here talking about biases and how all of this stuff gets baked in her brain and one of the ways that it gets baked into her brain is by making statements of “Well, this is how it is period.” I realize you’re making a statement of something to challenge, but I think it's something that we really need to think about that if we want to change the status quo, it starts with reimagining it different. Coming up with a different statement, with a period even as a starting point, and then letting that lead to questions of how do we go and manifest this new reality that is more what we want.

KAREN: Can I embarrass myself? [laughs]

ARTY: Yes, of course.

KAREN: Okay, right.

[laughter]

KAREN: So I have two children. That's not embarrassing. They're in their early 20s now. That's not embarrassing. I had read, when they were younger, that there is research done that said that if you tell a girl just before she takes a math test, that girls aren't good at math, that her score will actually go down.

This is the embarrassing thing. So before dropping my daughter off for like her PSATs and SAT exams, I just said, “Remember, girls are really good at math and you are really good at math, too.” [chuckles] So maybe already changing the narrative by using different periods statements, too [laughs] making up alternate realities.

Oh gosh, I can't believe I just shared that story. My daughter would probably be so embarrassed.

DAMIEN: That’s a modern story and I don't think there's anything to be embarrassed about there and I think Arty brings up an amazing and very valuable points. The suggestion I want to make in response to that is, because what Rein was describing is a fact and I’m sure it's important to know about and to know that it happened—and I'm already using that language now: it happened.

In the past when men went into a field, it became more prestigious and higher paid. When women into a field, it became less prestigious and higher paid. And that's what has happened in the past and by stating it that way, now we can go, “Okay, what are we going to do now?”

REIN: There's a thing I learned from Virginia Satir that I probably should have done here, which is when you find one of those ends with a period sentences Arty, like you're talking about, you add until now at the end. So when women enter a male dominated fields, wages go down until now.

ARTY: And now they go up. Now they go up because everyone wants women because they're so awesome. Women bring so much awesomeness to the table so wages go up. The more women you have, the better the wages.

CHANTÉ: Period.

KAREN: Yeah.

[laughter]

Yeah, and—yes, and—the other kind of way to look at this is, I've been doing a lot of work with how might we statements and so the question is, how might we change the trajectory? How might we imagine the future of work where all people and all identities are welcome and we are building towards a future that is literally more equitable and more accessible for all? So how might we do that? We can maybe answer that question today, or we can invite folks who are going to listen in to weigh in when we post this online and talk to us on Twitter.

ARTY: I love that, though. I mean, I think if we really want to change the status quo, part of that is realizing that we're the ones who make it. We're the ones that create our reality and our culture is just a manifest of all these beliefs and things that are in our head emerging from all of us. If we realize that we're actually the ones that are in control of that, that we're the ones that are manifesting that, then we can create any type of world that we want.

So what does that vision look like? Let's go up to the whiteboard and create and dream up the type of world that we want, the type of vision that we want, the type of company we want, the type of culture we want. Write those things down, make them real to us, start selecting and doing things that reinforce those visions and beliefs. But we've got to start with believing. It's possible. We got to start with imagining that reality is already there, that we're already there, that we've already created it right now and now we're just living it.

KAREN: 100%.

REIN: Well, I think that is a great sentiment to end our episode on. We should do reflections and thanks to Arty, I already have one. So I can go first, if anyone else wants to?

CHANTÉ: Take it away.

REIN: So my reflection and Arty, you really sort of brought this home for me with the last thing you said, is that – Karen, you said that your superpower is your ability to simplify things and I would offer that you have another one, which is your ability to translate ideals, values, intentions into actions. There's a word for that and the word is practice. So what I think we all need to be thinking about is how to get better at practicing.

KAREN: Thank you for that, Rein. In fact, I wrote it down because I clearly have to go look it up in the dictionary afterwards and become more familiar. So thank you. I learn something new every day and I've just learned a new vocabulary word and I'm honored. I don't even know what – I do know what it means based on how you used it just then, but I'm honored by your thoughts and your reflections to me. Thank you.

DAMIEN: Yeah, I'll build on that because I learned so much in this conversation today and I'm so glad we had it. Specifically regarding very practical things that framing with the one sheet of how bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens and what Arty said about our use of language.

I'm a certified hypnotist and NLP practitioner and so, these are the things that I've known, but hadn't applied. So just again, being reminded of them and being able to take that and go, “Okay, let me use these things in the service of this goal of being a better ally” to use your turn of phrase. So thank you. Thank you all.

CHANTÉ: Yeah, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that we didn't record it properly the first time so I could selfishly join this conversation. Yes! I love it when things work out that way.

I really appreciated the fact that we talked about so many of the practical things, just what Damien mentioned here. We kind of reiterated some things I already knew, but could have an excuse to tweet out later [laughs] and that is just that we're all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Many of us, Karen, to your point of your story, that we don't start off doing this work, but the journey and the problem is big enough for all of us to take a part in it. What I love about where we are these days is that the world offers us so many resources, tools, and networks that we have a decision to make when we were talking about this lifestyle choice.

So today, you might be the ally. Tomorrow, you might be the bridge. The next day, you might be the person who simply passes on somebody's resume, but all of those parts matter when we're trying to imagine a different future, especially around technology. I'm really appreciative of the conversation and I'm looking forward to continuing it. Thank you.

REIN: You're welcome, Chanté.

[laughter]

ARTY: Yeah, we screwed this up just for you.

CHANTÉ: [laughs] Yay!

ARTY: So my reflection, I wanted to bring up the thing that I actually mentioned last time as my reflection, because I feel like it's really important. One of the simple things that we can do to make a huge difference is just expanding our network and there's so much limitation that's caused by these homogenous networks we have and staying within our circle and friends. Even though, it takes some effort to get outside of our comfort zone and meet new people and to build relationships with people we might not otherwise. The benefits that happen because of all those new relationship, connections are huge and it's totally worth it.

I love your simple trick at the conference thing of go find the person who's in the corner by themselves. Talk to them. They're the easy ones, right? I love that. Super easy, but I think change is one of those things that takes some courage on all of our parts to take one little bitty step that can make a big difference.

KAREN: Yeah. Arty, there's a saying that says, “When you step outside your comfort zone, that's where the magic happens.” So I think you're already a believer of that and I hope that it plays out in real life for you.

I'll just say to wrap up my reflection, I absolutely loved this conversation. I am glad we got to do it again, too. It's it was very different than the first time and I think it was absolutely wonderful.

So thank you everyone and if I think about, I learned something from all of you. The one that I think I will really be putting into practice is a combination of Arty and Rein, what you've shared in terms of if there is a period statement, how to turn that to more of a question, or to add to it to say until now. I want to try that out. I want to use that as I am speaking to people about allyship and navigating this on writing my newsletter. I'm not sure where, but it is something I want to try out and see how it – I'm sure it's going to be effective and I appreciate that. Thank you.

ARTY: Well, thank you for joining us on the show, Karen. This was a wonderful conversation.

KAREN: Absolute pleasure. Thank you, everyone!

Special Guest: Karen Catlin.

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02:15 - David’s Superpower: Being Confused

11:56 - Daily Writing

15:47 - Learning to Be Better at Emotions

23:22 - Achievement and Joy as Aspirational Goals

Reflections:

Jessica: Trying not knowing yourself.

Rein: You shouldn’t be the owner of all your desires. Instead, you should measure your life by how well you follow the intentions that arise out of your values.

Jacob: Thinking of yourself as the sum of all of the habits you maintain or don’t.

David: The [Homeostasis vs Homeorhesis](https://wikidiff.com/homeostasis/homeorhesis#:~:text=is%20that%20homeostasis%20is%20(physiology,to%20a%20trajectory%2C%20as%20opposed) distinction, and cleaning a home as an ongoing process.

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Transcript:

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JACOB: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 223. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I'm joined with my co-host, Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Thanks, Jacob and I'm here with my friend and also stranger because we haven't done this together in months, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Thank you, Rein! And Iím really excited today because our guest is David MacIver. Twitter handle, @DRMacIver.

David MacIver is best known as the developer of Hypothesis, the property-based testing library for Python, and is currently doing a Ph.D. based on some of that work. But he also writes extensively about emotions, life, and society and sometimes coaches people on an eclectic mix of software development, intellectual, and emotional skills. As you can probably tell, David hasn't entirely decided what he wants to do when he grows u and that's the best because if you had decided well, then so few possibilities would be open.

David, hello!

DAVID: Hi, Jessica! Great to be here.

JESSICA: All right. I'm going to ask the obligatory question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

DAVID: So as you saw me complaining about on Twitter, this question doesn't translate very well outside of the United States.

JESSICA: Yeah, which is fascinating for me.

DAVID: I'm a bit too British to say nice things about myself without sounding like I'm being self-deprecating.

JESSICA: Self-depreciating it is!

DAVID: [laughs] So I thought about this one for a while and I decided that the answer is that I'm really good at being confused and in particular, I have a much more productive response to being confused than it seems like most people do because basically, the world is super confusing and I think I never know what's going on, but then I notice that I know what's going on and I look at it and I'm just like, ìHmm, this is weird, right?î

And then I read a book about it, or I sort of poke at it a bit and then I'm not less confused, but I'm less confused about that like, one little facet of the world and have found ten new things to be confused about.

[laughter]

JESSICA: Nice.

DAVID: Usually, I can then turn this into being slightly better at the thing I was previously confused about, or writing about it and making everyone else differently confused than they started with.

JESSICA: Definitely confused. That is a win. That's called learning.

DAVID: Yeah, exactly.

[laughter]

This is where a lot of the writing you were talking about comes from and essentially, about 2 years ago, I just started turning these skills less on software development and more just going like, ìLife, it doesn't make sense, right?î

[laughter]

And noticing a whole bunch of things, I needed to work on and then that a lot of these were shared common problems. So I am, if anything, far more confused about all of it than I was 2 years ago, but I'm less confused about the things I was confused about that and seem to be gradually becoming a more functional human being as a result of the process. So yay, confusion.

JESSICA: That superpower, the productive response to confusion, ties in with your reaction to the superpower question in general, which is as Americans, we're supposed to be ñ we want to have power. We want to be special. We want to be unique. We want to make our unique contribution to the world! And as part of that, we're not comfortable being confused because we need to know things! We need to be smart! We need to convey strength and competence and be the best! I hate the superlatives.

[laughter]

I hate the implied competition there, but instead, we could open our hearts to our own confusion and embrace that. Be comfortable being uncomfortable.

DAVID: One of the things that often comes up for me is it's a thing that I think is slightly intentioned with this American tendency youíre pointing at, which is that I kind of want to be the best, but I don't really want to be better than other people. I just want to be better than I am now.

I wrote a post a while ago about neuromas of excellence like, what would a community look like, which helped everyone be the best version of themselves and one of the top lists was basically that everyone has to be comfortable with not being good at things, but another is just that you have to not want to be better to the other people. You just need want to be better.

Again, this is where a lot of the writing comes from. I've just gone, ìWell, this was helpful to me. It's probably helpful to other people.î That's not as sense of wanting to change the world and wanting to put my own stamp on things and it does require a certain amount to self-importance to go, ìYes, my writing is important and other people will like to read it,î but then other people like to read it so, that's fine and if they don't, that's fine, too.

JESSICA: Well, you didn't make anyone read it, but you did start a newsletter and let people read it.

JACOB: Is this weird thinking reflect a journey that you took in your life? Because I think about my company and my team and how incredibly generous everybody is and even still, I just find it's natural to compare myself to everyone else and needing to not be on the bottom. Part of me wonders if that's just like a natural human tendency, but just because it's natural doesn't make it so.

JESSICA: Way natural American.

JACOB: Yeah, basically I'm asking how do I stop doing that?

[laughter]

DAVID: It's definitely not something I've always been perfectly good at. But I think the thing that helped me figure out how to do this was essentially being simultaneously at the bottom of the social rung, but also super arrogant.

So it's your classic nerd kit thing, right? It's completely failing at people, but also going, ìBut I'm better than all of you because I'm smart,î and then essentially, gradually having the rough edges filed off the second part and realizing how much I had to learn off the first part.

I think sometimes my attitude is due to a lot of this is basically, to imagine I was a time traveler and basically going back in time and telling little David all the things that it was really frustrating that nobody could explain to me and I sadly haven't yet managed to perfect my time machine, but I can still pay it forward.

If nobody was able to explain this to me and I'm able to explain it to other people, then surely, the world is a better place with me freely handing out this information. I don't think it's possible, or even entirely desirable to completely eliminate the comparing yourself to others and in fact, I'd go as far as to say, comparing yourself to others is good, but I think theÖ

JESSICA: Itís how do we have a productive response to compare ourselves to others?

DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. There's a great section in The Inner Game of Tennis, which is a book that I have very mixed feelings about, but it has some great bits where he talks about competition.

If you think of a mountain climber, a mountain climber is basically pitting themselves against the mountain, right? They're trying to climb the mountain because it is hard and you could absolutely take a helicopter to the top of the mountain, but that wouldn't be the point. It's you're improving yourself by trying a hard thing. I mean, you're improving yourself in the sense that you're getting better at climbing mountains. You might not be improving yourself in any sort of fully generalizable way.

JESSICA: Okay.

[laughter]

DAVID: When you are playing tennisóbecause this is a book about tennisóyou are engaged in competition with each other and you're each trying to be better than the other. In this context, essentially, what you are doing is you are being the mountain for each other. So you are creating the obstacles that the other people overcome and improve themselves that way and in doing this, you're not just being a dick about it. You're not doing this in order to crush them. You're doing this in order to provide them with the challenge that lets them grow.

When you think about it this way, other people being better than you is great because there's this mountain there and you can climb it and by climbing the mountain, you can improve yourself. The thing that stops everyone becoming great is feeling threatened by the being better rather than treating it as an opportunity for learning.

JESSICA: Yeah, trying to dynamite the mountain instead of climbing it. Whereas, when you are the mountain for someone else, you can also provide them footholds.

Rein, do you have an example of this?

REIN: I sure do, Jess. Thanks for asking. So I was just [laughs] thinking while you were talking about this, about the speed running and speed running communities. Because speed running is about testing yourself against a video game, which in this case, serves the purpose of the mountain, but it's also about competing against other speed runners. If it was purely competitive, you wouldn't see the behaviors, the reciprocity in the communities like sharing speed running strats, being really happy when other people break your record.

I think it's really interesting that that community is both competitive, but there's also a lot of reciprocity, a lot of sharing.

JACOB: And it's like the way the science community should work. It's like, ìOh, you made this new discovery because of this discovery I shared with you and now I'm proud that my discovery is this foundation for all these other little things that now people can be by themselves in 10 seconds instead of 30.î

JESSICA: Yeah. Give other people a head start on the confusion you've already had so that they can start resolving new confusions.

DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely one of my hopes with all of this writing is to encourage other people to do it themselves.

Earlier this year, I was getting people very into daily writing practices and just trying to get people to write as much as possible. I now think that was slightly a mistake because I think daily writing is a great thing to do for about a month and then it just gets too much. So I will probably see if I can figure out other ways of encouraging people to notice their confusion, as you say, and share what they've learned from edge. But sadly, can't quite get into do it daily.

JESSICA: This morningís newsletter you talked about. Okay, okay, I can do daily writing, but now I want to get better at writing. I've got to go do something I'm worse at.

DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think daily writing is still a really good transitional stage for most people. To give them more context for this newsletter for people listening. Basically, most of my writing to date, I just write in a 1- or 2-hour sitting from start to finish. I don't really edit it. I just click publish and I've gotten very good at writing like that. I think that most people are ñ I mean, sometimes it's a bit obvious that I haven't edited it because they're obvious typos and the like. But by and large, I think it is a reasonably high standard of writing and I'm not embarrassed to be putting it out in that quality, but the fact that I'm not editing is just starting to be sort of the limiter on growth for me. It's never going to really get better than it currently is. It's certainly not going to allow me to tackle larger projects that I can currently tackle without that editing skill.

JESSICA: [laughs] I just pictured you trying to sit down and write a book in one session.

[laughter]

And then you'd be tired.

DAVID: Yeah. I've tried to doing that with papers even and it doesn't really work. I mean, I do edit papers, but Iím very visibly really bad at editing papers and it's one of my weaknesses as a academic is that I still haven't really got the hang of paper writing.

JESSICA: Do you edit other people's papers?

DAVID: I don't edit other people's papers, but I provide feedback on other people's writing and say, ìThis is what worked for me. This is what didn't work for me. Here are some typos you made.î It's not reading as providing good feedback on things, that is the difficult part of editing for me. It is much more ñ honestly, it's an emotional problem more than anything else. It's not really that I'm bad at editing at a technical level. I'm okay at editing at a technical level. I just hate doing it. [laughs]

JESSICA: That is most problems we have, right?

DAVID: Yeah.

JESSICA: In the end, itís an emotional problem.

DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is definitely one of the interesting things I've been figuring out in my last 2 years of working on learning more about emotions and the various skills around them is just going, ìOh, right. It's not this abstract thing where you are learning to be better at emotions and then nothing will change in your life because you're just going to be happier about everything.î I mean, some people do approach it that way, but for me, it's very much been, ìOh, I'm learning to be good at emotions because this really concrete problem that I don't understand, it turns out that that's just feelings.î

[laughter]

It's like, for example, the literature on how to have a clean home, turns out that's mostly anxiety management and guilt management. It's like fundamentally cleaning your home is not a hard problem. Not procrastinating on cleaning your home is a hard problem. Not feeling intensely guilty and aversive about the dirty dishes in the sink and is putting them off for a week. I don't do that. But just as a hypothetical example.

[laughter]

I mean, not a hypothetical example, I think a specific example that comes from the book, Unfuck Your Habitat, which is a great example of essentially, it's a book that's about it contains tips, like fill the spray bottle with water and white vinegar and also, tips about how to manage your time and how to deal with the fact that you're mostly not cleaning because of shame, that sort of thing. Writing books are another great example where 80% about managing the feelings associated with writing; it turns out practical problems pretty much all come down to emotionsóat least practical life problems.

REIN: Sorry, I was just buying Unfuck Your Habitat real quick.

[laughter]

DAVID: It's a good book. I recommend it.

JESSICA: Our internal like emotional habitat and our external habitat are very linked. You said something earlier about learning to be at emotions is not just you're magically happier at other things in your life change.

DAVID: Yes. I mean, I think there are a couple of ways in which it manifests. One of them is just that emotions often are the internal force that maintains our life habits. It's you live in a particular way because moving outside of those trained habits is scary or aversive in some way.

Like the cleaning example of how, if your home is a mess, it's not necessarily because you don't know how to make your home not a mess. Although, cleaning is a much harder skill than most people treat it as speaking as someone who is bad at the practical skills of cleaning, as well as the emotional side of cleaning. But primarily, if it were just a matter of scale, you could just do it and get better at it, right? The thing that is holding you in place is the emotional reaction to the idea of changing your habits.

So the specific reason why I started on all of this process was essentially relationship stuff. I'd started a new major relationship. My previous one hadn't gone so well for reasons that were somewhere between emotional and communication issues, for the same reason basically every relationship doesn't go so well, if it doesn't go so ñ Oh, that's not quite true. Like there are actual ñ

JESSICA: Some people have actual problems. [chuckles] But these things are. I mean, our emotions really, as sometimes we treat them as if they're flaws. As if our emotions are getting in our way is some sort of judgment about us as not being good people, but no, it just makes us people.

DAVID: For sure.

JESSICA: So you started on this journey because of the external motivation of helping someone you're in a relationship with, because it's really hard to do these things just for ourselves.

DAVID: It is incredibly hard to do things just for ourselves. I guess, that is exactly an example of this problem, right? It's that there is a particular habit of life that I was in and what I needed to break out of that habit of life was the skills for dealing with it and then figuring out these emotional reactions. But unfortunately, the thing that the habits were maintaining, it was me not having the skills and so having the external prompts of a problem that was in the world rather than in my life, as it was, was what was needed to essentially kick me out of that.

Fortunately, it turns out that my standard approach of reading a thousand books now was one that worked for me, in this case. I probably haven't read a thousand books on this, but that certainly worked.

JESSICA: It wouldnít surprise me. [laughs]

DAVID: I read fewer books than people think I do. I may well have read more than a hundred books about emotions and therapy and the like. But I probably haven't, unless I cast that brush really broadly, because I mean, everything's a book about emotions and therapy, if you look at your right.

REIN: Have you read any books by average Virginia Satir?

[laughter]

DAVID: I don't know who that is, I'm afraid.

JACOB: Drink!

REIN: Excellent! Excellent news.

[laughter]

JESSICA: Itís about Virginia Satir, right?

REIN: Virginia was a family therapist who wrote a lot about processing emotions and I have been a huge fan of her work and it's made a huge difference in my life and my career. So I highly recommend it.

DAVID: Okay. I will definitely hear recommendations on books. What's the book title, or what's your favorite book title by?

REIN: I think I would start with The Satir Model, which is S-A-T-I-R M-O-D-E-L. The Satir Model, which is about her family therapy model.

JESSICA: Chances are good, you've read books based on her work. I was reading Gerry Weinberg's Quality Software Management: Volume Two the other day, which is entirely based on The Satir Model.

REIN: Yeah. He was a student of hers. One of the things that she likes to say is that the problem is never the problem, how we cope is the problem.

JESSICA: Can we have a productive response to the problem?

DAVID: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. I think often, the problem is also the problem.

[laughter]

JESSICA: It's often self-sustaining like the habits you're talking about. Our life habits form a self-sustaining system and then it took that external stimulus. It's not like an external stimulus somehow kicked you in the butt and changed you, it let you change yourself.

DAVID: Yes, absolutely. I guess what I mean is ñ so let's continue with the cleaning example. The problem is that your flat is messy and your flat is messy because of these life habits, because your emotional reactions to all these things. If you do the appropriate emotional work, you unblock yourself on shame and anxiety around a messy flat, and you look around and you've saw you've processed all these emotions. You fixed how you respond to the problem and it turns out your flat is still messy and you still have to clean it.

I think emotional reactions are what either ñ Iím making it sound like emotional reactions are all negative and I really don't mean that. I mean, that way is just ñ

JESSICA: Oh, right because once you've dealt with all that shame and the anxiety and stuff, and maybe you've picked up your flat some, and then you come in and you have groceries and you stop and you immediately put them away and you get a positive, emotional feeling from that as you're in the process of keeping your flat tidy. The emotions can reinforce a clean flat as well.

DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is something that has always been one of my goals more than it is what am I active?

JESSICA: No, I love this distinction that you're making here. Is it a goal or is it something I'm activelyÖ? The word goal is [inaudible].

DAVID: Yeah. So I think for me, one of the other problems, other than the relationships it starts, was me essentially realizing that my emotional experience, it wasn't bad. I mean, it wasn't great, but I wasn't actively miserable most of the time, but it also just didn't have very many positive features, which it turns out is also a form of depression. It's very easy to treat depression as just like you're incredibly sad all the time, but that doesn't have to what it can be like flatness is.

So I think very much from early on in my mind was that the getting better at emotions wasn't just about not being anxious. It was also about experiencing things like joy, it was about being happier and I think having this as sort of an aspirational goal is very, very motivating in terms of a lot of this work and in terms of a lot of trying to understand all of this, because I think I don't want to be miserableóit only gets you so far.

If you have a problem that you're trying to solve, and that turns out to be an emotional block, you have to actually wants to solve the problem. It's like, I think if you don't want to clean the flat, then it doesn't matter how much you sort of fix your anxiety around that. You're still just going to go, ìOkay. I'm no longer anxious about this messy flat. That's great,î and your flat is going to stay messy because you don't actually want it not to be and that's fine.

JESSICA: Itís just fine, yeah. Who cares? Especially now.

DAVID: Unless it becomes a health hazard, but yeah.

[laughter]

DAVID: Certainly like thereís ñ

JESSICA: If you're affecting the neighboring flats with your roaches, thatís fine.

DAVID: [laughs] Yeah.

JESSICA: So you were talking about joy as an aspirational goal, but it's not the kind of goal where you check the box at the end of the year and declare yourself worthy of a 2% raise.

DAVID: [laughs] No, absolutely not and I think for all big goals, really, I find that I want to be very clichÈ and say, it's the journey, not the destination.

JESSICA: But it is! No, it totally is!

DAVID: Yeah.

JESSICA: See, the word goal really irks me because people often use it to mean something that you should actually reach. Like write every day per month, that's a goal that you find benefits from hitting, but feelings of joy are, as you said, aspirational. I call it a quest, personally. Some people call it a North Star. It is a direction that can help you make decisions that will move you in that direction, but if you ever get thereÖ No, that doesn't make sense. You wouldn't want to exist in a perpetual state of joy. That would also be flat. [laughs]

DAVID: No, absolutely. And I think even with big but achievable goals, it still is still quite helpful to treat them in this way. So for one, quite close to my heart right now, a goal of doing a Ph.D. I think you've got a 3-, 4-year long project in the States, I think it's more like 5 or 6 and if you treat the Ph.D. as it's pass/fail, like either you get the Ph.D. or those 3 or 4 years have been wasted, then that's not very motivating and also will result in, I think, worst quality results in work. Like the thing to do is ñ

JESSICA: Like anxiety, stress, and shame.

DAVID: Yeah. Yeah, very much so. [chuckles] So just thinking in terms of there's this big goal that you're trying to achieve of the Ph.D., but the goal doesn't just define a pass/fail; it defines a direction. Like if you get better at paper writing in order to get your Ph.D., then even if you don't get your Ph.D., you got better at paper writing and that's good, too.

JESSICA: Because the other outcome is the next version of you.

DAVID: Yes, exactly.

JESSICA: Itís about who does this aspirational goal prompt you to become?

REIN: This reminds me of the difference between homeostasis and homeorhesis. Homeostasis is about maintaining a state; homeorhesis is about maintaining a trajectory

DAVID: That makes sense. Yes, very much that distinction and also, one of the nice things about this focus on a trajectory is that even if a third of the way through the trajectory, you decide you don't want to maintain it anymore and actually you're fine where you are. This goal was a bad idea or you've got different priorities now, possibly because a global pandemic has arrived and has changed all of your priorities. Then you still come all that way. It's like the trajectory doesn't just disappear backwards in time because you're no longer going in that direction. You've still made all that progress. Youíve still got to drive some of the benefits from it.

JESSICA: Yeah. There's another thing that maybe it's an American thing, or maybe it's wider than that of if it doesn't last forever, then it was never real, or if you don't achieve the stated goal, then all your effort was wasted.

DAVID: Yeah. I don't think itís purely an American thing. It's hard to tell with how much American pop culture permeates everything and also, I shouldn't say that although I'm quite British, I am also half American. So Iím a weird third culture kid where my background doesn't quite make sense to anyone. But yeah, no, I very much feel that. This idea that permanence is required for importance and it's something that every time I sort of catch myself there, I'm just like, ìYeah, David, you're doing the thing again. Have you tried not doing the thing?î [chuckles] But it's hard. It's very internalized.

JESSICA: If you clean your flat and a week later, it's dirty again. Well, it was clean for a week. That's not nothing.

DAVID: Yeah. I do genuinely think that one of the emotions that people struggle with cleaning. Certainly, it is for me.

JESSICA: Oh, because it's a process. It is not a destination. Nothing is ever clean!

DAVID: Yeah.

JACOB: I think of myself sometimes as I want to be the kind of person that always has a clean home, as opposed to, I like it when my house is clean.

JESSICA: Yeah. Is it about you or is it about some real effect you want?

JACOB: Yeah. Is it about like the story that that I imagine I could project if I could project on Instagram because I'm taking pictures of my pristine house all the time, or is it just like, I like to look around and see things where they belong?

DAVID: Yeah. I'm curious, does this result in your home being clean?

JACOB: No, it doesnít and thatís sort of the issue that I'm just realizing is it's not actually a powerful motivator because it's just not possible trying to imagine that I could maintain homeostasis about it. It's not a possible goal and so yeah, it's not going to happen.

REIN: Yeah. The metaphor here is it changes motion, but it's always happening so it's more like the flow of time than motion through space.

JESSICA: Itís not motion, too.

REIN: Actually staying the same is very hard to do and very expensive.

DAVID: Absolutely.

JESSICA: No wonder it takes all of our feelings to help us achieve it.

[chuckles]

DAVID: So the reason I was asking by the way about whether this idea of being the sort of person who has a clean home is effective is that this ties in a little bit to what today's newsletter was about. There's this problem where when you have self-images that are constructed around being good at particular things, being bad at those things is very much, it's a shame trigger. It's essentially, you experienced the world as clashing with your conception of yourself and we get really good at not noticing those things.

You see this a lot with procrastination, for example, where you are putting off doing a thing because it does force you to confront this sort of conflict between identity and reality. I think sometimes, the way out of it is just to identify less with the things that we want to achieve in the world and just try and go, ìI'm doing this because I want to and if I didn't want to, that would be fine, too.î Essentially, becoming fine with both an outcome and failing to achieve that outcome is often the best way to achieve the outcome.

JESSICA: So practicing editing in order to practice editing, whether you achieve writing a book or not, whether you're good at it or not, and it does come back to the journey. If what you're doing is a means to an end and yet not in line with that end, it often backfires because the means are the end. In the end, they become it.

So having a clean house is stupid. That's not a thing. Picking up is a thing. That's something you can do and what I am picking up. True fact! [laughs] You don't have to worry about whether you can, are you doing it? All right then, you can! Whereas, having a clean house is not a thing.

DAVID: Very much. This kind of ties into the comments about books earlier, where you were talking about how many books I read, and one of the things that I think very much stops people from reading books is the idea that oh God, there are so many books to read, I'll never get through all of them.

JESSICA: If I started, I have to finish it.

DAVID: Oh, yeah. I mean, people definitely shouldn't do that; books are there to be abandoned if they're bad.

JESSICA: I read a lot of chapter ones.

DAVID: Yeah. I have a slightly bad habit of buying books speculatively because they seem good and as a result, I think my shelf of books that I'm probably never going to get around to read, but might do someday and might not and either is fine is probably like a hundred plus books now.

JESSICA: I love that shelf. I have big piles everywhere.

[laughs]

There's always something to read wherever I sit and most of it, I will never read, but it's beautiful.

DAVID: I'm currently in a very weird experience where I write, for possibly the first time in my life, I have more bookshelf space than books.

JESSICA: Huh, that's not a stable state.

DAVID: No, no. This will be fixed by the time I leave this flat. The piles will return.

JESSICA: You will maintain the trajectory.

DAVID: Yeah. [laughs] Because I'm just reading. I can read these as many books because I just sit down and read and at some point, I will finish a book or I will abandon the book and both are fine. But I think if you treat this as a goal where your goal is to read all the books, then that's not the thing and also, I think people go, ìMy goal is to read a hundred books a year,î or I don't know how normal people guesstimates are.

JESSICA: Itís like, is it really or itís their goal to learn something.

DAVID: Yeah, exactly.

JESSICA: And the means is reading books.

DAVID: Yeah. I think if one instead just goes, ìI like reading and it's useful so I'm going to read books,î you'll probably end up reading a lot more than setting some specific numerical goal. Also, you run into sort of Goodhart's law things where if your goal is to read a hundred books in a year, great buy the Mr. Men set. But wait, it's not a thing in ñ the Mr. Men are a series of kidsí books which tells ñ

JESSICA: With the big smiley face?

DAVID: Yeah. Exactly, that's the one.

[laughter]

You can read a hundred of those in a weekóI assume there are hundred Mr. Men books, I don't actually knowóand youíll probably learn something.

JESSICA: Then again, you might choose Dynamics in Action, never get through it, and then feel bad about it, and that would be pointless because you learned more from the introduction than you did from the Mr. Men series.

DAVID: I don't think I've even opened my copy of Dynamics in Action. I think you recommended on Twitter or something and I was just like, ìThat does sound interesting. I will speculatively buy this book.î

JESSICA: It's a hard book.

DAVID: Yeah. It's far from the hardest book on my shelves, but it's definitely in the top. I'm going to confidently say top 20, but it might be harder than that. I just haven't done a comparative analysis and I don't want to overpromise.

[laughter]

JESSICA: The point being read books because you want to know.

DAVID: Yeah.

JESSICA: Or sometimes because you want to have read them. That's the thing. There's a lot of things I may not want to pick up, but I do want to have picked up and I can use that to motivate me.

DAVID: Yeah, and even then, there are two versions of that and both are good, actually. I think one of them sounds bad. One version is you want to have read it because you want to understand the material in it and the other one is just, you want to be able to say that you have read it and thus, you ñ and probably for the status game and also, just sort of as a box ticking, like I think ñ

JESSICA: Oh, itís not completely wrong.

DAVID: No, it's not completely wrong.

JESSICA: You still get something out of it.

DAVID: Yeah.

JESSICA: On the other hand, if you want to read it because you want to be the kind of person who would read it. I don't know about that one.

DAVID: Yeah, I agree. I thinkÖ

JESSICA: Then again, life habits. Sometimes, if you want to be the kind of person who picks up and so you fake it long enough to form the habit, then you are.

DAVID: Yeah, absolutely and I read a book recentlyóof course, I didóby Agnes Callard called Aspiration, which I'm glad I read it. I cannot really recommend it to people who aren't philosophers, because there's a thing that often happens with reading analytic philosophy, where the author clearly has a keen insight into an important problem that you, as the reader, lack and the way they express that insight is through an entire bookís worth of slightly pedantic arguments with other analytic philosophers who have wrong opinions about the subjects.

JESSICA: Half of Dynamics in Action is like that.

DAVID: Yeah, I think it very complicated.

REIN: Was it written as a thesis?

DAVID: I don't think so. I'm not certain about that, but it might've been. It ended up being quite an influential book and I think she was mentioning that there's going to be a special issue of a journal coming out to recently about essentially, its impact and responses to it. But I think it's just genuinely that analytic philosophers had a lot of really wrong opinions about this subject.

So the relevance of this is the idea she introduces the book is that of a proleptic value where ñ

JESSICA: Proleptic, more words.

DAVID: Proleptic basically, I think originally comes from grammar and it means something that stands in place for another thing. A proleptic value is what you do when you're engaged in a process of aspiration, which is trying to acquire values that you don't currently have.

So she uses the example of a music student who wants to learn to appreciate the genre of music that they do not currently appreciate and they find a teacher who does appreciate that genre and they basically use their respect for that teacher as a proleptic value. They basically say, ìI don't currently value this genre of music, but I trust your judgment and I value your opinion and I will use your feedback and that respect for you as a value that stands in place of the future value of appreciating this genre of music that I hope to acquire.î

So I think this thing of reading a book because you want to be the sort of person who reads that kind of book can have a similar function where even though, you don't really wants to read the book, that process of aspiration gives you a hook into becoming the sort of person who does want to read the book.

JESSICA: That's like being the mountain for each other.

DAVID: Yeah.

JESSICA: In some ways. You're not going to get a view yet. You're only 10 feet off the ground, but meanwhile, just climb to climb because it's here.

DAVID: Yeah. I'm not necessarily very good at being the sort of person reading books for this reason. Partly because there are so many books, I have so many other reasons to read, but yeah.

JESSICA: Yeah, you're fine. You don't need more reasons to read a book.

DAVID: [laughs] But I think two books that I have read mostly to have read them rather than necessarily because I was having an amazing time and learning lots of things reading them are Seeing Like a State by James Scott, which it's a good book.

I don't think it's a bad book, but it is very much a history book that also has a big idea and there are like 70,000 blog posts about the big idea. So if you're going and wanting just the big idea, read one of the blog posts, but I'd seen a reference so many times and I was just like, ìYou know, this seems like a book that I should rate,î and my opinion is now basically that like, if you like history books and if you want lots of detail, then yeah, it's a great book to read. If you just want the big idea, donít.

JESSICA: Right, because other people have presented it more succinctly, which probably happens with your Aspiration book that you talked about.

DAVID: I would like it to happen with the Aspiration book. The Aspiration book is only a few years old.

JESSICA: You've written a ñ oh, okay, so it's too soon for that. So you'll write about it, if you haven't yet.

DAVID: Yeah, I havenít yet. Looking at it, it was published in 2018 and you have the paperback from 2019. So this is really cutting-edge philosophy to the degree that there is such a thing. [chuckles]

JESSICA: Yeah. Oh no, what do you mean? [inaudible].

REIN: Seeing Like a State is.

DAVID: Well, I've had this argument with philosopher friends where I was arguing that it was a thing and the philosopher friend was just like, ìIs it a thing, though?î Because the interesting thing about philosophy is just that it never goes out to date. People are sort of engaging with the entire historical cannon so the question is not does new philosophy get done? The question is more, I think is this less ñ?

JESSICA: This isnít really a cutting edge.

DAVID: Yeah, exactly.

JESSICA: Itís more kind of a gentle nuzzling.

DAVID: [laughs] Yeah. But also, is this more cutting edge than, I don't know, reading Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics? I don't know.

JESSICA: Philosophy [inaudible].

DAVID: Yeah, I personally think that there is cutting-edge and this is on it, but plenty of room for philosophical dialogue on that subject if you can sort of dig Socrates up and ask him about it.

[laughter]

Yeah, and speaking of philosophy, the other book that I have read essentially to have read it rather than because I was getting a lot out of it was Wittgensteinís Philosophical Investigations where I essentially read it in order to confirm to myself that I had already picked up enough Wittgenstein by osmosis that I didn't really need to read it, which largely true.

JACOB: This is the part of the show where we like to reflect on what we took from everything and just wrap things up a little bit.

JESSICA: I have one thing written down. We talked a bit about who you are and who you want to be as a person, and how sometimes what you want to do is in conflict with how you think of yourself. Like, when you think of yourself as good at something, it's hard to be bad at it, long enough to learn better.

It occurs to me that in our society, we're all about getting to know yourself and then expressing your true self, which is very much a homeostasis more than a homerhesis. But what have we tried not knowing yourself? What if we tried just like, I don't know who I am and then I can surprise myself and have more possibilities. That's my reflection.

REIN: All of this discussion about happiness and pleasure, and diversion and striving reminds me a lot of Buddhist philosophy, or what I should say is, it reminds me a lot of my very limited understanding of Buddhist philosophy. Specifically, this idea that you shouldn't judge your life by the outcome of your preferences; that you shouldn't identify yourself with your wants and cling to the outcome of things. You can acknowledge that these things have happened and you can avoid unpleasant things, but you shouldn't be the owner of all of your desires. Instead, what you should do is measure your life by how well you follow the intentions that arise out of your values.

JACOB: Yeah. Maybe to put another way, I'm starting to think maybe I could think of myself as the sum of all of the habits I maintain or don't, and try to think of outcome of those habits as what a lagging indicator, I guess, or as a secondary and think more of myself like, ìWell, what are the things that I find I am naturally doing and if I'm not, what can I do to just try to enforce it for myself that I'm going to do that more?î Or maybe I don't care.

DAVID: So I'm not finding myself with sort of a single cohesive summation of the conversation, but I've really enjoyed it and there's been a couple of things I'm going to take away from it and mull over a bit more.

I really liked the homeostasis versus homeorhesis distinction. I'd obviously heard the first word, but not the second word and so, I'm going to think about that a bit more. Sort of tying onto that, I very much liked Jessica's point of how a clean home isn't really a thing, you can only do cleaning and thinking much more in terms of the ongoing process than trying to think of it as a static goal that you are perfectly maintaining at all times. Slightly orthogonal in relation to that, but I'm also just going to look up Satir as an author and maybe read some of her books. [chuckles]

REIN: Yay!

DAVID: Because as we have established, always up for more reading. [laughs]

JACOB: That should wrap up our Episode 223. I'd like to thank David for joining us and weíll see you next time.

Special Guest: David MacIver.

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02:05 - Elyse’s Superpower: Fearlessness

19:41 - Auditor => IT Consultant

24:02 - Broken Interview Processes and Evaluating Human Performance

Reflections:

Damien: The ways that I can be fearless.

Arty: You only have one life. Don’t put limits on it.

Rein: Being intentional about making our networks more inclusive.

Elyse: There isn’t a pipeline problem in IT.

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ARTY: Hi, everyone! Welcome to Episode 222 of Greater Than Code. Iím Artemis Starr and Iím here with my fabulous co-host, Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Thanks, Arty. Iím here with my co-host, Damien Burke.

DAMIEN: Thanks, Rein and Iím here with our guest, Elyse Robinson.

Elyse Robinson has been described as fearless. After losing her mother to blood cancer, she left America to mourn her mother in Mexico and decided to stay. Going into her 5th year of residing in Mexico, she is the Founder of NewsIn.IT and runs a blog, podcast, and a YouTube channel about her life in Mexico under ElyseRobinson.com.

Before becoming the fearless person Elyse is now, she was an auditor that kept the public safe and before COVID hit, an IT consultant in Mexico helping people understand the intricacies of the cloud.

You can find Elyse splitting her time between America and Mexico when she gets tired of tacos and Spanish, or Chick-Fil-A and English.†

Welcome to the show, Elyse.

ELYSE: Thank you.

DAMIEN: So you know the first thing we do on this show is ask every one of our guests the same question. So for you, Elyse, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

ELYSE: Fearlessness! Not many people would leave everything they know to go move to another country and then stay for almost 5 years. [chuckles] I tell people that closed mouths donít get fed. You have to put yourself out there for opportunities or else, theyíll just pass you by so I donít have an issue doing that.

Moving to a whole another country, not knowing anyone. Wanting to mourn, not knowing the language and not knowing the culture. Oh, that'll make you fearless all the way around. [laughs]

DAMIEN: Or the opposite. It could have had the exact opposite effect.

ELYSE: That's true. That's true. Because I know many people that have moved to another country and then they came right back and so. [chuckles]

REIN: What do you think made the difference for you in terms of staying versus leaving?

ELYSE: Everything just fell into place. I tell people all the time that I have not had a bad experience in Mexico; everything has been like roses and pearls, I guess. People are friendly. The food is good. I mean, I had a time of my life,

About a month and a half in, I called my father up and told him I wasn't coming back home daddy and he was like, ìOkay.î [laughs]

DAMIEN: Well, for my own benefit. What part of Mexico are you in that's so wonderful?

ELYSE: Well, I first had went to Mexico City, but I'm in MÈrida now. MÈrida is about, I live about 15 minutes from the ocean, which I can't even go to no more because of COVID. [laughs] But it's always hot. It's never cold.

But I mean, before COVID hit, I was supposed to go back to Mexico City, but Mexico City is one of the largest cities on earth. So it just didn't make sense to go back and be all up underneath all those people with COVID. Mexico City also gets cold so I didn't want to be in the cold either dealing with COVID since it affects your lungs, but I definitely recommend Mexico City if you ever go. Don't go to Cancun, go to Mexico City. [laughs]

REIN: So you couldn't have known this at the time, but you picked an interesting decade and interesting 5 years to move to Mexico with everything that's happened since.

ELYSE: Yeah. I mean, I meet all kinds of people that say they want to leave because of well, at the time it was Trump or because of racism, sexism, all the isms, or their job sucks, whatever.

But my reason for moving was totally different. I literally had to quit my life to take care of my mother and help out my family. So I had nothing left and it just, for whatever reason, I think by that time Trump had got elected. Yeah, I knew by then because I left in November and it was what it was at the time because people literally think that people move because they just hate their country and that wasn't my reasoning, so. I thought I was going to come back, but I just didn't.

ARTY: So this fearlessness, where do you think it comes from?

ELYSE: I have no idea. I don't know. I feel like at least my motto is that you only have one life and so, why are you putting limits on it? I try not to put limits on my life and I want to experience all the things, all the things and fear always puts limits on things. If I am fearful, I try to put that to the side and do what Iíve got to do.

DAMIEN: So one of the things that would scare me in the situation like youíre in is working in another country and in another language. Did you speak Spanish before you moved to Mexico? Do you speak Spanish in your work as an IT consultant? How did that work?

ELYSE: No. I knew like three words. I knew uno, dos, tres. [laughs] See, no.

It was funny because I got lost my very first night in Mexico City. You hear all the things about Mexico; the cartel, they're going to sex traffic you and cut your body up, steal kidneys, all that stuff. So I didn't talk to anyone and I literally walked around in my neighborhood for like 2 hours before I finally broke down and was like, I'm going to talk to someone, [chuckles] or at least try. So everything worked out because somebody helped me find my place and everything like that.

But no, when I became an IT consultant, I focused on real estate companies because real estate companies, they're usually bilingual, the people that work there and so I didn't have to know that much Spanish, But I ended up moving to Guatemala to get my Spanish down because Spanish classes in Mexico are ridiculously expensive for whatever reason.

Mexico is one of those places where if you don't know Spanish, they will find someone that knows enough English to help you. [laughs] So for the longest, I never even knew Spanish. I never knew because I didn't have to know it.

REIN: I've had this question on my mind, but it's kind of heavy so if you don't want to talk about it, that's totally fine.

ELYSE: Okay.

REIN: But what is it like for a Black American, a Black woman to leave America and to go to a country that doesn't have a history of slavery? If thatís comparable.

ELYSE: Uh, it actually does have a history of slavery.

REIN: Does it? Oh.

ELYSE: Yeah. There's this Black Mexicans that look just like me. So they do have a history of it, but they might have been the firstódon't quote me on that. They might have been the first to eliminate it, though but all of Central America, all of South America, they had it. Of course, America, Canada,

But living in Mexico as a Black American woman. Like I said, I haven't had any bad experiences. I know of other people that have, but they live in small towns. I have not lived in a small town. So small town minds, small town behavior. Not to stereotype, but that stereotype is there for a reason. So they think these things and they're just not true, but it's been wonderful. I have no complaints.

REIN: Yeah. I feel like I just put my foot in my mouth. I want to just mention that I'm aware of the history of colonialism in Latin America. I didn't mean to erase that. So I would like to apologize for doing that.

ELYSE: No, no. There's plenty. It's in Oaxaca area and Veracruz area is where the Black Mexicans live and a lot of them are just very dark skin and they have the Mexican features, but then there are some that look like me and my Auntie and my Uncle and everybody else. But yes, Mexico does have a history of slavery. Yes, they do.

REIN: I guess, my question is, is the impact today different? You mentioned that you haven't encountered as much racism. I guess, what I'm asking about is more of the structural conditions.

ELYSE: That does exist. I think it comes more so into play because I am an American and so, they're more so curious about that, but it also doesn't come into play because a lot of times people don't even think I'm an American. They might think, since I'm closer to Belize, depending on how good my Spanish is for the day, I'm Cuban. If my Spanish is not that good, then I'm Belizean. So it's a strange dynamic.

More so in Cancun area, they would automatically know that I'm American because Americans come through all the time, but in smaller areas, they're like, ìYou're Haitian,î ìYou're Jamaican,î because there's a lot of them there and unfortunately, they have a stereotype that we're poor. So it's a very interesting dynamic.

But when I first moved to Mexico City, one of the first people that I had run into when I got lost was a Haitian guy and so, Iím asking him about like, should I live here, should I stay, things like that. He was born in New Mexico and so he doesn't know anything else like I do, but he said that he loved it. One of the first people I met was a Black person so it kind of put me at ease more so, especially when you hear all these things about Mexico.

DAMIEN: Then not being in America for the Trump administration.

[laughter]

How did you feel about that?

ELYSE: Well, I actually came back very often. My father and my sister was getting tired of me because I would come back like every two months or so. So I came back very, very often and stayed probably like a month or so at a time.

I didn't work in America, of course and I didn't technically live here and funny enough, I'm back in the States now [laughs] for the holidays and I will be here until April because my sister is an essential healthcare worker and so, she took a travel contract. So I'm here, but I don't know. I guess, more so Mexicans wanted to know why Trump was the way that he was. So yeah, in the beginning I got a lot of flak about Trump and how crazy he was, but I definitely was in the States during Trump time a lot, I was.

REIN: You moved to Mexico, sort of, you just had to drop everything and move to Mexico and what was it like trying to pick things back up once you got there?

ELYSE: I mean, I don't know. I guess, I tell people all the time I live in a dual existence because in my house, I'm full English, but when I step out, I'm in full Spanish and it can be difficult to switch. When I come back home, I'm still saying, ìhola,î ìbuenos dios,î ìsi,î ìgraciasî and then I don't know, when I come back, though it's like an instant turn on. I don't know. It's pretty instant.

The only problem comes into play when I come backóhome, home is what I call itóbut that's really the only issues that I have is when I come back. Because if you're going months speaking another language and then you're only here for like a month or so, it's really different. But yeah, the dual existence gets difficult sometimes because I still do US things and I still live like an American and it gets to be a lot, a lot. [laughs]

REIN: Thereís like a whole new level of code switching now where it's not just different in English.

Do you have to code switch in Spanish, too? Like, are there different situations where you speak Spanish differently?

ELYSE: Oh, yeah. No, they think I'm a child a lot of times because I sound like a kid, I guess. [laughs] They think I'm a child! I went somewhere at one time and they were like, ìAre your parents going to come sign the papers?î I'm like, ìIím like over 30!î

[laughter]

So I think that kind of plays into it. I think I sound like a child and then I'm also skinny and Mexicans are not known to be skinny and I really look like a child when I cut all my hair off because sometimes, I'll go totally bald. So they probably think I'm some little African child or something. I don't know. I donít know. [laughs] But I get it a lot. I get a lot that I'm a child. They were giving me discounts on the bus and I'm like, ìWhy are they giving me discounts on the bus?î

[laughter]

They think I'm a child! So I don't know. I don't know, it's weird. [laughs]

DAMIEN: I also speak Spanish at the level of a small child.

[laughter]

So I can see that happening to me.

ELYSE: No, my voice sounds like a child too, though because when you learn another language, you don't sound the same when you speak your first language. Because I'm a part of a Black language group and I asked in the group, I'm like, ìHow does your voice down when you speak your other language?î and everybody's laughing because they don't sound the same. So I think I sound like a child when I talk. [laughs]

DAMIEN: Yeah. I know from watching Dora the Explorer, but I then start talking like Dora and that's not how I normally sound. [laughs]

ELYSE: Right, right, right. Well, yeah, itís very, very different.

ARTY: I was wondering what kind of stuff you talk about on your podcast and blog?

ELYSE: Ha! Whatever I feel like. Well, of course, recently I have been talking about COVID cause COVID has hit to Mexico very, very hard.

At one point, Mexico was number three on the list with the deaths and lastly, people are just ñ well, they're still coming, but people were steadily coming in the middle of the freaking pandemic and I'm just like, Iím oh my gosh, literally thousands of people were dying a day and people were like, ìI'm coming to Mexico because Mexico is like the only country in the whole wide world that's open!î So I'm like, ìWell you can catch the COVIDî [laughs] because I mean, if it was pretty bad in my little small town, I don't even want to know what it was like or is like in Cancun and Mexico City and the bigger citiesóPuerto Vallarta.

When I'm home, I don't go anywhere. I mean, I go to the bank because I still have to get my rent out because they're behind and I go to the spa because that keeps me sane. But other than that, I don't go anywhere.

ARTY: So like food wise, do you do groceries or what does your just day-to-day situation look like? What does a day in the life in Mexico like?

ELYSE: The food? Uh. Where I am now, I don't enjoy the food. It's one of the main reasons I need to get back to Mexico City is because it's a large city, they have everything you can think of. But big city life, this is one of the reasons why I love Mexico City so much is because I can live like an American and then I also don't have to live like in an American if I don't want to.

It was funny because when my sister and my nephew came to visit me, they were like, ìNo wonder you don't want to come back. You have all the American eats and you can do all the American things.î I mean, Mexico City has Six Flags. Mexico City has Cheesecake Factory, Red LobsteróRed Lobster is one of my favorites. I can just get all my American eats and be perfectly fine. That's why I say when I come back home, I get Chick-fil-A because we don't have Chick-Filet but yeah, lots of tacos.

But where I live at now, it's really weird because it's not real Mexico. I don't even consider it to be real Mexico because it's really heavy European dominance. So they have a lot of Italian restaurants and like steakhouses and stuff, it's really weird. I don't know.

REIN: Weird. In America, we don't really have the places where you just don't have a local cuisine so that's just the stuff that you eat, but I guess, in Mexico I would expect to go eat Mexican food a lot.

ELYSE: And I do, I do, but I mean, I'm still an American. We have the variety that other countries do not have and so, I still like my Indian, I still like my Thai, I still like my Vietnamese and that's to the point where I really want to come home is when I get tired of eating the same things all the time. [laughs]

But MÈrida is a weird city. I don't know. I don't even consider it to be real Mexico and honestly, if it was the first place that I moved to [laughs] because MÈrida is really big with especially the older expats because it's hot. It never gets cold. It's on the beach. So there's a lot of older expats that want to live there and come live there and so, I guess, maybe they might cater to them, but it's really an odd place. Like I've asked Mexicans, I'm like, ìWhere do you go to get tacos?î and they were like, ìWe don't do tacos, tacos will give you the runs.î I'm like, ìWhat?!î [laughs]

Meanwhile, when I was in Mexico City, I would step out my front door and there's all kinds of taco carts. Now MÈrida is ridiculously hotót can easily get 110óso there won't be taco carts on the street. But there should be some type of place where I can get decent tacos because I used to literally leave the house and just go to the taco cart and get six tacos and go back up to my house. [laughs]

DAMIEN: You described a very interesting way of transitioning to living in Mexico and not transitioning; some things changed and lot of things stay the same, especially when you're there in Mexico City.

But you did go from being an auditor to an IT consultant. How did that transition work?

ELYSE: Yeah, because people always ask me that. So I guess, when I was like 10 years old, I wanted to know how those websites worked because the internet was just getting started with dial-up and stuff. Showing my age, [chuckles] but I wanted to know how those websites worked and so I taught myself how to code.

Shout out to the very first website that taught me. It was Lissa Explains it All and it still exists and it was funny because I had sent the lady a message over a year ago and she just checked her messages and she was like, ìOh, thank you. It still exists.î She's the same age as me. I thanked her and told her I learned how to code because of you.

My parents actually thought something was wrong with me because I was 10 years old and I didn't go outside and play that summer. Like, I wanted to learn how to code so I did it and then I progressed to taking classes in high school and college, of course.

I won't sit up here and say that I did not get internships because I did, but they were government internships and so not stereotype, but it's true. [laughs] The government stagnates you because they don't get the latest and the greatest, they're slow, there's a bureaucracy and they're like 20, 30 years behind on so much things. So I wanted an internship and not necessarily Google or whatever, but even FedEx would have been fine. [laughs] I didn't find one so I was like, ìOkay, well, whatever, then I'll switch to accounting.î

Switched to accounting, accounting was good to me. They actually have entry-level positions and funny enough, I went and worked for the government, though so. [laughs] But it wasn't hard to find a position; they didn't make me jump through all these hoops and all this other kinds of stuffs. I stuck with accounting and became an auditor and then of course, life happened. And that was my next step to Mexico.

So then when I got to Mexico, I fell back on my IT skills. I learned about the cloud. One of the first things I built on the cloud was my podcast and so, I learned that on AWS, you can run a podcast for like pennies a month instead of paying Blubrry or something, I don't know how much it is, $25 a month or something like that. So yeah, I did that and then I built an email service on AWS, too. So instead of paying MailChimp $50 a month, it would be free or pennies for AWS to send hundreds of thousands of emails.

So I got interested in the cloud that way and then of course, Mexico [chuckles] is a third world countryóit might be second world now I'm not a 100% sure on thatóand so they're behind on a lot of things. I came with this idea that I was going to put them into the cloud. They like to use Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Pages to conduct business and my whole thing is if you're going to sell real estate to international people, are you going to look on Facebook Marketplace or Facebook Pages for property? [chuckles] No, you're going to want a website. So I built the websites on AWS using the cloud and then the databases in the background to pull the properties, depending on how big the real estate company was, and that's how I became an IT consultant.

To fall back on being a Black American in Mexico and starting your own thing, not to say that America doesn't have a lot of resources, but Mexico has tons of resources to get you started doing business in Mexico. [chuckles] And being Black also helps, too because everybody's curious about you, so. [laughs]

DAMIEN: So what I heard in that story was you ran into some really broken interview processes in tech so then you all went off and became an auditor and did that for X number of years and now that you're in Mexico doing your own consulting, it's different. You don't have to deal with the broken interview processes that we have in this industry.

ELYSE: Yeah. I have interviewed recently just to see [laughs] and at this point, I kind of want to come back for grad schools because I said, I need to quit playing around and do something with my life, but. [laughs]

So I have interviewed, and I don't know if it's gotten worse, but I see that it's really out there, and in comparison to audits and in comparison to say, the government process of interviewing, because I have interviewed at the government Level II for IT, it's really out there. I don't understand why.

REIN: What are the tech community is like that you've been a part of in Mexico, or how are they different from a bunch of white dudes with beards getting together in the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco?

ELYSE: One of the first people that I had met moving to my second apartment in Mexico City was a programmer. So I asked him about the process and everything and he's like, ìYeah, no one does that here.î So I don't think it's like as gatekeeped in Mexico because you'll see women working in all types of industries, going to work in their little business suits and things like that. [chuckles]

Not to say it's equal because sexism is really bad in Mexico. They've literally been having marches for the amount of sexism that that's been going on in Mexico. But you do see women working in these roles and I have not talked to a woman in IT, only males. So I guess, I'm kind of biased on this. [laughs]

DAMIEN: Can you talk a little bit about the difference between entering or interviewing in IT versus auditing or government?

ELYSE: Yeah. So Iíve interviewed at, I can't remember because it was so long ago, but I want to say it was KPMG. So I have interviewed at the big four and everything like that and of course, they do the are you a culture fit questions. It's more so on are you a culture fit, I guess. They're not asking you what is the difference between a debit and a credit [laughs] in accounting.

With IT, they're asking you what is the difference between a join and whatever else in SQL and to spit something off the top of my head like that, that's detrimental to my psyche. [laughs] Because I've done it for years, I might not know the name of it, because it doesn't matter if I've been doing it for years and I couldn't even see it at the entry-level point because they didn't even do that at the entry level point for me.

But the government process is very sterile because they're not supposed to be biased. They're supposed to give people with disabilities and women and minorities, equal opportunity. There is no video, usually. Everything's on the phone. There's probably no names on resumes and things like that. Like, they cut all that stuff out so there's no bias in the interview process because if your name is Hardeep, [laughs] you'll have some type of bias, potentially.

So the government process is very sterile and then they rate you. It's very different. There's no hoops to jump through because if I have a portfolio of work or I've been working for this employer, then you just basically need to check references at that point, I guess, instead of having me do a coding interview on something that I wouldn't know what it was beforehand; putting me on the spot.

DAMIEN: Yeah. I've definitely seen that the gotcha questions of testing esoteric tech knowledge, but I've been on the other side interviewing people and because of the way we managed to structure the interviews, I get to meet the people before looking at their resumes, which I prefer. But I'll do some pairing with the person and then go, ìWell, this person does not know how to write code,î and then ñ like just don't understand the concept of giving instructions to a computer and I go back and I look at their resume and find like 5 years senior software engineer at this company I've heard of.

ELYSE: So my question is though, do you think people are faking their portfolios, too? Because I mean, there's no portfolios and in accounting so it's basically their word against yours and like I said, you would check the references to be a 100% sure, but I guess, people can fake references at this point, too. But the background check comes into play because I've heard people say you need to do a video talking about yourself and then you have to have all these ñ you have to have ten projects, contribute to open source, and where does it end? [laughs]

REIN: My wife is an accountant, but she's in tax and I really don't understand how you would interview someone for that job because so much of it is looking stuff up all the time.

ELYSE: What type of process can we do to where people aren't spending 6 hours doing these interviews? [laughs]

REIN: I mean, the tax code is so big that no one can remember it, then it changes. It has changed a lot under Trump. How do you demonstrate expertise in reading and parsing the tax code? That's weird to me. I don't know how you do that.

ELYSE: That's why I said. More so I guess, it would be a culture fit because I'm trying to think back to one of my interviews for my auditor interviews, I don't recall them asking me any accounting questions. It was basically personality type questions like, do I want to work with you because every job, you're going to need some type of training to get up to speed and that's the other problem.

It was funny because I asked a lady yesterday, I worked for the government so I have clearance, I asked her, ìAre you filling these roles?î [laughs] She said, ìNo, these roles have been open for months,î and I said, ìI'm not trying to get in your business, but I was just curious.î She started stuttering like she wasn't prepared to answer that question and she's like, ìNo, they've been open for forever,î and I'm like, ìYeah, I know they are. That's why I'm askingî because number one, you're looking for a cloud engineer and number two, you're looking for somebody with a top secret clearance. That's probably like one out of a million people on this earth, a billion, too at this point. [laughs]

DAMIEN: Thatís an absolutely ridiculous requirement like, it's only reasonable, to hire somebody you think you can get clearance for and then work to get their clearance. To require that sort of thing in advance is absolutely ridiculous.

ELYSE: This is what I'm talking about and that's why I asked her because I get these things in my inbox all the timeócloud engineer with a clearanceóand they're like, ìYou need a top secret,î and I'm like, ìWhat's the chance of somebody having a top secret and is a cloud engineer and also knows enough about being in the cloud to fill your requirements?î Because like I said, the cloud is so vast number one, you would have to train someone on a lot of things and a top secret clearance? [laughs]

DAMIEN: That dovetails with the other thing you said, the question being in an interview, ìDo I want to work with this person?î and that's actually the final question I use when I'm done with an interview. It's like, ìDo I want to work with this person tomorrow? Do I want to work with them tomorrow? Are they capable of doing the job?î And by capable of doing the job, I don't mean they know everything right now because they've never worked here before. They sure donít know our code base. Also, things are going to change so can they learn?

So do I want to work with you and can you learn?

ELYSE: Yeah. Not to say that I want to hire somebody that knows nothing and then train them up, which at this point, that might be what you have to do especially when you want some obscure requirements.

But my thing is, can this person learn? Are they hungry? That's my whole thing. Are they capable of learning because some people are not capable; [laughs] they'll throw in the towel real, real quick. So can they figure out some things?

REIN: You know that thing I said about how accountants are always looking stuff up? Software engineers do that, too.

ELYSE: Oh yeah, I know they do and I do it all the time with my own projects. It's like, you're asking me the difference between debits and credits. I can give you a baseline, but at the end of the day, I'm going to look it up to make sure that I got it right. As long as I know it and understand it to an extent.

So those little questions on those things kind of insane and going back to what he said, people faking experience. Are you saying that people are faking their portfolios, too or do you not? Because that's the thing, people are saying do a portfolio, but no one has ever looked at mine. [laughs] Even as a contractor doing my own thing, no one has ever asked to see work that I've done before. They're like, ìOkay, well, she sounds good so we're going to hire her.î [laughs]

REIN: A lot of people that have worked at big companies don't have portfolios so they can just show people because it's not their work.

ELYSE: Yeah, and that's the other thing because I worked for the government and a lot of things that I did was secret so a lot of things I can't talk about. So it's like what am I supposed to say here? [laughs]

REIN: As far as I can tell, every industry is just really bad at this, but tech might be one of the worst at actually evaluating human beings.

ELYSE: Yeah, and like I said earlier, my sister's in health care and she recently just left to go on a contract to help out for COVID. So I'm asking her, I was like, ìWell, what did they do to see if you were qualified for the job?î She was like, ìWell, they just checked my license and they checked my references and that was it! î That was it. So it's crazy out here and I've had places where they were like, ìWe're going to do seven interviews.î Seven interviews for what?!

DAMIEN: The only way to know if a person is capable of doing the job is to do the job with them. To work with them over a course of weeks, months, years. So obviously, references are probably the best, but if you call up a stranger and say, ìHey, this person who used to work for you. Are they good at the job?î They're going to say yes or nothing because they risk litigation, otherwise.

I live in Hollywood, you see this in movies where directors, especially top named directors, work with the same cast over and over again because they've worked with that cast, they know how they work. Even not top named directors. If you go to a casting agent, you'll find that they bring in the same people over and over again and the same people get hired because somebody can say, ìOh yeah, I worked with them. They were great.î

ELYSE: Yeah. I understand where you're coming from. I do. But for a field that says there's such a shortage, [chuckles] such a shortage, it doesn't line up.

DAMIEN: That's the other half of it, too is I can take any reasonable human being and make them into an excellent software engineer. I've done it. Those weren't reasonably human beings; those people were awesome. [chuckles] But I think I can do it with reasonable people, too and I think a lot of our industry does not know how to do that. We don't. There's so much, especially in engineering management, they don't know how to make engineers better engineers or how to make people integrate engineers. So what are you going to do?

ELYSE: I don't know, but I guess, IT was started kind of funny. I was a little bit too young to really fully understand, but I know at one point they were just throwing money at the most stupidest things. Maybe that's why these ridiculous requirements have come about because accounting has been around since the beginning of time, medicine has been around since the beginning of time so that's my only thought on that. [laughs]

DAMIEN: Yeah. If you could just solve that problem for us real quick, just right here on the podcast, that'd be great.

[laughter]

Just go ahead and tell us what to do.

DAMIEN: Weíd all appreciate that.

ELYSE: I mean, interviewing like I said, at the government where they interview one time because everybody's already on the panel so they can get a feel for you because they're like, ìOkay, well you're going to interview with so-and-so,î and then the second interview, youíre going to interview with so-and-so, the third interview, you're going to interview with so-and-so. Can you just make it one whole thing so everyone can ask their questions, kind of like what we're doing right now and get it over with? [laughs] I mean, that's one of the first steps. [laughs]

REIN: If you look at like big companies like Google, they get so many applicants that they mostly just care about saying no to people. They mostly care about weeding out the people they don't want and they'd be happy to say no to people they do want; that's more important to them than saying yes to people. They would say no to someone they do want and say yes to someone they don't want because it's hard to fire people, which is good. But their hiring process is entirely built around saying no as quickly as possible and if Google can't do this with all of the resources they have, what hope do the rest of us have?

ARTY: I don't know how useful it is to compare ourselves to Google, though because the problem totally shifts. When you move away from a filtering problem and you turn things around, you've got an attraction problem then instead. I think a better way to frame it is to look at it as how can we put ourselves out there as a company such that we attract the right people that are likely to be a good fit for us?

Because you can get a whole bunch of the wrong people, but if you do a really good job at characterizing yourself, your company, your team, and things in a way that really shines and shows through what it is you're about and interested in and what your culture is about, then it makes it easier for the right people to find you.

But not have ridiculous requirements. I imagine this Venn diagram with cloud engineer and then top secret security clearance where you've got like this set up for, you can only talk to us if you're a unicorn. Instead of doing that, focus on the things that you really care about and then eliminate all of the impossible to fill the requirements and just focus on the competencies that are actually relevant instead.

ELYSE: Yeah. I mean, I don't know because every organization has some type of IT in it. So just like accounting, those probably are the two biggest fields where everybody is going to need it. It really needs to be fixed because everyone needs IT just like everyone needs accounting.

ARTY: To your point earlier, in talking about there's a shortage and a supply problem. If that's the problem to solve, then figuring out how we improve education and support and learning for people that are interested in those sorts of fields. How do we support mentorship kinds of opportunities so that you can get more help and support on your journey?

ELYSE: Oh no, there's plenty of programs out there. Plenty because I've done them. I've done them 2 years ago and I've done them now, but just like back then, I got discouraged with the process. I mean, if the process is ridiculous, it's going to turn a lot of people off and they're just going to go do something else. So that's another reason why it needs to be fixed.

I don't want people to go to school for computer science or whatever, and they don't know anything about this whole process, theyíve got to go through this hazing process, basically and they wasted their time because that literally could have been me, but I got smart on it and I switched to accounting. [laughs]

REIN: It seems like if the problem is that getting hired is a lot about who you know and that this is really discriminatory that on the one hand, you should change that by getting better at assessing human performance. But that seems like a really long-term plan that will take decades and so, maybe the thing to do in the short-term is to try to get more people those opportunities to be known and to be a part of that network.

ELYSE: Yeah. I don't know because like I said, there's all types of organizations and everything else to help, all of that. There's plenty of that. Where the problem comes into play is like I said, there's such a shortage then why are so many people just out of the loop? Because you can go all up and down Twitter and people are constantly complaining about it. Theyíre constantly complaining about it.

I haven't looked to see if there's anything else for accounting or any other field. But like I said, I did two fields alreadyóaccounting and medicineóand obviously, they're not like that, so.

REIN: It's really interesting. This is true about capitalism in general. There are a lot of jobs that need people and there are a lot of people that need jobs and it's not efficient at all.

ELYSE: Yeah, that's true. But again, I think part of the problem is we can go back to the cloud engineer and the security clearance. How many people on this earth actually have that? [laughs]

DAMIEN: Yeah. Theoretical efficiencies and capitalism are dependent on people being knowledgeable and rational to things that are not true about human beings, but we can improve that.

I love what Arty said about really finding the relevant things and the relevant thing is not you know what a credit or a debit is, you know the difference between a join and a left outer join. Honestly, if I'm hiring somebody, the relevant thing is, do I want to work with you? Are you a pleasure to work with? I can teach you all about IT; I can't teach you to care about your coworkers.

ELYSE: Right. [laughs] That is true.

DAMIEN: And if I'm dealing with classified material, I need to be able to get people clearances. If I can't do that, I'm ñ yeah, that's not a thing.

ELYSE: Yeah, and if you want to talk about the clearance trust. The trust factor, too. I mean, we don't want you out here selling the secrets and giving away credit card numbers and social security numbers. I don't know, but something needs to be fixed because yeah, I don't know and it's definitely not a pipeline problem. It's not a pipeline problem. I'm truly thinking it is the interview process.

REIN: Itís also maybe a little bit that the jobs people end up getting suck so much. There are a lot of toxic workplaces and people were treated really poorly.

ELYSE: Yeah. I mean, that's why I'm really open to remote work because you don't have to look at people, you don't have to deal with them, and a lot of IT jobs probably need to be a remote so you don't have to go into the office. Especially now.

I joke with my father that all the people that's causing all the issues right now are the extroverts. [laughs] Us introverts, we're fine sitting at home and not too much people interaction and stuff. It's all the extroverts.

I guess, to an extent, it's probably the extroverts that's doing the hiring process and things like that so they come up with these ridiculous procedures to put people through these hazing processes, too. Recently, I saw job bulletin, it was Scrum master and a Python developer and I'm like, ìA Python developer doesn't want to talk to people like that.î [laughs] We just want to sit behind the computer and code! We're not going to facilitate meetings and do Scrum. You're crazy. I've seen tons of positions like that and I'm just like, ìGone are the days where you could just not have too much people interaction and just code or do whatever in IT.î

So I think that might be a part of the problem, too becauseóI don't want to be stereotypical again, butóIT is for those that would just want to sit behind the computer and not really deal with people that much. So I think that's also a part of the problem. Extroverts are trying to get into IT and they probably shouldn't be. [laughs]

DAMIEN: So the thing that I'll be reflecting on is really, the ways that I can be fearless. The story Elyse told us felt to me like something had to be done, so she did it and if it has to be done and you do it because there's no room for fear and there's a lot of areas in my life where I have a lot of fear and it's not necessary, I don't have to have it. I could just do it. So I'm going to be reflecting on that.

ARTY: The thing I've been thinking about is when you said, ìYou only have one life, so why are you putting limits on it?î You think about all the limits we put on ourselves and all the things we don't do and you can kind of imagine yourself getting old and looking back at your life and like, ìWhy didn't I do that? Why was I so paralyzed by fear that I didn't take that chance? I didn't do that opportunity. I didn't pick up and move to a different country?î [chuckles]

There's so many things in life that we have the opportunity to see yet all those limits hold us back from experiencing those things and why? Why do we let fear grip us in that way, as opposed to really living and experiencing our life? I find it so inspiring that you just picked up and left everything you knew, and moved to a different country without knowing anyone, without having any friends there. You found some stranger that helped find your place, ended up creating work opportunity and stuff with drawing on your skills that you had to make a living, and making the whole thing work and that's so powerful, just to be able to do that.

ìYou only have one life, so why are you putting limits on it?î

REIN: I have a couple reflections by the first one is that I need to learn more about the history of the transatlantic slave trade outside of the United States so that I don't sound like a dipshit on my own podcast and the second one is that, I think that folks in tech, especially people who look like me, should be intentional about making our networks more inclusive. If that's how the world works, then I think that's what we need to do and also, itíll enrich your lives if you do that because you'll get to it hang out and talk to more people.

ELYSE: I will say that I don't think that there is a pipeline problem because I know tons of engineersówomen, Asian, Blackóand we're all minorities in IT and we're pumping through it and like I said, all over just on Twitter alone, there's all types of complaints about the process. Being from accounting was my ñ I don't want to see my original field but the field that I switched to after I found out that computer science was not as fair. There was none of these issues that I ran into.

So living in another country for years and just frolicking has changed my perspective on so many things and I hope that the IT industry officially gets it together because they're missing out so much, so much talent. So much talent.

Special Guest: Elyse Robinson.

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01:59 - Wesley’s Superpower: Connecting With People and Being a Social Chameleon

11:31 - Sharing Responsibility Based on Strengths; Delegating “Weakness”

23:52 - Mission Statements Are Bullsh*t (especially for marginalized people/groups)

“The real barrier is individuals who don’t want to lose power.”

32:16 - Talking Truth to Power: Enacting Change

“Strong opinions don’t mean right opinions.”

Reflections:

Damien: The decommodification of labor and people.

John: Finding strengths and leaning into them so you can be the most effective.

Casey: We are stronger together.

Wesley: Skills are things you aren’t necessarily born with. You can create and cultivate them.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep 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.

Special Guest: Wesley Faulkner.

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01:48 - Josh’s Superpower: Teaching nearly anything he knows to almost anyone

05:04 - Safety Science and Staying Safe While Rock Climbing

17:42 - Transfer of Knowledge from Experts to Non-Experts

23:07 - Root Cause Analysis & Taking Gambles

33:00 - Failure As An Opportunity For Growth

50:07 - Psychological Safety

Reflections:

Rein: Operators are always gambling and taking risks.

Mando: How to properly build systems and teams that are friendly to lesser experienced individuals to bring up folx who are earlier in their careers or other industries.

Josh: Commemorating team learning experiences.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep 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.

Special Guest: Josh Thompson.

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03:19 - Mando’s Superpower: Willingness to Talk About Anything Personal with Others

08:39 - Dealing with Life in 2020/2021

18:30 - Finding Anchors

Ted Lasso

34:28 - Being Okay Being Less Productive

Sea Shanty TikTok

46:47 - Practicing Gratitude For Communities You Do Have; Talking to Kids About Feelings

“If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.” – Fred Rogers

Reflections:

Rein: The ability for there to be a higher-level cognitive function that happens after emotional and affective responses and that it is capable of mediating between those responses and action.

Mando: Giving a specific name to how he’s feeling right now: lost.

Damien: The value of interrogating feelings.

“Community is not the sum of its members but the product of their relationships.” – Russell Ackoff

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep 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.

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02:12 - Isa’s Superpower: Being a Bridge

08:56 - Community Learning

19:16 - Pivoting From Rock’n’Roll to Software Engineering: Software + Music

27:57 - Grappling with Impostor Syndrome

Reflections:

Damien: Community over architecture.

Casey: Community and mentorship.

Isa: Talking to other engineers re: non-code + community and sustainability.

Laurie: Finding new ways to collaborate in a remote/pandemic world.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep 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.

Special Guest: Isa Herico-Velasco .

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• Linode: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.

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