Greater Than Code – Details, episodes & analysis

00:44 - Pandemic Life * Politics * Healthcare * Society * Work 13:58 - Jay, Happiness, and Fulfillment * Personal Development and Self-Discovery * Brené Brown (https://brenebrown.com/) * Glennon Doyle (https://momastery.com/) * Elizabeth Gilbert (https://www.elizabethgilbert.com/) * Nihilism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism) * Manifestation * Gratitude & Daily Journaling * Morning Pages (https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/) * EarlyWords (https://earlywords.io) 29:09 - Witchcraft & Magic * Intention and Ritual * Terry Pratchett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett) * Franz Anton Mesmer (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Anton-Mesmer) * The Placebo Effect (https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/what-is-the-placebo-effect) * Zenify Stress Relief Drink (https://zenifydrinks.com/) * Effort and Intention Reflections: Mandy: Everyone should journal. Reflect on the past and bring it to the present. Damien: Bringing magic into non-magical environments. Aaron: Ritual, intention, reflection, alignment. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 277 of Greater Than Code. I am Damien Burke and I'm joined with Aaron Aldrich. AARON: Hi, I am Aaron and I am here with Mandy. MANDY: Hello, everybody. I'm Mandy Moore and today, it's just the three of us! So if you came expecting more than that, I'm sorry. [laughter] We’re what you get today, but hopefully, we can have a great conversation and we were thinking that we would talk about all the things. I'm doing big hand gestures right now because there's been so many things happening since 2020 that are still happening and how our perspectives have changed. For one, I, myself, can tell you I have grown so much as a person in 2 years. And I'm curious to hear how the two of you have been living your lives since the pandemic. DAMIEN: [chuckles] Where to begin. AARON: I know. It's such a good topic because I feel like everyone's had so much to change, but at the same time, it's like, okay, so 2 million years ago at the beginning of this pandemic. I'm now my third place, third job since the beginning of the pandemic as well and wow, I came out as non-binary in the middle of the pandemic [laughs]. So that was a whole thing, too. I think the question I asked earlier is how much have you radicalized your politics over the course of the past 2 years? [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah, yeah. That's been bouncing around in my head since you said it off mic. Every time I hear the word pandemic now, I think about, “Oh man,” I hesitate on how far to go into this. [laughs] Because I look at the techno-anarchist crypto bros and I can I say that disparagingly and I will say that disparagingly because I was like them. [laughs] I filled out a survey today and they asked like, “How do you rate yourself as on a conservative and liberal scale?” I'm like, “Well, I think I'm super conservative.” And I still do and every time I align with any political policy, it's always an alignment with people who call themselves socialists and leftists and why is that? [laughs] Hmm. [laughter] But anyway, that was the part I was trying not to go back into. [laughs] One of the big realizations in living in a pandemic is that healthcare is not an exclusive good. MANDY: What? [laughter] DAMIEN: That is to say that I cannot, as an individual, take care of my own health outside of the health of the community and society I live in. Didn't know that. In my defense, I hadn't thought about it, [laughs] but that was an amazing realization. AARON: No, I think that was a big thing. I think so much of the pandemic exposed the way our systems are all interconnected. Exposed the societal things. Like so much we rely on is part of the society that we've built and when things don't work, it's like, well, now what? I don't have any mechanism to do anything on my own. What do we do? DAMIEN: Yeah. It's so fundamental in humanity that we are in society. We are in community. We only survive as a group. That's a fundamental aspect of the species and as much as we would like to stake our own claim and move out to a homestead and depend on no one other than ourselves, that is not a viable option for human beings. AARON: Right, yeah. Even out here in rural Vermont with animals and things, we're still pretty dependent on all of the services that are [chuckles] provided around. I'm still on municipal electric service and everything else. There's still dependence and we still rely on our neighbors and everyone else to keep us sane in other ways. DAMIEN: Yeah, and I feel like people in rural areas—and correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't lived in a rural area in maybe ever—have a better understanding of their independence. You know your neighbors because you need to depend on them. In the city—I live in Los Angeles—we depend on faceless institutions and systems. AARON: Yeah. DAMIEN: And so, we can easily be blind to them. AARON: Yeah. I think it mixes in other ways. I get to travel a bit for work and visit cities, and then I end up coming back out into the rural America to live. So I enjoy seeing both of it because in what I've seen in city spaces is so much has to be formalized because it's such a big deal. There are so many people involved in the system. We need a formal system with someone in charge to run it so that the average everyday person doesn't have to figure out how do I move trash from inside the city outside the city. [laughter] We can make that a group of people's job to deal with. Here, it's much more like, “Well, you can pay this service to do it, or that's where the dump is so can just take care of it yourself if you want.” “Well, this farm will take your food scraps for you so you can just bring this stuff over there if you want.” It's just very funny. It just pops up in these individual pockets and things that need group answers are sometimes like pushed to the town. You get small town drama because like everyone gets to know about what's happening with the road and have an opinion on the town budget as opposed to like, I don't know, isn't that why we hire a whole department to deal with this? [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah, but small town drama is way better than big town drama. The fact that half of LA's budget goes to policing is a secret. People don't know that. AARON: Yeah. DAMIEN: Between the LA Police Department and LA Sheriff's Department, they have a larger budget than the military of Ukraine. That's the sort of thing that wouldn't happen – [overtalk] AARON: Don't look at the NYPD budget then. DAMIEN: Which is bigger still, yeah. [laughter] That's not the sort thing that would happen in a small town where everybody's involved and in that business. AARON: Yeah. It happens in other weird ways, but it's interesting. This is stuff that I don't know how has, if it's changed during pandemic times. Although, I guess I've started to pay attention more to local politics and trying to be like, “Oh, this is where real people affecting decisions get made every day are at the municipal levels, the city level.” These are things that if we pass a policy to take care of unhoused, or to change police budget, this affects people right now. It's not like, “Oh, wow, that takes time to go into effect and set up a department to eventually go do things.” It's like, “No, we're going to go change something materially.” It's hard to compare the two because the town I'm in rents a police officer part-time from the next [laughs] municipality over. So the comparison to doesn't really work. [laughter] DAMIEN: Everybody knows exactly how much that costs, too. AARON: We do. I just had to vote on it a couple Tuesdays ago. [laughter] DAMIEN: So then I think back to how that has impacted – I'm always trying to bring this podcast more into tech because I feel guilty about that. [laughs] About just wandering off into other things. But I think about how that impacts how I work in the organizations I work in. Hmm. I recognize I'm learning more about myself and how much I can love just sitting down with an editor and churn out awesome code, awesome features, and awesome products. That brings me so much joy and I don't want to do anything else. And what we do has impact and so, it's so beneficial to be aware of the organization I'm in what it's doing, what the product is doing, how that’s impacting people. Sometimes, that involves a lot of management—I do a lot of product management with my main client now. But also, in other places, you would look at, “Well, okay, I don't need to manage the client's finances”. Not because that's not as important, it's because other people are doing it and I trust how they're doing it. That's something I haven't had elsewhere. The advantage of being with a very small organization is that I have these personal relationships and this personal trust that I couldn't get at one of the vampire companies. What'd they call them? FAANG? AARON: Yeah, FAANG. We've been talking about this because FAANG, but Facebook and Google changed their name. So now, is it just MAAN? DAMIEN: Yeah. AARON: I mean Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, right? DAMIEN: I'm all for the right of individuals to choose what they're called; I don't know if I'm willing to extend that to Facebook and Google. AARON: [laughs] Yeah. DAMIEN: Remember, was it Altria? AARON: Oh, Philip Morris. DAMIEN: Philip Morris, right? AARON: Yeah. DAMIEN: They were just like, “Oh, everything we've been doing is so horrible and harming to society for the past several decades, we'll just change our names and people will forget about it.” AARON: That was Philip Morris. Altria didn't do any of that. DAMIEN: Yeah. Altria didn't do any of that. [chuckles] Yeah, I remember that. AARON: Yeah. I'm curious because I think it's changed for me a bit over this time, too. But I'm curious for folks that have had a sensitivity change to the types of company, not necessarily types of companies, but like, I'm more sensitive to who I'm working for. I think my list of no, I won't work for the X company [chuckles] has probably grown throughout the pandemic and I'm definitely much more critical. Part of it's probably because as in tech we're sort of at an advantage, it is high demand right now and we can be a bit picky about where we work, but I definitely have been [laughs] lately. Much more careful about I'm not just willing to work with anyone. I want someone that's got reasonable values. I interview other companies a lot more and I want to make sure product is not causing harm generally speaking and make sure I get a lot more value alignment out of leadership team and things like that. I don't know if other people have had a similar experience. MANDY: Unfortunately, I haven't had that experience. I'm still working for whoever will give me money. [laughter] But I wish I could do that and I'm currently looking. I mean, I've been trying to break into a full-time DevRel career for I guess, 2 years now and I guess, I'm actively looking. Oh, here we go. If you’re hiring, let me know. [laughter] I guess I am. I'm looking for that job that I'm really feeling fulfilled in is right now I'm not feeling that and I think it's because of the pandemic, I've really stopped to think about what I want in my life and how I want to feel. I want to be happy, I want to be passionate about my job, and I want to wake up and not feel scared to open my computer because – [overtalk] DAMIEN: Wow. MANDY: Are they going to tell me they no longer need my service? DAMIEN: Right. MANDY: And it's been demoralizing really, for me recently, especially because I tried to join a developer relations Slack group just a few months ago and they rejected me flat out and they're like, “You do not work in dev full time. You cannot be a part of our group,” and I'm like, “Oh.” So now I'm like, “Hmm, what do I do in tech?” [laughter] I thought I'd been doing DevRel before DevRel was cool. I'm going to humble brag for a minute, but I have single-handedly put this podcast together and put you people together that you didn't even know and you love each other. You get that vibe. I can tell who's going to get – you're going to love this person and you're going to like – [overtalk] DAMIEN: Oh man, you not only put this podcast together, but you are the sustaining force. You are the heart of it. You are the thing where that all the panelists that are connected to. You are one who gets all of the mechanical, everything besides talking in mics. You do everything else and you're maintaining all these relations with these developers. [laughter] MANDY: I never even wanted to be on mic. I just started doing it because everybody was busy and I was like, “I guess I have to step up.” [laughs] DAMIEN: Whatever it takes to get it done, right? MANDY: Well, yeah. I feel like the topics on this show that we talk about are important and they're even important outside of tech that hence, the whole name: Greater Than Code. There are more things out there than our jobs and our work and I just want to be happy. I want to be fulfilled and I want to be passionate about something and so does my dog. AARON: That was a shift for me, too. That was definitely one of the roles I was in during the pandemic and realized my struggle with it so much was it was clashing with that. It wasn't fulfilling for me, it was clashing with my core values, and it was just like, “You know what, I can't do this anymore.” [chuckles] I'm no longer in a place where I have the energy to do a thing I don't like doing, or don't have some care for. There's always something you don't like doing. There's always some crap around every job that like don't like to do or you have to deal with something, but I'm no longer at a place where I can have a whole job that rubs me the wrong way. MANDY: Yeah. It's hard for me. I should feel great about this, but I'm known as the podcast girl. If you have a tech podcast, you should talk to Mandy, but I'm not just a podcast editor! I do so much more than that. I do operation, I do product management, I do writing; there's so much more that encompasses who I am in tech than the podcast girl. I feel like not a lot of people know that and maybe that's my fault because I guess, I haven't really done a good job of putting myself out there to be like, “Hey wait. But I'm –” because for me, it's still a hustle as a single mom. I have to pay the bills. So it's like, I wish I could be more discerning with the jobs that I take and who I work for, but I don't know. I'm just one of those people of the universe. What will be, will be and if it's meant to be, it'll come to me. [laughs] So I don't ever really actively seek and that's probably half of my problem. DAMIEN: Mm. That's funny because I didn't know all those things about you. I pitch you as a podcast producer and again, I live in a LA, I'm involved in the entertainment industry at a slight level, and the word producer there is very, very powerful and very important. A producer is an executive. A producer is person who gets things done, who makes it happen. I'm not entirely sure what a producer does, even though I've done it. MANDY: I'm not even sure what a – [laughs] DAMIEN: Right, because it's never the same thing. MANDY: No. DAMIEN: It's whatever it takes and that skill. AARON: Yeah. DAMIEN: That being able to be know enough about a movie, or theatrical production, or a podcast, to know what it takes, to be able to manage, and sustain and get it done. That's really what it comes down to: get it done. MANDY: That's why it's so hard for me. Everyone's like, “Do you have a resume?” And I'm like, “I don't know what to put on it!” Like, you tell me you need this done, I'll get it done. If I don’t know how to do it, I'll figure it out because that's what I've done for 13 years. Like I got hired as Avdi Grimm’s virtual assistant because an Indeed.com ad came out and was like, “I need somebody to answer emails for me,” and I'm like, “Don’t know why you can't do that yourself, but sure.” [laughter] And then from there, he had a podcast and was like, “Can you edit my podcast?” And I was like, “Sure,” and then I'm Googling what is a podcast. [laughter] I had no clue. So I got here, I think a lot out of luck from being at the right place and talking to the right person at the right time. But I have busted my ass to just learn what people need me to learn and do what people need me to do. I guess, that's maybe what I should just put on the resume. I'll do what you need me to do. I make it happen. DAMIEN: No, no, no. You put on the resume what your next job is going to be doing. MANDY: [laughs] Yeah, so, it's hard when people ask me for my resume. I have like three resumes and I'm like, “This does not, no.” AARON: It's almost more a portfolio at this point, right. I made this thing happen. I made this thing happen. Here's this other thing that I did. Here's another thing I made happen. DAMIEN: Resumes are horrific. They're not good for anybody and the only people who use them are people who need to filter quickly out of large groups and they're not even good for that. I've long aspired to be at a place in my career where I don't need a resume and I might be there. Steve Jobs didn't have a resume. Didn't need a resume. He didn't send his resume to the board to get that job at Apple back. It's ridiculous. MANDY: Well, that's the thing for me. I get most of my work from word to mouth. DAMIEN: Right. MANDY: So until I really lost a big client and I was like, “Oh, I don't have a resume. Don't you know who I am?” [laughter] DAMIEN: But like, they should. [laughter] AARON: Just say the portfolios level. I mean, it's kind of the same thing, right? This is... MANDY: Yeah. AARON: [laughs] Kind of the same thing. It’s sort of how my resume is morphed in DevRel proper. It's gone from I still kind of have the resume that's like, “Yeah, I worked into these things internally that might not surface otherwise, but also, here's my speaking portfolio and all the things that I have done over the past 3 years. [laughs] You might know me from all of this stuff instead of what's on this resume.” [laughter] MANDY: Yeah. Of course, once I was getting comfortable enough to want to speak, that's when the whole world shut down. DAMIEN: Yeah. MANDY: So I have no videos of myself speaking anywhere whatsoever. DAMIEN: Well, I think there might be a few podcasts that you appear on. MANDY: There's a few episodes as of late that I have ventured to be on out of keeping the show alive. DAMIEN: And every episode of this podcast, and I think several others, are shits near portfolio, right? [laughter] MANDY: Then I'd have a really wrong resume. [laughs] AARON: We'll figure it out. DAMIEN: Yeah. AARON: You just need the highlights. MANDY: But I don’t know, a lot of other things have changed for me over the course of the past 2 years. Just in my personal life, I've gotten sober and that was a really hard thing to do during a pandemic. AARON: Yeah. MANDY: When everybody else was out hoarding toilet paper, I was like, “Oh my God, I need beer,” [laughs] and actually, I did. While everybody was stocking up on those other necessities, I was buying cases of beer and putting them in my garage because I was like, “Oh great, the world's ending and I guess, if that's going to happen, I might as well be drunk.” And then – [overtalk] AARON: I mean, it's a fair argument in your defense. MANDY: But then it became a bad problem because when you're home all day and I was home, I worked from home before this. But everything is so damn depressing and you keep the news on the television and next thing you know, it's lunch time and cracking a beer and I'm like, “Whoa, this is… [laughs] where did this come from?” So no, I got sober and I don't drink anymore and honestly, I have never felt better. I've also become a runner. I got a treadmill and I run a 4, or 5 miles a day and I've lost a good amount of weight, probably a lot from alcohol bloat. DAMIEN: [chuckles] Yeah. MANDY: But it's more for me. It's not even about losing a weight because I don't even own a scale because it's more about how I feel. DAMIEN: Yeah. MANDY: It's what is about how I feel. So when I went to the doctor's office for my yearly checkup on Monday and I got on the scale because they make you, I said, “Whoa,” [laughs] because I didn't even know. For me, it's about how I feel and I think that that's really, what's brought a lot of things into perspective for me is that at our time here on earth is fine. I want to be here for my daughter especially. She's 13 and I want to be healthy for her. I want to be here for my friends. I ask myself why I'm still in York, Pennsylvania and I haven't left because I do have people around here that I care about. DAMIEN: Yeah. MANDY: And other than that, I could take it, or leave it. But because the people who I love are here, that's why I haven't left. DAMIEN: Yeah. MANDY: So that's another thing, the things like the pandemic has just really set me into a lot of personal development work and self-discovery. I journal every day. I read self-help books, which is so weird to me because I was one of those people that were like, “Who are those people that read self-help books?” and now I'm one of them. [chuckles] I want to be Brené Brown and Glennon Doyle’s best friend. [laughter] Those two women are my people. Elizabeth Gilbert. I can give you so many names of people and great authors that just inspire the hell out of me and 2 years ago, I was not that at all. AARON: Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for getting at our time on earth is finite and so, in refocusing on what matters to us. Another way I had a friend put it to me, it's like optimistic nihilism. Look, at the end of the day, we're all going to be dead and none of this matters. So you might as well do what makes you happy, right? [laughs] You might as well do the things that are fulfilling and meaningful and try to make other people have a good time, too. You might as well. DAMIEN: I always thought it was ridiculous that nihilism had such a negative connotation. It was like, “No. Okay. I can believe that and be –” [overtalk] AARON: No pressure. At the end of the day, we're all going to die so, no pressure. Do what do what you need to do. Doesn't matter if you succeed, or fail. MANDY: That's like, I'm one of those people that would rather spend their money on experiences. AARON: Yeah. MANDY: Because I don't care how much money I die with. [laughter] I'd rather use it now and take my kid Disney world, which I did 3 years ago. DAMIEN: Nice. MANDY: And enjoy those experiences rather than have a bank account full of dollars that I can't use. DAMIEN: High score. MANDY: Yeah, high score. DAMIEN: Shout out to thriving in hand wavy. I feel embarrassed about this and I don't talk about it much because so many people are suffering. People I love are suffering. People I work with and deal with on a daily basis are suffering, and bad things are happening. This is the best year of my life. This is better than last year and last year was better than the year before. I just keep getting better and my life just keeps getting more awesome. I don't know if I was going anywhere with that, but solidarity with Mandy, I guess. You bought a treadmill. I bought a rower. MANDY: I feel like honestly, the universe gives back what you put out and I guess, I’ve become real – a lot of people are like, “You're like, woo-woo witchy now,” and I'm like, “Aha, yeah.” I kind of like that. So I feel like if you manifest things, you can make that happen and yes, there's things happening. Yes, yes, there are so many bad things happening, but sometimes out of self-preservation, you just have to tune all of that out and just be in your immediate dwell. For me, sometimes I'll go a week without watching news and I feel guilty about that a lot, but it's just like, you know what, if something's going to happen, it's going to happen. AARON: I think the best way someone put that to me was anxiety is not activism. MANDY: Yeah. DAMIEN: Yeah. AARON: Right, so just sitting around making yourself anxious and stressed out about everything and whatever emotion you have, making yourself feel bad doesn't improve the situation, it just also makes you feel bad. So it's okay to take a step back and do the self-care that you need to do because just feeling bad isn't fixing the problem either. So step back, find what you can do. Maybe there's stuff you can do here, in your immediate space that you can take action on. MANDY: Exactly. And also, for drinking other people's problems away, – [overtalk] [laughter] AARON: You can’t drink other people’s – disassociating from other people's problems isn't effective. [laughter] MANDY: No. Let me tell you, I tried. [laughter] DAMIEN: That's such a great statement. Anxiety is not activism, but also the opposite is true. Joy is activism, rest is activism, thriving in a world that doesn't want you to thrive is an act of resistance and activism. Shout out, living a good life. AARON: That's been a good conversation. I think that's easy to forget and I've seen it come up a couple times over the past couple years of what they have been of taking those moments for joy are really important. They can be radical in and of themselves. MANDY: Keep a gratitude journal. There are so many great apps that every day before I go to sleep, I just write one sentence and it gives you an option even to have a picture. So you can snap a picture. Even if it's just like this candle, this candle is burning right here and it smells so good and it's making me happy today. So I'm grateful for the candle. DAMIEN: Yeah, I'm up to approximately 2 years of daily journaling. A buddy of mine got together. We built a daily journaling app based on Morning Pages from The Artist's Way. It's called Early Words. Shout out earlywords.io if you want to join and journal with me. But every day, 750 words. I do it first thing in the morning most days. Stream of consciousness. It has absolutely changed my life. It makes me feel good. It made me a better writer. Not because the writing is good, but because it's taught me to turn off the editor. Writing does have to be good for me to write it. MANDY: Yeah. Big proponent of journaling. AARON: I believe in it. I just don't remember to do it. But that's my own problem. [laughter] DAMIEN: Can we go back? Can we talk about witchcraft? AARON: All right, I’m in. DAMIEN: A friend of mine asked me oh my God, maybe it was a year ago. Maybe it was several months ago. I have no idea. She asked me like, “Do you actually believe in witchcraft? Those magic woo-woo stuff?” It's like, “Well, let me tell you something. Every morning when I wake up in the morning, I make a potion with dried leaves that energizes me. At night, I make a different potion with dried flowers that calm me down and helps me sleep. My literal job is making sand think. Do I believe in witchcraft? I mean, yeah.” [chuckles] MANDY: I mean, it's a full moon today so I have a whole jug of water out charging. I do. I literally have a jug of water on my deck charging for full moon water energy and I use it like, I'll put a little bit in my bath water. I'll put it a little bit of it – I'll cook with it. When I boil some water, put it in there. Does it help? I don't know, but it makes me feel better! DAMIEN: Okay. Wait. It makes you feel better? AARON: Sounds like it’s helping. DAMIEN: Doesn’t that means it helps? MANDY: Yeah. It does. AARON: Yeah. I think that's a good point. I believe in the power of intention and ritual. There's a reason why humans developed rituals over time and sometimes, it's just for us to feel the right thing. But like, feelings are important? DAMIEN: [laughs] But like, feelings are important. AARON: I don’t want to say something controversial on the Greater Than Code podcast such as feelings are important. But they are. Sometimes, while you go through a certain step and it centers you, or you go through a certain set of steps and it makes you feel better, or it helps you process the anxiety you're feeling, or it's like, nope, I need to get centered in my five senses again so I can come back into my body and be here instead of going off on an anxiety spiral. MANDY: Absolutely. AARON: What is witchcraft? I actually love this from Terry Pratchett, one of my all-time favorite authors who does the Discworld series of novels, as a very specific approach to witchcraft, which is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, magic and whatever. But their daily thing is checking on all the people of the village and doing all the work that nobody wants to do. So it's like, how are the elderly doing? Do they need help with anything? Making sure and so takes their bath, making sure this person's animals are taken care of, making sure this sort of thing. Sometimes, it's about appearances and going through the ritual to make sure the community is coming along. Sitting with the dead, all that kind of stuff. And that's witchcraft, that's the bread and butter of witchcraft is knowing the right herbs and poultices to put together, being the heart and soul of the community and being able to get people and helping each other, and move the resources around as needed and that sort of thing. So yeah, I believe in that. [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah. There was there's a great story and about Anton Mesmer, I learned this shout out to Mary Elizabeth Raines who taught me hypnosis. I learned this when she told me this story when I was doing my hypnosis training about Anton Mesmer, who's considered the [31:10] of hypnotism. He introduced hypnotism to the to the white people. The word mesmerism and magnetic person, magnetic personality, all this comes from Mesmer. He had salons where people would hold onto metal rod that he had “magnetized” and be healed and fall out and screaming have spirit and all that. But Mesmer was very popular and very powerful and the king of France did not like this. The king of France put together a blue-ribbon commission. I don't know if he called it a blue-ribbon commission. Probably not because he spoke French, but put together a commission of scientists to discredit Mesmer. One of these scientists was Ben Franklin, by the way. So they did a double-blind study. They did a proper double-blind test. They had Mesmer come out and magnetize a tree. That was a thing he did. He would magnetize trees, people would come out and hug the trees and then they'd be healed. So they did a study. They had to magnetize the tree and they brought people out who were sick and they said, “Hug that tree. That’s magnetized and you'll be healed.” Some of the trees Mesmer had magnetized, some he hadn't and it turns out it didn't matter. People were still healed and so, they all came to conclusion, “All right. See, Mesmer’s not doing anything. It's all placebo effect.” Mesmer was run out of town and lived in exile for the rest of his days. Nobody bothered to ask why were the people healed? Everybody knows placebo effect is a real effect. Nobody's like, “How do we make it more effective? Why is it working this way? What do we do it? What do we do with that? How can we use that?” MANDY: Yeah. AARON: No, I think it's a super interesting thought. The placebo effect is a powerful and interesting concept overall. We did ourselves a disservice to not understand it. DAMIEN: Yeah. To dismiss it as if it doesn't exist. Not only does it exist, it's increasing. AARON: Hmm. DAMIEN: Because people are getting more powerful. MANDY: Yeah. I'm drinking this Zenify Stress Relief Drink. [chuckles] And does it work? I don't know, but it's delicious and you know what? It makes me happy. You know why? Because it's not alcohol. [laughter] So it's not having a negative effect on me. I'm not getting drunk and doing stupid things. Is it taking away? My stress? Eh. I mean, but I love it. I love it and it makes me feel good. It's a treat. It's a special drink. I have one a day and it's one of those things that instead of missing my case of White Claw Seltzer. I know, I know, I wasn't even a bougie – well, I wasn't even a good drinker. That's what made it a problem. [laughs] AARON: This is far too affordable. MANDY: I was not a discerning drinker, so. [laughs] No, I have my one bougie drink that I have and it makes me feel good. Does it relieve my stress? I don't know, but I don't care either. DAMIEN: Yeah. If it works, it works. One of the great things about placebos is they don't – well, I was going to say they don't have to be expensive, but sometimes it works better when they're expensive. [laughs] MANDY: Moon water is free. DAMIEN: Moon water is, yeah. But, well, it's not free actually. You had to put an effort and intention. MANDY: True. DAMIEN: And I think if you didn't, it wouldn't be as effective. AARON: Effort and intention go a long way. DAMIEN: [laughs] That's a root of magic, isn't it? MANDY: Why can't I just get paid for effort and intention? [laughs] AARON: I mean, if I put my effort and intention into this money tree. [laughter] I've always thought it would be nice if real world jobs worked like Animal Crossing. Like, “Oh, so I can just go pick some stuff up and then you're just going to give money and then we can just move on? Great.” “Now look, I dug up a bag of money. If I just plant this bag of money, I'll get more money. It's fine.” [laughs] DAMIEN: I'm trying to bridge that gap. That's such a great question like when effort and intention is so well, literally magical, why does it seem to not have the impact we want in nonmagical environments, I'll call them? AARON: Mm. DAMIEN: I asked that question because I want to know what to do about that. I want to bring magic to nonmagical environment, to city council, to retail stores. I almost named an online retail store; I don't want to name it. [laughs] But it's a city council to corporate interactions. And there's no reason you can't. Corporations are people. Governments are people. I think requires dealing with them in individually in ways that we're not used to. AARON: Yeah. It's a good question. You've got to be really thinking about… MANDY: My wheels are turning. AARON: Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is effort and intention are always going to make the most effect for you because most of it is about aligning your thought processes. It's about taking the, I don't know, I'm just taking this into making the best decision I can to like, okay, if I can focus on this is my goal and my aim and what I'm after, suddenly all of the patterns emerge around that. Oh, now I'm ready for that opportunity, or oh, now this thing is working out, and oh, now this is what is working out because I've focused on my intentions and where I want to put my efforts. I think there's room for these things in other groups. Gets back to what I was thinking about ritual, about how humans are tuned for ritual to tell themselves story. We’re tuned for storytelling and ritual and all this sort of thing. So I think there's room from a tech perspective, I'm thinking about what comes to mind quickly is incident management stuff. Sorry, I'm coming off of SRECon this week so, everything's going to be around that. DAMIEN: Our apologies. [laughter] It’s all right. AARON: It was fantastic, but it's a different podcast. [laughs] But think about that, right? When you're coming in and doing instant reports, it’s so powerful is it to set the intention of the meeting, or any meeting that you have and say, “We are here for this purpose. This is what we're looking to find. We're not looking to do –” Back when Chef had lots to say about this, they'd have those things like we're not here to determine what could have, or should have happened. We're here to find out what did and move the thing. So it's all about setting the intent of that gathering and what outcomes you're after and it focuses the whole conversation can make that meeting more powerful because you've set the focus right off the bat. I think there's room for that other places, too. DAMIEN: That's such a beautiful way of saying it. You described it as setting an attention. AARON: Yeah. S: Whereas, in corporate speak, I would describe it as setting an agenda. AARON: Right, and an agenda is one thing. It's kind of like, “Hey, here's kind of the stuff we're going to do,” but to be like, “We are gathered for this purpose to [laughs] cover this thing.” DAMIEN: No, no. AARON: Right. DAMIEN: Dearly beloved, dear colleague. AARON: Right? Yeah, right. DAMIEN: We are gathered here for this purpose. AARON: Yeah. I mean, we say it this way in personal stuff, why don't we –? Like, it's useful. [laughs] MANDY: It really is. DAMIEN: Because how are you ever going to get something done if you don't know what you're there for? AARON: Right. DAMIEN: Well, you're going to get something done. If you don't have a destination, any road you take is fine. AARON: If you don't have any intention set, it's a series of meetings that could have been emails. [laughter] And then maybe that's the power of it, in a nonmagical space, is forcing yourself to go through this thought process of why am I doing this? Why are we here? What do we want to accomplish? Can probably trim so much of the cruft from all of our meetings and engagements. DAMIEN: That was my favorite sentence as a product manager: what is it you're trying to accomplish? [chuckles] AARON: I say that a lot, DAMIEN: But it is a very, very powerful question. AARON: Especially when you have children asking to use dangerous tools. [laughter] What is it you're trying to accomplish? Maybe we don't need to bust out razor blades. [laughs] DAMIEN: So from an SRE standpoint, when you get together for – what do you call that meeting? An incident review postmortem? Postmortem is a bit – [overtalk] AARON: Yeah, yeah. Post-incident report. There's a handful of names for that reason, but post-incident review. MANDY: Retrospective. DAMIEN: Retrospective, yeah. So the question is, what is it you are trying to accomplish? AARON: Right. DAMIEN: I'm trying to find somebody to blame. AARON: And not blaming. DAMIEN: I'm trying to find somebody to blame so that I look good in my next performance review. AARON: Well, that's what was so important about doing that because that's the shift we're, largely as an industry, trying to make. Finding a person to blame doesn't learn anything about what happened and will teach us nothing for next time. So if we set the intention of like, we're trying to learn from this incident and how we can improve or what we can do better, or maybe there's nothing. Maybe this was just a fluke and let's find that out. That's what we're here to learn. But we're not here to point fingers, or find a root cause because root causes are for plants. [laughter] AARON: Again, that's a whole other podcast. [laughs] MANDY: At the beginning of the pandemic, I owned zero plants. Now, I think I'm the proud plant mother of 20? [laughs] DAMIEN: Wow. AARON: That's amazing. MANDY: I know. AARON: My problem is I can't keep things alive. MANDY: Well, mostly they're all thriving because I set the intention that I was not going to mess this up. [laughter] DAMIEN: There you go. Do you give them moon water? MANDY: I do. DAMIEN: Apparently, it's working. MANDY: I do. Do we want to do some reflections? DAMIEN: Sure. Let's do it. MANDY: I'll start us off. With this conversation, we were just having about the intention and stuff. This is why I think everybody should journal, including CEOs and leaders. Get out a journal, what do you want, and then look back at some of the stuff. I don't it often, but I go back and I'm like, “Oh yeah.” Just reflecting on what you've written in the past and bringing that to the present can really help you put stock in all the things that you want and should be accomplishing. DAMIEN: Yeah. This bringing magic into nonmagical environments and journaling is part of that. A shout out to journaling. Another plug for earlywords.io that I own. Come journal with me because it is a magical thing. It is a ritual I do daily. That clears my mind. That is a practice of the listening to myself. It is a practice of letting go and not controlling what's coming out. Along with that and all the other sort of ways I know of being that I can call magic, I can call hypnotism, I can call NLP, I can call ontological coaching I've done a lot, bringing that into environments where I haven't because they're so useful there and we talked about some of the ways they are and so, we really confirmed more ways of doing that. AARON: I think the things I'm thinking about after this conversation are ritual, intention, and reflection are the big things that are standing up. I think this pandemic, for instance, and how things have changed is because I've had just so much time to have to sit alone by myself and reflect on what's going on externally and internally. But yeah. Anyway, just about setting intentions, of understanding the directions you want to go before going, making sure you're aligned with your goals, and you're not just accidentally wandering down paths that you don't want to be down and turning around and finding out your miserable 10 months later. I think I've thought a lot about the power of even small rituals just to interrupt our standard thought processes and align ourselves with those kind of things. There's been a lot from basic health stuff of here are the rituals I can go through when I'm feeling anxious and I know they'll calm me down to writing in a journal, or directing a group to [laughs] let's align our thought processes. It can be super useful. DAMIEN: Absolutely. MANDY: Awesome. Well, this has been a really fun conversation. I'm glad we just had a panel only episode and I'd love to do more of these in the future. They're really cool. We didn't come to the show with much of an agenda and hopefully, you dear listener, appreciate it. If you would like to give us some feedback, we'd appreciate it. Tweet at us. Join our Slack. AARON: Hire Mandy. DAMIEN: Tell your friends. MANDY: DM me. [chuckles] Tell your friends. DAMIEN: Tell your enemies. MANDY: Tell your enemies, too! [chuckles] We’ll see you all next week.

01:09 - Jenna’s Superpower: Being Super Human: Deeply rooted in what is human in tech * The User is Everything 04:30 - Keeping Focus on the User * Building For Themself * Bother(!!) Users * Walking A Mile In Your Users Shoes - Jamey Hampton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-zYKo8f7nM) 09:09 - Interviewing Users (Testing) * Preparation * Identifying Bias * Getting Things Wrong * Gamifying/Winning (Developer Dogs & Testing Cats) * Overtesting 23:15 - Working With ADHD * Alerts & Alarms * Medication * Underdiagnosis / Misdiagnosis * Presentation * Medical Misogyny and Socialization * Masking * Finding a Good Clinician Reflections: John: Being a super human. Jacob: Forgetting how to mask. Jamey: Talking about topics that are Greater Than Code. Jenna: Talking about what feels stream-of-consciousness. Having human spaces is important. Support your testers! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hi, everyone and thanks for tuning in to Episode 276 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Hello, like to be here. I'm with my friend, John Sawers. JOHN: Thanks, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Jenna Charlton. Jenna is a software tester and product owner with over a decade of experience. They've spoken at a number of dev and test conferences and is passionate about risk-based testing, building community within agile teams, developing the next generation of testers, and accessibility. When not testing, Jenna loves to go to punk rock shows and live pro wrestling events with their husband Bob, traveling, and cats. Their favorite of which are the two that share their home, Maka and Excalipurr. Welcome to the show, Jenna! [chuckles] JENNA: Hi, everybody! I'm excited to be here with all the J’s. [laughter] JAMEY: We're so excited to have you. JOHN: And we will start with the question we always start with, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JENNA: On a less serious note, I have a couple of superpowers. One I discovered when I was a teenager. I can find Legally Blonde on TV [laughter] any kind of day [laughs] somewhere. It's a less valuable superpower than it used to be. But boy, was it a great superpower when you would be scrolling and I'm like, “Legally Blonde, I found it!” [laughter] JAMEY: I was going to ask if one of your superpowers was cat naming, because Excalipurr is very good. It's very good. [laughs] JENNA: I wish I could take credit for that. [laughter] Bob is definitely the one responsible. JAMEY: So it's your husband superpower, cat naming and yours is Legally Blonde. Got it. JENNA: Mine is Legally Blonde. [laughter] I also can find a way to relate anything to pro wrestling. JAMEY: I've seen that one in action, actually. Yes. [laughter] JENNA: But no, my real superpower, or at least as far as tech goes is that I am super human. Not in that I am a supremely powerful human, it's that I am deeply rooted in what is human in tech and that's what matters to me and the user is my everything. I'm not one of those people who nerds out about the latest advancement. Although, I enjoy talking about it. What I care about, what gets me excited, and gets me out of bed every day in tech is thinking about how I can solve a deeply human problem in a way that is empathetic, centers the user, and what matters to them. JAMEY: Do you feel like you were always like that naturally, or do you feel like that was a skill that you fostered over your career? JENNA: I think it's who I am, but I think I had to learn how to harness it to make it useful. I am one of those people who has the negative trait of empathy and when I say negative trait, there's that tipping point on empathy where it goes from being a powerful, positive thing to being something that invades your life. So I am one of those people who sitting in a conference room, I can feel the temperature change and it makes me wiggle in my seat, feel uncomfortable, get really awkward, and then default to things like people pleasing, which is a terrible, terrible trait [laughs] that I fight every day against. It's actually why remote work has saved me. But I've had to learn how to take caring about people and turn it into something that's valuable and useful and delivers because we can talk about the user all day and take no action on it. It's one thing to care about the user and to care about people. It's another thing to understand how to translate that care into something useful. When I learned how to do that in testing, my career changed and then when I learned how to translate that to product, things really started to change. JAMEY: That's amazing. JENNA: Thank you. [laughs] JACOB: I feel like so often at work I sit down at 9:00 AM and I'm like, “Okay, what do our users need in this feature, or how could this potentially go wrong and hurt our users?” And then by 9:20, everything's off the rails. [laughter] As work happens and here's a million fires to put out and it's all about things in the weeds that if I could just get them to work, then I could go back to thinking about to use it. You know what I mean? How do you keep that focus? JENNA: So part it is, I don't want to say the luck, but is the benefit of where I landed. I work for a company that does AI/ML driven test automation. I design and build experiences for myself. I'm building for what I, as a tester, needed when I was testing and let's be honest, I still test. I just test more from a UAT perspective. I get to build for myself, which means that I understand the need of my user. If I was building something for devs, I wouldn't even know where to begin because that's not my frame of reference. I feel like we make a mistake when we are designing things that we take for granted that we know what a user's shoes look like, but I know what my user's shoes look like because I filled them. But I don't know what a dev shoes look like. I don't know what an everyday low-tech user shoes look like. I kind of do because I've worked with those users and I always use my grandmother as an example. She's my frame of reference. She's fairly highly skilled for being 91 years old, but she is 91 years old. She didn't start using computers until 20 years ago and at that point, she was in her 70s. Very, very different starting point. But I have the benefit that that's where I start so I've got to leg up. But I think when we start to think about how do I build this for someone else and that someone isn't yourself, the best place to start is by going to them and interviewing them. What do you need? Talk to me about what your barriers are right now. Talk to me about what hurts you today. Talk to me about what really works for you today. I always tell people that one of the most beneficial things I did when I worked for Progressive was that my users were agents. So I could reach out to them and say like, “Hey, I want to see your workflow.” And I could do that because I was an agent, not a customer. They can show me that and it changed the way I would test because now I could test like them. So I don't have a great answer other than go bother them. Get a user community and go bug the heck out of them all the time. [laughs] Like, what do you mean? How do you do this today? What are your stumbling blocks? How do I remove them for you? Because they've got the answer; they just don't know it. JAMEY: That was really gratifying for me to listen to actually. [laughter] It's not a show about me. It's a show about you. So I don't want to make it about me, but I have a talk called Walking a Mile In Your Users’ Shoes and basically, the takeaway from it is meet them where they are. So when I heard you say that, I was like, “Yes, I totally agree!” [laughs] JENNA: But I also learned so much from you on this because I don't remember if it's that talk, or a different one, but you did the talk about a user experience mistake, or a development mistake thinking about greenhouses. JAMEY: Yes. That's the talk I'm talking about. [laughs] JENNA: Yeah. So I learned so much from you in that talk and I've actually referenced it a number times. Even things when I talk to testers and talk about misunderstandings around the size of a unit and that that may not necessarily be global information. That that was actually siloed to the users and you guys didn't have that and had to create a frame of reference because it was a mess. So I reference that talk all the time. [laughs] JAMEY: I'm going to cry. There's nothing better to hear than you helped someone learn something. [laughter] So I'm so happy. [chuckles] JENNA: You're one of my favorite speakers. I'm not going to lie. [chuckles] JOHN: Aw. JAMEY: You're one of my favorite speakers too, which is why I invited you to come on the show. [laughs] JENNA: Oh, thank you. [laughter] Big warm hugs. [laughs] JOHN: I'm actually lacking in the whole user interviewing process. I haven't really done that much because usually there's a product organization that's handling most of that. Although, I think it would be useful for me as a developer, but I can imagine there are pitfalls you can fall into when you're interviewing users that either force your frame of reference onto them and then they don't really know what you're talking about, or you don't actually get the answer from them that shows you what their pain points are. You get what maybe they think you should build, or something else. So do you have anything specifically that you do to make sure you find out what's really going on for them? JENNA: The first thing is preparation. So I have a list of questions and that time with that user isn't over until I’ve answered them. If it turns out that I walked into that room and those questions were wrong, then we stop and time to regenerate questions because I can bias them, they can bias me, we can wind up building something totally different than we set out to do, which is fine if that's the direction we went end up going. But I need to go into that time with them with that particular experience being the goal. So if I got it wrong, we stop and we start over. Now, not everybody has to do that. Some people can think faster on their feet. Part of being ADHD is I fall into the moment and don't remember like, “Oh, I wrote myself a note, but there's also” – I just read a Twitter thread about this today. I wrote myself a note, but also to remember to go back and read that note. So [laughs] all of those little things, which are why I really hold to, “I got it wrong. We're going to put a pin in this and come. Let's schedule for 2 days from now,” or next week, or whatever the appropriate amount of time is. There have been times – and I'm really lucky because my boss is so good at interviewing users so I've really gotten to learn from her, but there have been times when she'll interview a user and then it totally turns the other direction and she goes, “Well, yes, we're not building this thing we said we were going to build. I'm going to call you again in six months when I'm ready to build this thing we started talking about.” Because now the roadmap's changed. Now my plan has changed. We're going to put a pin in this because in six months, it may not be the same requirement, or the same need. There might be a new solution, or you may have moved past that this may be a temporary requirement. So when we're ready to do it, we'll talk again. But the biggest thing for me is preparation. JAMEY: I have a question about something specific you said during that near the beginning. You said, “They can bias me and I can bias them,” and I wonder if you have any advice on identifying when that is happening. JENNA: When it feels like one of you is being sold? JAMEY: Mm. JENNA: So early in my career, before I got into tech, I worked in sales like everybody who doesn't have a college degree and doesn't know what they want to do with their life does. Both of my grandfathers and my father were in sales. I have a long line of salespeople running through my blood. If I realize that I feel like, and I have a specific way that I feel when I'm selling somebody something because I like to win. So you get this kind of adrenal rush and everything when I realize I'm feeling that. That's when I know ooh, I'm going to bias them because I'm selling them on my idea and it's not my job today to sell them on my idea. I know they're biasing me when I realize that I'm feeling like I'm purchasing something. It's like, oh, okay. So now I'm talking to somebody who's selling me something and while I want to buy their vision, I also want to make sure that it makes sense for the company because I have to balance that. Like I'm all about the user, but there's a bottom line [laughs] and we still have to make sure that's not red. JOHN: So you're talking about a situation where they maybe have a strong idea about what they want you to build and so, their whole deal is focused on this is the thing, this is the thing, you’ve got to do it this way because this would make my life the most amazing, or whatever. JENNA: Yeah, exactly. Or their use case is super, super narrow and all they're focused on is making sure that fits their exact use case and they don't have to make any shifts, or changes so that it's more global. Because that's a big one that you run into, especially when you're like building tools. We have to build it for the majority, but the minority oftentimes has a really good use case, but it's really unique to them. JOHN: What's the most surprising thing you've taken away from a user interview? JENNA: I wouldn't say it's a surprise, but probably the most jarring thing was when I got it wrong the first time and when I got it wrong, I was really wrong. Like not even the wrong side of the stadium, a different city. [chuckles] Like a different stadium in a different city wrong. [laughs] It caught me off guard because I really thought that what I had read and what I understood about the company that I was working with, the customer that I was working with. I thought I understood their business better. I thought I understood what they did and what their needs would be better. I thought I understood their user better. But I missed all of it, all of it. [laughs] So I think that was the most surprising, but it was really valuable. It was the most surprising because I was so off base, but it was probably the most valuable because it showed me how much I let my bias influence before I even step into the conversation. JOHN: Is there a difference between how you think about the user when you have your product hat on versus when you have your tester hat on? JENNA: Oh, absolutely. When I have my product hat on, I have to play a balancing game because it's about everybody's needs. It's about the user's needs. It's about the business' needs. It's about the shareholders’ need. Well, we don't really have shareholders, but the board's needs, the investors’ needs. And when I'm testing, I get to just be a tester and think about what do I need when I'm doing this job? What solves my problem and what doesn't? What's interesting about testing and not every tester is like this, but I certainly am. I mentioned that I like to win. Testing feels like winning when you find bugs. So I get to fill that need to win a little bit because I'm like, “Oh, found one. Oh, found another one. Yes, this is awesome!” I get really excited and I don't get to be that way when I'm product person, but when I'm testing person, I get to be all about it. [laughs] JAMEY: I love that. That's so interesting because to me as a developer, I get a similar feeling when I fix bugs. I feel crappy when I find bugs, [chuckles] but I get that feeling when I fix them. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about that side in that way. I like it. JENNA: Have I ever shared with you that I think developers are like dogs and testers are like cats? JAMEY: Elaborate. JACOB: Let's hear it. [laughs] JENNA: Okay. So I like dogs and cats. That's not what this is about. JAMEY: I like dogs and cats, too. So I'm ready to hear it. [laughs] JENNA: Dogs are very linear. If you teach a dog to do a trick and you reward them in the right way, with the exception of a couple of breeds, for the most part, they'll do that for you on a regular basis. And dogs like to complete their task. If they're a job, because a lot of dogs, they need jobs. They're working animals, it's in their DNA. If their job is to go get you a beer, they're going to go get you a beer because that's their job and they want to finish their job. Cats, on the other hand, with the exception of their job of catching things that move for the most part, they are not task oriented and really, a cat will let a mouse run past it if it's just not in the mood to chase it. It's got to be in the mood and have a prey drive and they don't all. So a cat, you can teach them a trick and if you reward them the right way, sometimes they'll do it and sometimes they won't. Some breeds of cats are more open to doing this than others. But for the most part, cats are much more excited about experimentation. So what happens if I knock on that glass of wall water? What happens if I push on that? What happens if I walk up behind you and whack you in the back of the head? They're not doing it because they're mean, they're doing it because the response is exciting. The reaction to their input in some way is exciting to them as opposed to finishing tasks. Because if you've ever had a cat catch a mouse, they're actually sad after they have caught the mouse. The game is over, the chase is done. It's not fun to give me the mouse; it's fun to chase the mouse. So testers are a lot like that. The chase and the experimentation are a whole lot more fun than the completion. When I find a bug, that's the chase, that's the good part of it. That's like, “Oh yeah, I tracked it down. I figured it out. I found the recreate steps.” After I found the bug, it's not as fun anymore. [chuckles] So I’ve got to find the next one because now I'm back on the hunt and now that's fun again. Dogs on the other hand, it's like, “Oh, I finished the task. I'm getting my reward. I get to cross this off. My list feels really good” Very different feedback. So I think that's part of it is that devs love to finish things and testers love to experiment with things. JOHN: Yeah. JAMEY: I think that's really insightful. JOHN: Yeah. [laughter] JAMEY: I'm like a I put something that I did on my to-do list so that I could cross it off and it feels like I did something kind of person. [laughter] JACOB: I think we, at least I was, early in my career kind of trained to have that mindset and trained away from no, we're not here to like experiment with the newest and coolest thing. We're just trying to ship features. We're just trying to fix bugs. We're just trying to finish the task. Please do not be overly experimental just for fun, which is an over simplification because everyone needs to be creative at some point. But I totally agree. JENNA: Well, and testers do have to balance that, too because there is such a thing as over testing and you hit this tipping point where it becomes wasteful and you move from I've delivered valuable information to now I'm creating scenarios that will never happen. Yes, a user can do pretty incredible things when they want to, but we can only protect from themselves to a point. Eventually, it's like okay, you've reached that tipping point now it's waste. [laughter] JOHN: Yeah. I remember some research that came out recently that if you call the cat and it doesn't come, it understands what you're asking for and it's like, “Nah.” JENNA: Yeah. Maka not so much. But Excalipurr, when she's sleeping, she’ll hear you. That cat is out cold. She has zero interest in what you're saying, or doing. Nothing is going to disturb her well-earned slumber. [chuckles] JACOB: I'm kind of amazed how like my cat is just easily disrupted by the smallest noise when awake and then when he's sleeping, he's dead to the world just like you said. He clearly can't hear it, or if he is, there's something switched off in his brain when he's sleeping, because he's a total spaz when he is awake. [laughter] JENNA: I don't know. I think my vet could explain it better. He actually walked me through what happens in a cat's brain when they were sleeping. I don't remember why. I think we were waiting for a test to come back, or something and he was just killing time with me. But there was this whole neurological thing in their brains that looks for certain inputs and even biochemically, they're wired to certain sounds that are things that they should get awakened by and other things, it's like yeah, that matter. For some reason, though my cats have weird things that they're really tuned into. If you knock on the door, Excalipurr—we call her Purr—will go bananas. She is furious that someone has knocked on the door. Same thing if something beeps like microwave beep, the sound of if I've got a somebody on speaker phone and their car door opens and it beeps, she is mad. She could be dead asleep and she hears that and she is furious. But otherwise, nothing bothers her. She's out cold. [laughs] JAMEY: I also hate when people knock on my door so I can relate to that. JOHN: Yeah. JENNA: Don't come to my door if I'm not expecting you. JACOB: Yeah. JENNA: Also don't call me if I'm not expecting you. [laughs] JAMEY: I have exactly one person I open the door for. His name is Joe and he's our neighborhood person who comes and collects everyone's bottles and cans. But I recognize the cadence of his knocks so that I can answer the door for him and not other people. [laughter] JOHN: So you said earlier that working with ADHD, you had to develop some sort of techniques for how to handle that well in your life. Do you want to talk more about that? JENNA: I don't know if I would say I handle it well, but I handle it. [laughter] Most of the time. Typically, I do you pretty well. So I have lots and lots of alerts for myself. Because as I mentioned, I'll write myself a note, but you still have to have the – somebody said the name of it today and I forgot what it was, but there's a type of memory that tells you to like, “Hey, go look at your notes that you created for yourself,” because you can write the notes, but forget that the notes exist and never go look for them again. So I have lots of like alerts and alarms that tell me like, “Hey, go do this thing. Take your meds. Check to make sure that you have everything you need on the grocery list.” I have a couple of times a day that I have a reminder to go check my to-do list [chuckles] because otherwise, I just won't remember. I'll put the system into place and forget that the system exists and even with those helps, sometimes it'll just slip by especially I'm busy during those alerts. But I try really hard to use those. The most effective thing for me, though is definitely my medication. I was chatting about everybody before we started and I mentioned that because of supply delays and all of the rules around how early you can refill and the rules around not being able to transfer your script from one pharmacy to another and all that kind of stuff, I was without my medication for let's see Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, because I didn't get it until midday yesterday and I was sick. So [chuckles] too many factors at one time that I was just not at all functional over the weekend. I forgot steps in what I was cooking. I forgot things on the grocery list. I couldn't stay awake. That was probably more being sick but. So for me, that's probably the most effective thing. Also, just as a note for those of us assigned female at birth, I that ADHD symptoms get worse [laughs] as we hit 40 and up that all of the hormonal stuff winds up interacting with how our attention is, because I couldn't figure out why my dose had to go up. I was like, “I've been on it forever. Why do we have to raise the dose?” And she's like, “Well, there's some things going on,” and I have a feeling it's all about premenopausal stuff, because for those who don't know, I'll be 40 in June. Not a teenager anymore. [laughs] So all sorts of things that I need to keep it all in balance and things that I'm learning about being in my age group and having ADHD that nobody talks about because of the assumption that ADHD is something only children have and that ADHD is something that you grow out of. When you don't grow out of it; it just kind of changes. And that it's not just men and people who are assigned male at birth that there's a lot of us out there, varying genders. We’ve got to talk about it more because a lot of us feel like we're wandering the wilderness, trying to figure out what's on in our heads. [laughs] JOHN: Yeah. I remember hearing recently that ADHD and ADD present differently in AFAB people and so, it goes underdiagnosed because of that. It doesn't show up in the classical symptom lists in the same way. JENNA: Yeah. So the classic symptom list was developed around pre-pubescent and puberty age boys and in girls, it doesn't tend to present as not being able to sit still. Although, there's still definitely some of that. It presents more in being like a Chatty Cathy as they say like, “Oh, they talk all the time.” So it presents differently and as we get older and all of the other like stuff starts to factor in, AFAB tend to get identified instead as borderline personality disorder, or bipolar as opposed to ADHD, or even anxiety as opposed to ADHD. Because when you feel like your brain is going a mile a minute, it makes you anxious. So they give you an anti-anxiety medication instead of dealing with the fact that you feel like you can't keep up with your thoughts. There are so many different factors there, but we're learning a lot more about the presentation of ADHD and autism in people who are assigned females at birth. JOHN: Yeah. I don't know a ton about the history of the diagnosis and everything, but I can assume well, because it’s the society we live in that there's a giant pile of sexism going on in there, both in who is studied and who they cared about succeeding in classical schooling and the work environment and all sorts of biases up and down the hierarchy. JENNA: Absolutely. There's both, the medical misogyny, but also the socialization because there's an expectation of good girl children and the behavior that girl children should display. So we are socialized to force ourselves to sit even if it means sitting on your hands. You're socialized to doodle instead of wiggling because good girls sit still. So there's all of that kind of stuff that plays into it, too. Even things like if you develop a special interest, which typically people associate with autism, but certainly has some crossover with ADHD because they're very closely related. You learn to either hide that special interest so you just don't talk about it, or you become that person that has the weird quirky thing because ADHD girls are always quirky, right? [chuckles] They're a quirky girl. There's no neurodivergence there. They're just quirky. They're just different. I guess, in many ways, I was kind of lucky because my mom taught autistic, intellectually disabled, and other disabled early childhoods. So she identified early, like kindergarten, that I was probably ADHD. I was dealing with it like really early. Also, she had this kind of belief about raising kids without gender, but also not doing it very well. So I wouldn't say it was a successful thing. [laughs] So let me tell you, we didn't have girl toys and boy toys. We had building blocks and stuff like that. We weren't allowed Barbies. We also weren't allowed Hot Wheels. Very gender in neutral things. But when, as a teenager, I dressed really androgynous, I was told to put on a dress because she is a girl. So I don’t know. [laughter] It didn't really work. But I think that a lot of that played into me being identified really early. I'm probably getting off track, but the benefit of is that I learned a lot about it from an early age and I was able to develop systems that work for me from an early age. Most people who are assigned female at birth don't get the benefit of that. My hope is that our kids, I don't have any kids, but to the people my age that have kids, my hope is that their children are being identified earlier so that they are able to get those systems in place and be more successful in the long term. JACOB: I'm autistic and sometimes I think about the fact that I think that my white male privilege let me get away with some of the less great behaviors that came naturally to me and did not force me to develop masking skills until much later in my life. So when you were talking about that, I can sort of relate to that by the opposite that that's making a lot of sense to me, that I could see how all these sort of societal pressures to sit still and behave weren't put on me. I was just encouraged to just be a weird individual and be myself and how that wasn't put on me in places where maybe it probably should have been. So that makes a lot of sense. JENNA: I have to say, though, I think I've forgotten how to mask COVID has definitely killed masking for me. I have completely forgotten how to make small talk. [laughs] JACOB: Yeah, me too. JENNA: [laughs] I can't do it anymore. I've also forgotten how to fix my face. I was never great at fixing my face. Everything I'm thinking, feeling wears on my face, but I'm even worse at it than I used to be. [laughs] JAMEY: I also struggle with fixing my face, but I've actually been finding that I love wearing face masks in public because I can interact with someone without having to worry about what my face is doing and it takes a lot of the pressure off me, I feel. JENNA: I think it does. So I have resting friendly face. [laughter] For those of you who've never met me in person, I am 4’ 10”. I'm really short. I'm also kind of wide. I'm fine with it. But little ladies in the grocery store will ask me to help them reach things because I look friendly and approachable. [laughter] But I can’t reach them any better than they can! [laughter] Sometimes they're taller than me. So face masks have allowed me to blend in more, which is really nice because I get less of random people coming up to talk to me. People will joke that I make a friend everywhere I go because people just start talking to me and I don't really care. I'll talk to them, that's fine. What I really laugh at is since I can't fix my face, I will put on a plastered-on smile and somebody will be like, “You are really mad at me right now, aren't you?” I'm like, “No, everything's fine. I'm super okay with this,” and they're like, “Yeah, you are furious so we're going to stop.” [laughs] Like I can manage an angry smile without meaning. [laughter] JAMEY: It's interesting what you said about people talking to you randomly, because I also I tend to be that, the kind of person that people talk to randomly in general. I've been having an interesting experience recently where I've been on testosterone for about a year and a half and I'm like finally hitting the point where the way people perceive me in public is different than it used to be. That got cut down dramatically immediately and in a way where people's eyes slide off of me in public. I'm not there in a way that never used to happen to me and it was really interesting realization for me to realize how much of that was the socialization that people think they're entitled to a woman's time and attention. It's not exactly what you were talking about, but it made me think of it and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. [laughs] JENNA: But it's true. It's really true. I think everyone who's perceived as a woman gets it, but gets it in different ways. I tend to get it from people who feel like I'm a safe place to go to. So little old ladies talk to me, little kids talk to me. Now to be fair, bright pink hair, little kids think I'm great. [laughter] Especially when my tattoos are showing, too. The parents are usually like, “Okay, okay. Leave them alone.” [laughter] But I'm also—no offense to anyone who identifies as male in the room—the person that men don't typically stop and talk to, or even notice. I remember I was taking four boxes of nuts to my coworkers and I think it was Fat Tuesday, or something so I was bringing in these special donuts from my favorite donut place around the corner. I had four boxes of donuts and this guy doesn't grab the door, or anything. Just leaves me to try and push the door open with four boxes of donuts. But then granted, she was gorgeous, beautiful blonde starts walking the other direction. He notices her right away, grabs the door, and opens it for her. It's like oh, okay. I've had that happen quite a few times and not to sound dramatic here, but that's part of the reality of living in a fat body that you do get overlooked by others. So the little old ladies tend to tend to gravitate towards me and then other women, men gravitate towards them. I think no matter, what women experience this and people who are perceived as women, because I do identify as non-binary. But let's be honest, people in the broader world perceive me as a woman. We all get it. We just get it very differently and in different ways, but I can't think of a single woman who hasn't experienced it in some way. JAMEY: Definitely. JOHN: Yeah. I've read so many rants frankly from women who have absolutely loved masking well in public because they don't get told to smile and they don't present as female as normal. So they don't fit into that category as much and so, they don't get that same attention. I look very male so no one ever does that to me, but I can imagine what a relief that must be. JENNA: I definitely think it is for some women, especially in super public spaces. JAMEY: I feel like I derailed from ADHD and I want to bring it back. [laughter] I did have a question I was going to ask anyway. So I'm bringing it back to that, which is that I feel like these conversations, like the conversation we're having right now about ADHD, is something that I've been seeing happening more, especially about ADHD and adults. I think it's just something that people have been talking about more the past few years in a way that's positive. I know a lot of people who were like, “Oh, I got diagnosed recently as an adult. I started on medication and I never realized this was what was making my life so hard and my life is so much easier now.” I have several friends that are like really thriving on that currently. So I guess, my question for you is that as someone this whole story you told about being aware of this much younger and being able to make all these coping mechanisms and things like this. What would your advice be to someone who's now, as an adult, realizing this about themselves and then coming to grapple with it? JENNA: Let me preface with this. I'm not one of those people who says medication is the only way; there are lots and lots of ways to manage ADHD symptoms. But I feel like the most beneficial thing you can do for your is to find a clinician that listens to you, that believes you, that doesn't dismiss your experiences because there are as many different presentations of ADHD as there are people who are ADHD. If you've met one ADHD person, you've met one ADHD person; we all have different traits. So finding somebody who is willing to hear you, listen to you, and partner with you, as opposed to try and dictate to you how to manage, how to cope is critical. Part of that is arming yourself with all the information that you can. But the other part of it is being a really, really good self-advocate and if you aren't comfortable with that kind of self-advocacy, finding somebody that's willing to partner with you to help be your advocate. I know a lot of people in the fat community who have personal advocates for medical appointments, because they feel like they're not heard when they go to the doctor. Same thing for us as people who are neurodivergent. We don't get heard all the time and if you feel like your clinician isn't hearing you and because there is a real barrier to getting a new one many times—oftentimes we're stuck with someone. Finding that person that's willing to walk with you is huge. It is really easy to find yourself in a situation where you lose control of your decision-making to a provider who makes the decisions for you, but is clever enough to convince you you're making the decision yourself. That's my biggest advice is don't fall into that trap. If something feels wrong, it's wrong. If a medication doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. There are multiple different types of medications, classifications of them, and different brands for a reason is because we all need something different. Like I went through Ritalin, Adderall, finally to Vyvanse because Ritalin and Adderall weren't working for me. Adderall worked, but it raised my heart rate. Ritalin made me feel manic. My provider listened to me when I said I feel manic. I feel out of control, and she's like, “If on the lowest dose you feel out of control, this is not a way to go.” I have a friend who has been pushed off of taking stimulants because she has a history of addiction. She has a history of addiction because she's ADHD and she was self-medicating. It took four different providers to finally get to somebody who said, “Yeah, the stimulants are what worked for you.” The non-stimulant options weren't working, but she had to go and demand and demand and demand and it was the only way to get heard. So I probably got on a tangent there, but self-advocacy, finding someone who will work with you, and getting an advocate if you don't get hurt. JAMEY: I think that advice will be really helpful for people. So thanks. JOHN: Yeah. JENNA: I'm always very worried that I'm going to cross a line and upset somebody, but it just is, right? JACOB: I don't know what line that would be. I feel like everything you said was just really empowering and I wish someone said that to me 10 years ago, honestly. JENNA: I hope it's helpful, but I've had people who haven't realized that even though they're an adult, because they're neurodivergent that they are forever a child. JACOB: Yeah, I know. JENNA: So their opinion, their experience doesn't matter, it's invalid, and those are the folks that sometimes get really upset when I talk about self-advocacy. That's a big personal journey to realize that hey, you are a grown up. You make these decisions. [laughs] You are allowed to be an adult now. In fact, you need to be an adult now. JAMEY: That's also very insightful, I think. JOHN: Yeah, and interestingly, it ties in with – so my company had an event for Black History Month. We're a healthcare company, we have a lot of clinicians of color and they put together a panel discussion about Blackness in a healthcare context and literally one of the panelists was talking about how do you cope with there's still prejudice, there's still people joining medical school right now that believe that Black people don't experience pain as strongly as other people. How do you deal with that? They said almost literally the same thing. You take advocates with you to your medical appointments so that you can have more opinions. You can have someone to help fight for you, someone to help make those arguments, and point out things that you might not be noticing at the moment about how the provider is acting, or just to give you that moral support to actually voice your like, “Hey, what, wait, wait, wait, this is not right. Let's back up and talk about this again.” So I think that advice is important in so many intersections that I'm glad you laid it out like that. JENNA: It's a really interesting conversation that I wound up having. I've had sleep problems my whole life and by the way, if you're ADHD and you have sleep problems, you're not alone. It's a pretty common symptom [chuckles] to have disrupted and disordered sleep partly because our brains get bored and then we wake up. Our brains don’t know how to focus on sleep. Interesting study that somebody's undertaking. But my neurologist that I see for sleep asked me to be part of a panel conversation with a team of doctors and they basically asked me questions about being ADHD and having sleep issues. And one of the things that these doctors had never really considered is that I know enough about my own body and my own sleep to know why all of the things that they've suggested haven't worked. One of them was like, “Did you try having more potassium?” I remember I just stopped myself and I said, “Listen, my parents have told me stories of how I wouldn't sleep as an infant.” We're talking about somebody who was sleeping 2, or 3 hours a night as a toddler. This is not a new thing. This is not insomnia. This is not stress related, stress induced sleep loss. This is a chronic medical condition. I said, “If you think that I haven't tried more potassium, having peanut butter at night, turning off devices an hour before bed, not watching TV before bed, not reading before bed, using the sleep training apps, going for a sleep study. If you think I haven't done this stuff, I don't know how to help you, because if you think I've made it this far in my life without trying anything, we have a whole another conversation to have.” It's the same thing. I'm going to say this and it's going to sound really hurtful to providers, but they think that we were born yesterday and until that change, we just have to keep proving them wrong. JAMEY: I think that you won't probably hopefully hurt the feelings of providers who aren't like that. Because my suspicion is that providers who aren't like that are like, “God, I know.” [laughter] JENNA: I hope so. I hope so because they're patients, too. I really wonder what it's like for them to go to a doctor. JAMEY: Yeah. I didn't want to totally derail into a different conversation again, but I just want to kind of note that this all really resonates with me also as a trans person, because I know way more about trans healthcare than doctors do. [chuckles] So I go in and I say, “This is what we're going to do because I know all about this,” and my doctor's pretty good. He listens to me and he works with me, but he says like, “Cool, I don't know anything about that so sounds good,” and it's just wild to me that I have to learn about all of my own healthcare to do healthcare. JENNA: Yeah, which that's a whole another conversation about how important it is to – like we talk about diversifying tech, which is important, but we also have to diversify the community. Until there are trans clinicians, until there are more Black clinicians, until there are more assigned female at birth clinicians, we are going to continue to find ourselves in these situations and we're going to continue to find ourselves in dangerous situations. I think about—getting off track for a second because that's what I do. I live in Cleveland. Well, I don't live in the city of Cleveland, but Cleveland is my nearest metro area. I’m 10 minutes outside of the city. Cleveland has one of the worst infant and maternal mortality rates for Black women in the country. We also have some of the lowest numbers of Black OB-GYNs in the country. There is a direct correlation there. No offense to my white men, friends, but all of these white men sitting here in their ivory tower guessing at how they're going to solve this problem while at the same time women like Serena Williams nearly die in childbirth because they don't listen to her. It's like, so you're going to come up with these solutions when you're not even listening to some of the most educated and informed patients that you have? It's why there's a whole coalition of Black women in Cleveland that have started a doula organization that they're becoming doula to support other Black women in the city because they don't feel like the medical community is here for them. It's the exact same thing. Like until we have this diversity that's so needed and required, and reflects patients, people are going to die. JAMEY: Yeah. On the flip side of that, when you do have a provider that shares your background in that way, it's so empowering. My new endocrinologist is trans and the experience is just so different that I couldn't have even fathom how it was going to be different beforehand. [chuckles] JENNA: That's amazing, though. That transforms your care, right? JAMEY: Yeah. Totally. JENNA: But it all comes back to what I said about how I care deeply about the human [chuckles] because this is all the human stuff. [chuckles] JOHN: Yeah. JAMEY: So what we like to talk about here on Greater Than Code, the human stuff. JENNA: That's why I love Greater Than Code. [laughs] I can't help myself, though. Whenever I say human stuff, or think about human stuff, I think about Human Music from Rick and Morty. [laughter] That whole thing has always stuck out in my mind. [laughs] Just look up Human Music from Rick and Morty and you'll get a giggle. [laughs] JAMEY: I think it's a great time to do reflections. What do you think? JOHN: Yeah, I can start. I think there's probably a ton I'll be taking away from this. But I think what struck me the most is right at the beginning when you were talking about your superpower, you talked about yourself as a super human, not super human, but as a just super human, just you're really human. All of us are, but we don't think of ourselves that way. I just love that framing of it as just that I'm here as a human and I'm leaning into it. I really like thinking that way and I'll probably start using that term. JACOB: I related really hard to the forgetting how to mask situation since COVID. I don't know if that's a full reflection, or not, but I relate really hard to that. JAMEY: I feel like in a way my reflection is so general, I think it's so great to talk about stuff like this. I think that it's really important. Like I was kind of saying about we have more people realizing things about theirselves because people are just more are open about talking about this kind of topics. I think that that's really amazing and I think that when people like Jenna come on shows like Greater Than Code and we can provide this space to have these kind of conversations. That, to me feels like a real a real privilege and I almost can't come up with a more specific reflection because I hope people will listen to the whole show. [chuckles] JENNA: What's been really amazing is getting to talk about whatever just feels stream of consciousness in this conversation has connected a lot of dots for me, which is really neat because outside of tech, for folks who don't know, I'm a deacon at my church, which is also a very human thing because I provide pastoral care to people who are in the hospital, or who are homebound, or who are going through crisis, or in hospice care, or families who have experienced a loss. All of these things interconnect—the way that I care for my community, the way that I care for my broader community because I have my church community, I have my tech community, I have my work community, I have my family. All of these very human spaces are the spaces that are most important to me. If you are my friend, you are my friend and I am bad about phone calls and stuff, but you are still somebody who's on my mind and if something happens, I'm your person. You just message me and I'm there. It all interconnects back to all of these like disparate ideas that have just coalesced in one conversation and I love that and that makes my heart very full. JAMEY: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything that you want to plug? JENNA: So I have a couple of talks coming up. At InflectraCon, I am doing a risk-based testing talk and Agile Testing Days, I am doing a workshop on test design techniques. If you came to CodeMash, it's that workshop, it's fun. Support your local testers! That’s my big plug. Support your testers! [laughter] JAMEY: Think about them as the experimental cats. I think that will be helpful for people. [laughter] JENNA: Yes! [laughter] JAMEY: Thank you so much. This was great! JOHN: Yeah, I loved the last line of your reflection. That was beautiful. JENNA: Aw, thank you. Special Guest: Jenna Charlton.

00:36 - Panelist Consulting Experience and Backgrounds * Debugging Your Brain by Casey Watts (https://www.debuggingyourbrain.com/) * Happy and Effective (https://www.happyandeffective.com/) 10:00 - Marketing, Charging, and Setting Prices * Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/) * Chelsea’s Blog (https://chelseatroy.com/) * Self-Worth by Salary 28:34 - GeePawHill Twitter Thread (https://twitter.com/GeePawHill/status/1478950180904972293) - Impact Consulting * Casey’s Spreadsheet - “Matrix-Based Prioritization For Choosing a Job” (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qVrWOKPe3ElXJhOBS8egGIyGqpm6Fk9kjrFWvB92Fpk/edit#gid=1724142346) * Interdependence (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interdependence) 38:43 - Management & Mentorship * Detangling the Manager: Supervisor, Team Lead, Mentor (https://dev.to/endangeredmassa/detangling-the-manager-supervisor-team-lead-mentor-gha) * Adrienne Maree Brown (https://adriennemareebrown.net/) 52:15 - Explaining Value and Offerings * The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz (https://www.amazon.com/Pumpkin-Plan-Strategy-Remarkable-Business/dp/1591844886) * User Research * SPIN Selling: Situation Problem Implication Need-payoff by Neil Rackham (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/833015.SPIN_Selling) 55:08 - Ideal Clients Reflections: Mae: The phrase “indie”. Casey: Having a Patreon to help inspire yourself. Chelsea: Tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes to in terms of a person’s needs. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: CHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 267. I'm Chelsea Troy, and I'm here with my co-host, Mae. MAE: And also with us is Casey. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. And today's episode, we are our own guests. We're going to be talking to you about our experiences in consulting. To get this one started, how about we share what got us into consulting and what we like, don't like about it, just high-level? Chelsea, would you mind going first? CHELSEA: Sure. So I started in consulting, really in a full-time job. So for early in my programming career, I worked for several years for a company called Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Labs is chiefly, or was chiefly at the time, a software engineering consulting organization. My job was to pair program with folks from client teams, various types of clients, a lot of health insurance companies. At the time, there was a restaurant loyalty app that we did some work for. We did some work for General Motors, various clients, a major airline was also a client, and I would switch projects every three to six months. During that time employed by Labs, I would work for this client, pair programming with other pivots, and also with client developers. So that was my introduction to consulting and I think that it made the transition to consulting later, a little bit easier because I already had some consulting experience from under the Labs’ umbrella. After I worked for Labs, I moved on to working at a product company for about 2 years and my experience at that product company burned me out on full-time programming for a little while. So in my last couple of months at that job, I realized that I was either going to have to take some time off, or I was going to have to find an arrangement that worked better for me for work, at least for the next little while. And for that next little while, what I decided I wanted to try to do was work part-time because I was uncomfortable with the idea of taking time off from programming completely. I felt that I was too early in my career and the skill loss would be too great if I took time off completely, but I knew I needed some space and so, I quit my full-time job. After I quit the full time—I probably should have done this before I quit the job, but I didn't—I called an organization that I had previously done some volunteer work with, with whom I discussed a job a couple of years prior, but for a couple of different reasons, it didn't work out. I said to them, “I know that you're a grant-funded organization and you rarely have the funding and capacity to bring somebody on, but just so you're aware, I like working with you. I love your product. I love the stuff that you work on. All our time working together, I've really enjoyed. So if you have an opening, I'm going to have some time available.” The director there emailed me that same day and said, “Our mobile developer put in his two weeks’ notice this morning. So if you have time this afternoon, I'd really like to talk to you,” [chuckles] and that was my first client and they were a part-time client. I still work with them. I love working with them. I would consider them kind of my flagship client. But then from there, I started to kind of pick up more clients and it took off from there after that summer. I spent that summer generally working 3 days a week for that client and then spending 4 days a week lying face down in a park in the sun. That helped me recover a little bit from burnout. And then after that, I consulted full-time for about 2 years and I still consult on the side of a full-time job. So that's my story. Is anyone feeling a penchant for going next? MAE: I can go. I've been trying to think how am I going to say this succinctly. I've had at least two jobs and several club, or organization memberships, or founding, or positions since I was 16. So wherever I go, I've always been saying, “Well, I've done it these 47 ways already [laughs] even since I was a teenager.” So I've sort of always had a consulting orientation to take a broader view and figure out ways in which we can systematize whatever it is that's happening around me. Specifically for programming, I had been an administrator, like an executive leader, for many years. I just got tired of trying to explain what we as administrators needed and I just wanted to be able to build the things. I was already a really big Microsoft access person and anybody who just got a little [laughs] snarky in there knows I love Microsoft Access. It really allowed me to be able to offer all kinds of things to, for example, I was on the board of directors of my Kiwanis Club and I made a member directory and attendance tracker and all these things. Anyway, when I quit my executive job and went to code school in 2014, I did it because I knew that I could build something a lot better than this crazy Access database [laughs] that I had, this very involved ETL things going on in. I had a nonprofit that I had been involved with for 15 years at that point and I had also taken a database class where I modeled this large database that I was envisioning. So I had a bunch of things in order. I quit my full-time job and went to an income of $6,500 my first year and I hung with that flagship customer for a while and tailored my software. So I sort of have this straddling of a SaaS situation and a consulting situation. I embed into whoever I'm working with and help them in many ways. Often, people need lots of different levels of coaching, training, and skills development mixed with just a place to put things that makes sense to them. I think that's the brief version [laughs] that I can come up with and that is how I got where I am and I've gone in and out of also having a full-time job. Before I quit that I referenced the first year I worked a full-time job plus at least 40 to a 100 hours on my software to get it ready for prime time. So a lot of, a lot of work. CASEY: Good story. I don't think I ever heard these fuller stories from either of you, even though I know roughly the shape of your past. It's so cool to hear it. Thanks for sharing them. All right, I'll share about me now. So I've been a developer, a PM, and I've done a lot of design work. I've done all the roles over my time in tech. I started doing programming 10, 15 years ago, and I'm always getting burnt out everywhere I go because I care so much and we get asked to do things that seem dumb. I'm sure anyone listening can relate to this in some organization and when I say dumb, I don't use that word myself directly. I'm quoting a lot of people who would use that word, but I say either we're being asked to do things that don't make sense, aren't good ideas, or there are things that are we're being asked to do that would make sense if we knew why and it's not being communicated really well. It's poor communication. Either one, the other, or both. So after a lot of jobs, I end up taking a 3-month sabbatical and I'm like, “Whatever, I got to go. I can't deal with caring so much anymore, and I'm not willing to care less either.” So most recently, I took a sabbatical and I finished my book, Debugging Your Brain, which takes together psychology ideas, like cognitive behavioral therapy and programming ideas and that, I'm so proud of. If you haven't read it yet, please check it out. Then I went back to my job and I gave them another month where I was like, “All right, look, these are things need to change for me to be happy to work here.” Nothing changed, then I left. Maybe it's changing very slowly, but too slowly for me to be happy there, or most of these past companies. [laughs] After I left, this last sabbatical, I spent three to six months working on a board game version of my book. That's a lot of fun. And then I decided I needed more income, I needed to pay the bills, and I can totally be a tech consultant if I just deal with learning marketing and sales. That's been my… probably six months now, I've been working on the marketing in sales part, thinking a lot about it. I have a lot of support from a lot of friends. Now I consult on ways to make teams happier and more effective and that's my company name, Happy and Effective. I found it really easy to sell workshops, like diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops to HR departments. They're pretty hungry for those kinds of workshops and it's hard to find good, effective facilitators. It's a little bit harder to get companies to pay for coaching for their employees, even though a new EM would love coaching and how to be a good leader. Companies don't always have the budget for that set aside and I wish they would. I'm working with a lot of companies. I have a couple, but not as many as I'd like. And then the hardest, my favorite kind of client is when I get to embed with the team and really work on seeing what's going on me on the ground with them, and help understand what's going on to tell the executives what's happening and what needs to change and really make a big change. I've done that once, or twice and I'd love to do that more, but it's the hardest. So I'm thinking about easy, medium, hard difficulty of selling things to clients. I would actually make plenty of money is doing workshops, honestly, but I want the impact of embedding. That's my bigger goal is the impact. MAE: Yeah. I basically have used my software as a Trojan horse for [laughs] offering the consulting and change management services to help them get there because that is something that people already expect to spend some money on. That, though has been a little problematic because a few years in, they start to think that the line item in the budget is only for software and then it looks very expensive to them. Whereas, if they were looking at it as a consultant gig, it's incredibly inexpensive to them. CASEY: Yeah. It's maybe so inexpensive that it must not be a quality product that they're buying. MAE: Yes. CASEY: Put it that way implicitly. MAE: Definitely, there's also that. CASEY: When setting prices, this is a good general rule of thumb. It could be too low it looks like it'll be junk, like a dollar store purchase, or it can be too high and they just can't afford it, and then there's the middle sweet spot where it seems very valuable. They barely can afford it, but they know it'll be worth it, and that's a really good range to be in. MAE: Yeah. Honestly, for the work that I do, it's more of a passion project. I would do it totally for free, but that doesn't work for this reason you're talking about. CASEY: Yeah. MAE: Like, it needs to hurt a little bit because it's definitely going to be lots and lots of my time and it's going to be some of their time and it needs to be an investment that not hurt bad [laughs] but just be noticeable as opposed to here's a Kenny’s Candy, or something. CASEY: I found that works on another scale, on another level. I do career coaching for friends, and friends of friends, and I'm willing to career coach my friends anyway. I've always been. For 10 years, I've reviewed hundreds, thousands of resumes. I've done so many interviews. I'm down to be a career coach, but no one was taking me up on it until I started charging and now friends are coming to me to pay me money to coach them. I think on their side, it feels more equitable. They're more willing to do it now that I'm willing to take money in exchange for it. I felt really bad charging friends until I had the sliding skill. So people who make less, I charge less for, for this personal service. It's kind of weird having a personal service like that, but it works out really well. I'm so happy for so many friends that have gotten jobs they're happy with now from the support. So even charging friends, like charging them nothing means they're not going to sign up for it. MAE: Yes, and often, there is a bias of like, “Oh, well, that's my friend.” [laughs] so they must not be a BFD.” CASEY: Yeah. But we are all BFDs. MAE: Exactly! How about you Chelsea? How did you start to get to the do the pricing thing? CHELSEA: Yeah, I think it's interesting to hear y'all's approaches to the marketing and the pricing because mine has been pretty different from that. But before I get off on that, one thing I do want to mention around getting started with offering personal services at price is that if it seems too large a step to offer a personal service to one person for an amount of money, one thing that I have witnessed folks have success with in starting out in this vein is to set up a Patreon and then have office hours for patrons wherein they spend 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon, or something like that and anyone who is a patron is welcome to join. What often ends up happening for folks in that situation is that people who are friends of theirs support their Patreon and then the friends can show up. So effectively, folks are paying a monthly fee for access to this office hours, which they might attend, or they might not attend. But there are two nice things about it. The first thing about it is that you're not – from a psychological perspective, it doesn’t feel like charging your friends for your time with them. It feels more indirect than that in a way that can be helpful for folks who are very new to charging for things and uncomfortable with the idea. The second thing is that the friends are often much more willing to pay than somebody who's new to charging is willing to charge. So the friends are putting this money into this Patreon, usually not because they're trying to get access to your office hours, but because they want to support you and one of the nice things about Patreon is that it is a monthly amount. So having a monthly email from Patreon that's like, “Hey, you we're sending you—” it doesn't even have to be a lot. “We're sending you 40 bucks this month.” It is a helpful conditioning exercise for folks who are not used to charging because they are getting this regular monthly income and the amount is not as important as receiving the regular income, which is helpful psychological preparation for charging for things on your own, I think. That's not the way that I did it, but I have seen people be effective that way. So there's that. For me, marketing was something that I was very worried about having to do when I started my business. In fact, it was one of those things where my conviction, when I started my consulting business, was I do not want to have to sell my services. I will coast on what clients I can find and when it is no longer easy, I will just get a full-time job because selling traditionally conceptualized is not something that I enjoyed. I had a head start on the marketing element of things, that is sort of the brand awareness element of things, my reputation and the reason for that is that first of all, I had consulted at Labs for several years, which meant that every client team that I had ever worked with there, the director remembered me, the product owner remember me. So a lot of people who had been clients of Labs – I didn't actually get anybody to be a client of mine who was a client of Labs, but the individuals I had worked with on those projects who had then changed jobs to go to different companies, reached out to me on some occasions. So that was one place that I got clients from. The other place that I gotten clients from has been my blog. Before I started my business, I had already been writing a tech blog for like 4, or 5 years and my goal with the tech blog has never actually been to get clientele, or make money. My goals for the blog when I started it were to write down what I was learning so that I would remember it and then after that, it was to figure out how to communicate my ideas so that I would have an easier time communicating them in the workplace. After that, it became an external validation source so that I would no longer depend on my individual manager's opinion of me to decide how good I was at programming. Only very recently has it changed to something like, okay, now I'm good enough at communicating and good enough at tech that I actually have something to teach anybody else. So honestly, for many years, I would see the viewership on my blog and I would be like, “Who are all these people? Why are they in my house?” Like, this is weird, but I would get some credibility from that. CASEY: They don't expect any tea from me. CHELSEA: Yeah. I really hope. I don't have enough to go around, [laughs] but it did help and that's where a lot of folks have kind of come from. Such that when I posted on my blog a post about how I'm going to be going indie. I've quit my job. I didn't really expect that to go anywhere, but a few people did reach out from that and I've been lucky insofar is that that has helped me sustain a client load in a way that I didn't really expect to. There's also, I would be remiss not to mention that what I do is I sling code for money for the majority of my consulting business, at least historically and especially in the beginning was exclusively that, and there's enough of a demand to have somebody come in and write code that that helped. It also helped that as I was taking on clients, I started to niche down specifically what I wanted to work on to a specific type of client and to a specific type problem. So I quickly got to the point where I had enough of a client load that I was going to have to make a choice about which clients to accept, or I was going to have to work over time. Now, the conventional wisdom in this circumstance is to raise your rates. Vast majority of business development resources will tell you that that's what you're supposed to do in this situation. But part of my goal in creating my consulting business had been to get out of burnout and part of the reason for the burnout was that I did not feel that the work that I was doing was contributing to a cause that made me feel good about what I was doing. It wasn't morally reprehensible, but I just didn't feel like I was contributing to a better future in the way that my self-identity sort of mandated that I did. It was making me irritable and all these kinds of things. MAE: I had the same thing, yeah. CHELSEA: Yeah. So it's interesting to hear that that's a common experience, but if I were to raise my rates, the companies that were still going to be able to afford me were going to be companies whose products were not morally reprehensible, but not things that coincided with what I was trying to get out of my consulting business. So what I did instead was I said, “I'm specifically looking to work with organizations that are contributing to basic scientific research, improving access for underserved communities, and combating the effects of climate change,” and kept my rates effectively the same, but niche down the clientele to that. That ended up being kind of how I did it. I find that rates vary from client to client in part, because of what you were talking about, Casey, wherein you have to hit the right price in order to even get clients board in certain circumstances. CASEY: Right. CHELSEA: I don't know a good way to guess it. My technique for this, which I don't know if this is kosher to say, but my technique for this has been whoever reached out to me, interested in bringing me on as a consultant for that organization, I ask that person to do some research and figure out what rate I'm supposed to pitch. That has helped a lot because a lot of times my expectations have been wildly off in those circumstances. One time I had somebody say to me, this was for a custom workshop they wanted. I was like, “What should I charge?” And they were like, “I don't know, a few thousand.” I was like, “Is that $1,200? Is that $9,000? I don't know how much money that is,” and so they went back and then they came back and they were able to tell me more specifically a band. There was absolutely no way I would've hit that number accurately without that information. CASEY: Yeah, and different clients have different numbers. You setting your price standard flat across all customers is not a good strategy either. That's why prices aren't on websites so often. CHELSEA: Yeah. I find that it does depend a lot. There's similarly, like I said, a lot of my clients are clients who are contributing to basic scientific research are very often grant funded and grants funding is a very particular kind of funding. It can be intermittent. There has to be a skillset on the team for getting the grant funding. A lot of times, to be frank, it doesn't support the kinds of rates that somebody could charge hourly in a for-profit institution. So for me, it was worth it to make the choice that this is who I want to work with. I know that my rate is effectively capped at this, if I'm going to do that and that was fine by me. Although, I'm lying to say it was completely fine by me. I had to take a long, hard look in the mirror, while I was still in that last full-time job, and realize that I had become a person who gauged her self-worth by the salary that she commanded more than I was comfortable with. More than I wanted to. I had to figure out how to weaken that dependency before I was really able to go off and do my own thing. That was my experience with it. I'm curious whether y'all, well, in particular, Casey, did you find the same thing? CASEY: The self-worth by salary? CHELSEA: Yeah. CASEY: I felt that over time, yeah. Like I went from private sector big tech to government and I got a pay cut and I was like, “Ugh.” It kind of hurt a little and it wasn't even as much as I was promised. Once I got through the hiring process, it was lower than that and now I'm making way less. When I do my favorite impact thing, the board game, like if I made a board game about mental health for middle schoolers, which is something I really want to do, that makes less than anything else I could with my time. I'll be lucky to make money on that at all. So it's actually inverse. My salary is inversely proportional to how much impact I can have if I'm working anyway. So my dream is to have enough corporate clients that I can do half-time, or game impact, whatever other impact things I'm thinking about doing. I think of my impact a lot. Impact is my biggest goal, but the thing is salary hurts. If I don't have the salary and I want to live where I'm living and the lifestyle I have, I don't want to cut back on that and I don't need to, hopefully. CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: I'm hoping eventually, I'll have a steady stream of clients, I don't need to do the marketing and sales outreach as much and all those hours I kind of recoup. I can invest those in the impact things. I've heard people can do that. I think I'll get there. CHELSEA: No, I think you absolutely will. Mae, I'm curious as to your experience, because I know that you have a lot of experience with a similar calculation of determining which things are going to provide more income, which things are probably going to provide less income, and then balancing across a bunch of factors like money, but also impact, time spent, emotional drain, and all that stuff. MAE: Well, Chelsea. [laughter] I am a real merry go round in this arena. So before I became a programmer, I had a state job, I was well paid, and I was pretty set. Then I was a programmer and I took huge pay cut because I quit. I became a programmer when I was 37 years old. So I already had a whole career and to start at the beginning and be parallel with 20-year-old so it's not just like my salary, but also my level and my level of impact on my – and level of the amount of people who wanted to ask me for my advice [laughs] was significantly different. So like the ego's joking stopped and so when you mentioned the thing about identity. Doing any kind of consulting in your own deal is a major identity reorganization and having the money, the title, the clout, and the engagement. Like a couple years, I have spent largely alone and that is very different than working at a place where I have colleagues, or when I live somewhere and have roommates. But I have found signing up for lots and lots of different social justice and passion project things, and supporting nonprofits that I believe in. So from my perspective, I'm really offering a capacity building grant out of my own pocket, my own time, and my own heart and that has been deeply rewarding and maybe not feel much about my identity around salary. Except it does make me question myself as an adult. Like these aren't the best financial decisions to be making, [chuckles] but I get enough out of having made them that it's worth it to me. One of the things probably you were thinking of, Chelsea, we worked together a little bit on this mutual aid project that I took on when the pandemic started and I didn't get paid any dollars for that and I was working 18 hours a day on it, [chuckles] or something. So I like to really jump in a wholeheartedly and then once I really, really do need some dollars, then I figure something else out. That is kind of how I've ebbed and flowed with it. But mostly, I've done it by reducing my personal overhead so that I'm not wigged about the money and lowering whatever my quality-of-life spending goals [chuckles] are. But that also has had to happen because I have not wanted to and I couldn't get myself to get excited about marketing of myself and my whole deal. Like I legit still don't have a website and I've been in operation now since 2014 so that's a while. I meet people and I can demonstrate what it is and I get clients and for me, having only a few clients, there's dozens of people that work for each one. So it's more of an organization client than a bunch of individuals and I can't actually handle a ton. I was in a YCombinator thing that wanted me to really be reporting on income, growth rates, and all of these number of new acquisition things, and it just wasn't for me. Those are not my goals. I want to make sure that this nonprofit can help more people this year and that they can get more grant money because they know how many people they helped and that those people are more efficient at their job every day. So those are harder to measure. It's not quite an answer to your question, [laughs] but I took it and ran a little. CHELSEA: No, I appreciate that. There is a software engineer and a teacher that I follow on Twitter. His name is GeePawHill. Are y'all familiar with GeePawHill? MAE: No. CHELSEA: And he did a thread a couple of days ago that this conversation reminds me of and I found it. Is that all right if I read like a piece of it and paraphrase part of it? MAE: Yes, please. CHELSEA: Okay. So this is what he says. He says, “The weirdest thing about being a teacher for young geek minds: I am teaching them things…that their actual first jobs will most likely forbid them to do. The young'uns I work with are actually nearly all hire-able as is, after 18 months of instruction, without any intervention from me. The problem they're going to face when they get to The Show isn't technical, or intellectual at all. No language, or framework, or OS, or library, or algorithm is going to daunt them, not for long. No, the problem they're going to face is how to sustain their connection to the well of geek joy, in a trade that is systematically bent on simultaneously exploiting that connection while denying it exists and refusing any and all access to it. It is possible, to stick it out, to acquire enough space and power, to re-assert one's path to the well. Many have done it; many are doing it today. But it is very hard. Very hard. Far harder than learning the Visitor pattern, or docker, or, dart, or SQL, or even Haskell. How do you tell people you've watched “become” as they bathed in the cool clear water that, for some long time, 5 years or more, they must…navigate the horrors of extractive capitalist software development? The best answer I have, so far, is to try and teach them how and where to find water outside of work. It is a lousy answer. I feel horrible giving it. But I'd feel even more horrible if I didn't tell them the truth.” CASEY: I just saw this thread and I really liked it, too. I'm glad you found it. MAE: Oh, yeah. I find it honestly pretty inspiring, like people generally who get involved in the kinds of consulting gigs that we three are talking about, which is a little different than just any random consulting, or any random freelancing. CASEY: Like impact consulting, I might call that. MAE: Yeah. It's awesome if the money comes, but it's almost irrelevant [chuckles] provided that basic needs are meant. So that's kind of been my angle. We'll see how – talk to me in 20 more years when I'm [chuckles] trying to retire and made a lot of choices that I was happy with at the time. CASEY: This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who's an executive director of an orchestra in the nonprofit space and he was telling me that so many nonprofits shoot themselves in the foot by not doing enough fundraising, by not raising money, and that comes from not wanting to make money in a way because they're a nonprofit, money is not a motive, and everybody's very clear about that. That's noble and all, but it ends up hurting them because they don't have the money to do the impactful things they would as a nonprofit. Money is a necessary evil here and a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. Including me a lot of the time. Honestly, I have to tell myself not to. What would I tell a friend? “No, charge more money.” Okay, I guess I'll tell myself to do that now. I have this conversation with myself a lot. MAE: Yeah. I've been very aware that when I become anti-money, the well dries up. The money well. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah. MAE: And when I am respectful of and appreciative of money in the world, more comes my way. There is an internal dousing, I think that happens that one needs to be very careful about for sure. CASEY: One of the techniques I use with myself and with clients is a matrix where I write out for this approach, this thing that I'm thinking about how much money will it make, how much impact will it have on this goal, and all the different heuristics I would use to make the decision, or columns and all the options arose. I put numbers in it and I might weight my columns because money is less important than impact, but it's still important. It's there. I do all this math. In the end, the summary column with the averages roughly matches what's in my head, which is the things that are similar in my head are similar on paper, but I can see why and that's very clarifying for me. I really like being able to see it in this matrix form and being able to see that you have to focus on the money some amount. If you just did the high impact one, it wouldn't be on the top of the list. It's like, it's hard to think about so many variables at once, but seeing it helps me. CHELSEA: It is. GeePaw speaks to that some later in the thread. He says, “You’ve got to feed your family. You’ve got to. That's not negotiable. But you don't got to forget the well. To be any good at all, you have to keep finding the well, keep reaching it, keep noticing it. Doesn't matter whether it's office hours, or after hours. Matters whether you get to it. The thing you’ve got to watch, when you become a professional geek, isn't the newest tech, and it sure as hell isn't the org's process. You’ve got to watch whether, or how you're getting to the well. If you're getting to the well, in whatever way, you'll stay alive and change the world.” I think I'm curious as to y'all's thoughts on this, but like I mentioned earlier, I have a full-time job and I also do this consulting on the side. I also teach. I teach at the Master's program in computer science at University of Chicago. I do some mentoring with an organization called Emergent Works, which trains formerly incarcerated technologists. The work situation that I have pieced together for myself, I think manages to get me the income I need and also, the impact that I'm looking for and the ability to work with people and those kinds of things. I think my perspective at this point is that it's probably difficult, if it's realistic at all, to expect any one position to be able to meet all of those needs simultaneously. Maybe they exist, but I suspect that they're relatively few and far between and I think that we probably do ourselves a disservice by propagating this idea that what you need to do is just make yourself so supremely interview-able that everybody wants to hire you and then you get to pick the one position where you get to do that because there's only one in the entirety of tech, it's that rare. Sure, maybe that's an individualist way to look at it. But when we step back and look more closely, or when we step back and look more broadly at that, it's like, all right, so we have to become hypercompetitive in order to be able to get the position where we can make enough while helping people. Like, the means there seem kind of cutthroat for the ends, right? [laughs] CASEY: This reminds me of relationships, too and I think there's a lot of great parallels here. Like you shouldn't expect your partner to meet all of your needs, all of them. MAE: I was thinking the same thing! CASEY: Uh huh. Social, emotional, spiritual, physical, all your needs cannot possibly by one person and that is so much pressure to put on that person, CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: It's like not healthy. CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: You can choose some to prioritize over others for your partner, but you're not going to get a 100% of it and you shouldn't. CHELSEA: Well, and I find that being a conversation fairly regularly in monogamous versus polyamorous circles as well. Like, how much is it appropriate to expect of a partner? But I think it is a valid conversation to have in those circles. But I think that even in the context of a monogamous relationship, a person has other relationships—familial relationships, friend relationships—outside of that single romantic relationship. CASEY: Co-workers, community people, yeah. CHELSEA: Right. But even within that monogamous context, it's most realistic and I would argue, the most healthy to not expect any one person to provide for all of your needs and rather to rely on a community. That's what we're supposed to be able to do. CASEY: Yeah. MAE: Interdependence, not independence. CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: It's more resilient in the face of catastrophe, or change in general, mild, more mild change and you want to be that kind of resilient person for yourself, too. Just like you would do a computer system, or an organization. They should be resilient, too. MAE: Yes. CASEY: Your relationship with your job is another one. MAE: Totally. CHELSEA: Right. And I think that part of the reason the burnout is so quick – like the amount of time, the median amount of time that somebody spends at a company in tech is 2.2 years. MAE: I know, it's so weird. CHELSEA: Very few companies in tech have a large number of lifers, for example, or something like that. There are a number of reasons for that. We don't necessarily have to get into all of them, although, we can if you want. But I think one of them is definitely that we expect to get so much out of a full-time position. Tech is prone. due to circumstances of its origin, to an amount of idealism. We are saving the world. We, as technologists, are saving the world and also, we, as technologists, can expect this salary and we, as technologists, are a family and we play ping pong, and all of these things – [laughter] That contribute to an unrealistic expectation of a work environment, which if that is the only place that we are getting fulfillment as programmers, then people become unsatisfied very quickly because how could an organization that's simultaneously trying to accomplish a goal, meet all of these expect for everybody? I think it's rare at best. CASEY: I want to bring up another example of this kind of thing. Imagine you're an engineer and you have an engineering manager. What's their main job? Is it to get the organization's priorities to be done by the team, like top-down kind of thing? We do need that to happen. Or is it to mentor each individual and coach them and help them grow as an engineer? We need that somewhere, too, yeah. Or is it to make the team – like the team to come together as a team and be very effective together and to represent their needs to the org? That, too, but we don't need one person to do all three of those necessarily. If the person's not technical, you can get someone else in the company to do technical mentorship, like an architect, or just a more senior person on, or off the team somewhere else. But we put a lot of pressure on the engineering managers to do that and this applies to so many roles. That's just one I know that I can define pretty well. There's an article that explains that pretty well. We'll put in the show notes. MAE: Yes! So what I am currently doing is I have a not 40 hours a week job as an engineering manager and especially when I took the gig, I was still doing all of these pandemic charity things and I'm like, “These are more important to me right now and I only have so many hours in the day. So do you need me to code at this place? I can, but do you need me to because all those hours are hours I can go code for all these other things that I'm doing,” and [laughs] it worked. I have been able to do all three of the things that you're talking about, Casey, but certainly able to defer in different places and it's made me – this whole thing of not working full-time makes you optimize in very different ways. So I sprinkle my Slack check-ins all day, but I didn't have to work all day to be present all day. There's a lot that has been awesome. It's not for everyone, but I also have leaned heavily on technical mentorship happening from tech leads as well. CASEY: Sounds good. MAE: But I'm still involved. But this thing about management, especially in tech being whichever programmer seems like the most dominant programmer is probably going to be a good needs to be promoted into management. Just P.S. management is its own discipline, has its own trajectory and when I talk to hiring managers and they only care about my management experience in tech, which is 6 years, right? 8, but I have 25 years of experience in managing. So there's a preciousness of what it is that we are asking for the employees and what the employees are asking of the employer, like you were talking about Chelsea, that is very interesting. It's very privileged, and does lead a lot of people to burnout and disappointment because their ideas got so lofty. I just want to tie this back a little bit too, something you read in that quote about – I forget the last quote, but it was something about having enough to be able to change the world and it reminded me of Adrienne Maree Brown, pleasure activism, emergent strategy, and all of her work, and largely, generations of Black women have been saying, “Yo, you’ve got to take care [chuckles] of yourself to be able to affect change.” Those people have been the most effective and powerful change makers. So definitely, if you're curious about this topic, I urge you to go listen to some brilliant Black women about it. CASEY: We'll link that in the show notes, too. I think a lot about engineering managers and one way that doesn't come up a lot is you can get training for engineering managers to be stronger managers and for some reason, that is not usually an option people reach for. It could happen through HR, or it could happen if you have a training budget and you're a new EM, you could use your training budget to hire coaching from someone. I'm an example. But there's a ton of people out there that offer this kind of thing. If you don't learn the leadership skills when you switch roles, if you don't take time to learn those skills that are totally learnable, you're not going to have them and it's hard to apply them. There's a lot of pressure to magically know them now that you’ve switched hats. MAE: And how I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have a therapist, [laughs] I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have multiple job coaches at any time. Like why are we not sourcing more ideas and problem-solving strategies, and thinking we need to be the repository of how to handle X, Y, Z situation? CASEY: For some reason, a lot of people I've talked to think their manager is supposed to do that for them. Their manager is supposed to be their everything; their boss. They think the boss that if they're bad, you quit your job. If they're good, you'll stay. That boss ends up being their career coach for people, unless they're a bad career coach and then you're just stuck. Because we expect it so strongly and that is an assumption I want everyone listening to question. Do you need your manager at work to be that person for you? If they are, that's great. You're very fortunate. If not, how can you find someone? Someone in the community, a friend, family member, a professional coach, there's other options, other mentors in the company. You don't have to depend on that manager who doesn't have time for you to give you that kind of support. CHELSEA: So to that end, my thinking around management and mentorship changed about the time I hit – hmm. It was a while ago now, I don't know, maybe 6 years as a programmer, or something like that. Because before that, I was very bought into this idea that your manager is your mentor and all these types of things. There was something that I realized. There were two things that I realized. The first one was that, for me, most of my managers were not well set up to be mentors to me and this is why. Well, the truth is I level up quickly and for many people who are managers in a tech organization, they were technologists for 3 to 5 years before they became managers. They were often early enough in their career that they didn't necessarily know what management entailed, or whether they should say no based on what they were interested in. Many managers in tech figure out what the job is and then try to find as many surreptitious ways as possible to get back into the code. MAE: Yeah. CHELSEA: Additionally, many of those managers feel somewhat insecure about their weakening connection to the code base of the company that they manage. MAE: Yeah. CHELSEA: And so it can be an emotionally fraught experience for them to be mentor to someone whose knowledge of the code base that they are no longer in makes them feel insecure. So I learned that the most effective mentors for me – well, I learned something about the most effective mentors for me and I learned something of the most effective managers for me. I learned that the most effective managers for me either got way out ahead of me experience wise before they became managers, I mean 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, because those are not people who got promoted to management because they didn't know to say no. Those are people who got promoted to management after they got tired of writing code and they no longer staked their self-image on whether they're better coders than the people that they manage. That's very, very important. The other type of person who was a good manager for me was somebody who had never been a software engineer and there are two reasons for that. First of all, they trended higher on raw management experience. Second of all, they were not comparing their technical skillset to my technical skillset in a competitive capacity and that made them better managers for me, honestly. It made things much, much easier. And then in terms of mentors, I found that I had a lot more luck going outside of the organization I was working for mentors and that's again, for two reasons. The first one is that a lot of people, as they gain experience, go indie. Just a lot of people, like all kinds. Some of my sort of most trusted mentors. Avdi Grimm is somebody I've learned a lot from, indie effectively at this point. GeePawHill, like I mentioned, indie effectively at this point. Kenneth Mayer, indie effectively at this point. And these are all people who had decades of experience and the particular style of programming that I was doing very early in my career for many years. So that's the first reason. And then the second reason is that at your job, it is in your interest to succeed at everything you try—at most jobs. And jobs will tell you it's okay to fail. Jobs will tell you it's okay to like whatever, not be good at things and to be learning. But because if I'm drawing a paycheck from an organization, I do not feel comfortable not being good at the thing that I am drawing the paycheck for. MAE: Same. CHELSEA: And honestly, even if they say that that's the case, when the push comes to shove and there's a deadline, they don't actually want you to be bad at things. Come on! That doesn't make any sense. But I've been able to find ambitious projects that I can contribute to not for pay and in those situations, I'm much more comfortable failing because I can be like, “You know what, if they don't like my work, they can have all their money back.” And I work on a couple projects like that right now where I get to work with very experienced programmers on projects that are interesting and challenging, and a lot of times, I just absolutely eat dirt. My first PR doesn't work and I don't know what's wrong and the whole description is like somebody please help and I don't feel comfortable doing that on – if I had to do it at work, I would do it, but I'm not comfortable doing it. I firmly believe that for people to accelerate their learning to their full capacity for accelerating their learning, they must place themselves in situations where they not only might fail, but it's pretty likely. Because that's what's stretching your capacity to the degree that you need to get better and that's just not a comfortable situation for somewhere that you depend on to make a living. And that ended up being, I ended up approaching my management and my mentorship as effectively mutually exclusive things and it ended up working out really well for me. At this particular point in time, I happened to have a manager who happened to get way out ahead of me technically, and is willing to review PRs and so, that's very nice. But it's a nice-to-have. It's not something that I expect of a manager and it's ended up making me much more happy and manage relationships. MAE: I agree with all of that. So well said, Chelsea. CHELSEA: I try, I try. [laughs] Casey, are there things that you look for specifically in a manager? CASEY: Hmm. I guess for that question, I want to take the perspective inward, into myself. What do I need support on and who can I get that from? And this is true as also an independent worker as a consultant freelancer, too. I need support for when things are hard and I can be validated from people who have similar experiences, that kind of like emotional support. I need technical support and skills, like the sales I don't have yet and I have support for that, thank goodness. Individuals, I need ideally communities and individuals, both. They're both really important to me and some of these could be in a manager, but lately, I'm my own manager and I can be none of those things, really. I'm myself. I can't do this external support for myself. Even when I'm typing into a spreadsheet and the computer's trying to be a mirror, it's not as good as talking to another person. Another perspective that I need support on is how do I know what I'm doing is important and so, I do use spreadsheets as a mirror for that a lot of the time for myself. Like this impact is having this kind of magnitude of impact on this many people and then that calculates to this thing, maybe. Does that match my gut? That's literally what I want to know, too. The numbers aren't telling me, but talking to other people about impact on their projects really kind of solidifies that for me. And it's not always the client directly. It could be someone else who sees the impact I'm having on a client. Kind of like the manager, I don't want to expect clients to tell me the impact I'm having. In fact, for business reasons, I should know what the impact is myself, to tell them, to upsell them and continue it going anyway. So it really helps me to have peers to talk through about impact. Like that, too types of support. What other kinds of support do you need as consultants that I didn't just cover? MAE: I still need – and I have [laughs] hired Casey to help me. I still need a way to explain what it is that I am offering and what the value of that really is in a way that is clear and succinct. Every time I've gone to make a website, or a list of what it is that I offer, I end up in the hundreds of bullet points [laughs] and I just don't – [overtalk] CASEY: Yeah, yeah. MAE: Have a way to capture it yet. So often when people go indie, they do have a unique idea, a unique offering so finding a way to summarize what that is can be really challenging. I loved hearing you two when you were talking about knowing what kinds of work you want to do and who your ideal customer is. Those are things I have a clearer sense of, but how to make that connection is still a little bit of a gap for me. But you reminded me in that and I just want to mention here this book, The Pumpkin Plan, like a very bro business book situation, [chuckles] but what is in there is so good. I don't want to give it away and also, open up another topic [laughs] that I'll talk too long about. So I won't go into it right now, but definitely recommend it. One of the things is how to call your client list and figure out what is the most optimal situation that's going to lead toward the most impact for everybody. CASEY: One of the things I think back to a lot is user research and how can we apply that this business discovery process. I basically used the same techniques that were in my human computer interaction class I took 10, or 15 years ago. Like asking open ended questions, trying to get them to say what their problems are, remembering how they said it in their own words and saying it back to them—that's a big, big step. But then there's a whole lot of techniques I didn't learn from human computer interaction, that are sales techniques, and my favorite resource for that so far is called SPIN selling where SPIN is an acronym and it sounds like a wonky technique that wouldn't work because it's just like a random technique to pull out. I don't know, but it's not. This book is based on studies and it shows what you need to do to make big ticket sales go through, which is very different than selling those plastic things with the poppy bubbles in the mall stand in the middle of the hallway. Those low-key things they can manipulate people into buying and people aren't going to return it probably. But big-ticket things need a different approach than traditional sales and marketing knowledge and I really like the ideas in SPIN selling. I don't want to go into them today. We'll talk about it later. But those are two of the perspectives I bring to this kind of problem, user research and the SPIN selling techniques. I want to share what my ideal client would be. I think that's interesting, too. So I really want to help companies be happier and more effective. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective, and that has the impact on the users of the company, or whoever their clients are. It definitely impacts that, which makes it a thing I can sell, thankfully. So an organization usually knows when they're not the most happy, or the most effective. They know it, but my ideal client isn't just one that knows that, but they also have leadership buy-in; they have some leader who really cares and can advocate for making it better and they just don't know how. They don't have enough resources to make it happen in their org. Maybe they have, or don't have experience with it, but they need support. That's where I come in and then my impact really is on the employees. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective. That's the direct impact I want, and then it has the really strong, indirect impact on the business outcomes. So in that vein, I'm willing to help even large tech companies because if I can help their employees be happier, that is a positive impact. Even if I don't care about large tech companies’ [chuckles] business outcomes, I'm okay with that because my focus is specifically on the employees. That's different than a lot of people I talk to; they really just want to support like nonprofit type, stronger impact of the mission and that totally makes sense to me, too. MAE: Also, it is possible to have a large and ever growing equitably run company. It is possible. I do want to contribute toward that existing in the world and as much as there's focus on what the ultimate looking out impact is, I care about the experience of employees and individuals on the way to get there. I'm not a utilitarian thinker. CASEY: Yeah, but we can even frame it in a utilitarian way if we need to. If we're like a stakeholder presentation, if someone leaves the company and it takes six months to replace them and their work is in the meantime off board to other people, what's the financial impact of all that. I saw a paper about it. Maybe I can dig it up and I'll link to it. It's like to replace a person in tech it costs a $100K. So if they can hire a consultant for less than a $100K to save one person from leaving, it pays for itself. If that number is right, or whatever. Maybe it was ten employees for that number. The paper will say much better than I will. CHELSEA: I think that in mentioning that Casey, you bring up something that businesses I think sometimes don't think about, which is some of the hidden costs that can easily be difficult to predict, or difficult to measure those kinds of things. One of the hidden costs is the turnover costs is the churn cost because there's how much it takes to hire another person and then there's the amount of ramp time before that person gets to where the person who left was. CASEY: Right, right, right. CHELSEA: And that's also a thing. There's all the time that developers are spending on forensic software analysis in order to find out all of the context that got dropped when a person left. CASEY: Yeah. The one person who knew that part of the code base, the last one is gone, uh oh. CHELSEA: Right. CASEY: It's a huge trust. And then engineering team is often really interested in conveying that risk. But if they're not empowered enough and don't have enough bandwidth time and energy to make the case, the executive team, or whoever will never hear it and they won't be able to safeguard against it. MAE: Or using the right language to communicate it. CASEY: Right, right. And that’s its own skill. That's trainable, too thankfully. But we don't usually train engineers in that, traditionally. Engineers don't receive that training unless they go out of their way for it. PMs and designers, too, honestly. Like the stakeholder communication, everybody can work on. MAE: Yeah. CASEY: That's true. MAE: Communication. Everyone can, or not. Yes. [laughs] I learned the phrase indie today. I have never heard it and I really like it! It makes me feel cool inside and so love and – [overtalk] CASEY: Yeah, I have no record label, or I am my own record label, perhaps. MAE: Yo! CASEY: I've got one. I like the idea of having a Patreon, not to make money, but to have to help inspire yourself and I know a lot of friends have had Patreons with low income from it and they were actually upset about it. So I want to go back to those friends and say, “Look, this prove some people find value in what you're doing.” Like the social impact. I might make my own even. Thank you. MAE: I know I might do it too. It's good. That's good. CHELSEA: Absolutely. Highly recommended. One thing that I want to take away is the exercise, Casey, that you were talking about of tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes in terms of a person's needs. Because I think that an exercise like that would be extremely helpful for, for example, some of my students who are getting their very first tech jobs. Students receive a very one-dimensional message about the way that tech employment goes. It tends to put set of five companies that show remain unnamed front and center, which whatever, but I would like them to be aware of the other options. And there is a very particular way of gauging the value of a tech position that I believe includes fewer dimensions than people should probably consider for the health of their career long-term and not only the health of their career, but also their health in their career. CASEY: One more parting thought I want to share for anyone is you need support for your career growth, for your happiness. If you're going to be a consultant, you need support for that. Find support in individuals and communities, you deserve that support and you can be that support for the people who are supporting you! It can be mutual. They need that, too.

Content warnings for discussion of pandemic and sickness, American politics, and mental health issues. In this special episode of Greater Than Code, several of our panelists have a candid conversation about the current COVID-19 situation, how it has been affecting them personally, and how they believe it will affect the tech industry as a whole. Discussion topics include how it feels both to be working and unemployed during the pandemic, productivity while quarantined, the effect on WFH and conference culture, the current political climate, and human resiliency in the face of the unknown. Links Mentioned: I Want to Know What Day It Is - Foreigner Parody (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH4TVYT1OYQ) Becoming More Fully Human with Virginia Satir (https://www.awaken.com/2017/03/becoming-more-fully-human-with-virginia-satir/) Additional show notes: Jamey wanted to report that after recording was finished, they called their favorite restaurant back and was able to successfully order takeout after all. . . . . This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

00:56 - Chris’ Superpower: Not Knowing In Public * Asking Questions 02:53 - Source Documents and Their Relation To People * Grace Hopper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper) * Maintaining Code to Give People Context (Writing Code For People) * Critical Complexity * Indu Alagarsamy (https://indu.dev/) 06:44 - Encouraging Others To Write Code For People * Modeling Behavior * Event Storming * ECO Mapping (Ego, Command, Outcome) (http://chrisstead.net/2020/01/17/ECO-mapping.html) * Creating Culture * Arlo Belshee: Naming is a Process (http://arlobelshee.com/tag/naming-is-a-process/) 12:39 - Naming Things in Code / Narratives in Software and Business 18:53 - Asking the Right Questions * Google-Fu (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Google-fu) * Mobbing Interviews 22:38 - Interviewing for the Benefit of the Interviewee * The Problem with Being Transactional * It’s People All The Way Down * Empathetic Interviewing 33:44 - Treating People as People; Making Things More Humane * Peopleware (https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Tom-DeMarco/dp/0932633439) * Books by Gerald Weinburg (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Gerald+Weinburg&ref=nb_sb_noss) * The Mythical Man-Month (https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Anniversary-Software-Engineering-ebook/dp/B00B8USS14/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1L37LXA2PI79D&dchild=1&keywords=mythical+man+month&qid=1586297658&sprefix=mythical+man%2Caps%2C164&sr=8-2) * The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings On Linux And Open Source By An Accidental Revolutionary (https://www.amazon.com/Cathedral-Bazaar-Musings-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/0596001088) * Willem Larsen (https://twitter.com/techgreatness) 38:23 - Code Stores Emotion * Measuring Progression * The Valley of Despair 45:19 - Deciding: “Will this be helpful for someone else?” Reflections: Jessica: The idea that code can convey emotions. Even code can be Greater Than Code. John: Structuring interviews with goals around comfort and familiarity so people can perform at their best. Jamey: Imbuing things with the feeling when you wrote it. Chris: If you’re feeling frustrated, kind is great. Also, everything is a systemic whole. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Chris Stead.

01:44 - Ruben’s Superpower: Believing in people more than they believe in themselves and helping people to meet their potential. 03:00 - How Ruben Developed His Superpower * Natural Belief In Self * Father and Mother’s Example 06:35 - Benefits Of Being Underestimated * Conquering Challenges * Career Karma Coaches And Squads 11:15 - Career Karma Success Story 13:50 - Fires Lit Inside 15:03 - Origin Of Career Karma * App Launched January 2019 * CareerKarma.com/schools (http://www.careerkarma.com/schools) * Learn And Experience The Companies * Breaking into Startups (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/breaking-startups-ruben-harris-1?articleId=5964022070152015872#comments-5964022070152015872&trk=public_profile_article_view) * The Reality of Breaking Into Startups: The First Product You Build Is Yourself (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reality-breaking-startups-first-product-you-build-yourself-harris?articleId=6121165669871411200#comments-6121165669871411200&trk=public_profile_article_view) 18:10 - How Career Karma Secured Funding 23:38 - What Makes The Success Of Career Karma Different * Culture of Experimentation 25:25 - What It Feels Like To Know You Are Doing What You Are Meant To Be Doing * Pay Attention To The Patterns In Your Life 31:21 - Impact of Coronavirus 36:15 - Who Will Benefit From Remote Work 38:00 - The Career Karma Team * Pay It Forward 42:30 - If You Want To Be A Master In Life, You Have To Submit To A Master 44:30 - What’s On The Horizon For Career Karma 48:20 - The Biggest Lesson Ruben Has Learned Thus Far LINKS: State of the Bootcamp Market Report 2020 (https://careerkarma.com/blog/bootcamp-market-report-2020/) Remote Working Tips and Complete Guide to Telecommuting in 2020 (https://careerkarma.com/blog/remote-working-guide/) How to Pay for Coding Bootcamp: The Ultimate Guide (https://careerkarma.com/blog/how-to-pay-for-coding-bootcamp-ultimate-guide/) Income Share Agreements: State of the Market 2019 (https://careerkarma.com/blog/income-share-agreement-market-report-2019/) This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Ruben Harris.

00:57 - Eric’s Superpower: The Ability To Explain Things In A Way That Makes Sense To Most People 02:37 - Legacy Capability Of The Web * Web Technologies Are Long Term * Frameworks * Lynx (https://lynx.browser.org) * Y2K 11:30 - Creating Long Term Within Frameworks * Static Can Be Good 15:50 - Ethical Dimensions * RAINN (https://www.rainn.org) * Information Accessible As Widely As Possible * Long Term vs. Short Term Code 20:50 - Longevity Of The Web 23:11 - Edge Cases - Stress Cases * Evan Hensleigh @futuraprime (https://twitter.com/futuraprime) * Design For Real Life (https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-life) 25:44 - Make Everything Accessible To The Most People * Diverse Teams Are Stronger * Making Assumptions * Write People Off Explicitly 44:00 - Design For Real Life * Challenging Team Assumptions * The Designated Dissenter * Sarah Parmenter @sazzy (https://twitter.com/sazzy) Reflections: John: The designated dissenter idea. Doing a pre-mortem on a project - planning ahead. Carina: A whole other conversation could come of the philosophy of agile and move fast and break things. Jacob: How the dissenter could be a challenging position to be in. Eric: The dissenter is stress testing, not criticizing. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Eric A. Meyer.

01:38 - What Does Resilience Mean To The Panelists? * John - [It’s] Like A Flexible Tree That Can Bend With The Wind Or Environment - It Does Not Resist Or Break * Chanté - Tenacity And Grit And Being Able To Cope Or Withstand Something That You Didn’t Foresee - It Doesn’t Break You, It Makes You Stronger * Antifragile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile) * Rein - [It’s] About Unforeseen Surprises 03:36 - Thoughts On David Woods - Four Concepts for Resilience (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276139783_Four_concepts_for_resilience_and_the_implications_for_the_future_of_resilience_engineering) * Resilience As Rebound * Resilience As Robustness * Resilience As The Opposite Of Brittleness * Resilience As Sustained Adaptability 04:49 - Applying Resilience To Leadership * High Performance Organization - HPO (https://www.hpocenter.com) * People Make Up Companies 14:40 - The Difference Between Sustainability And Resilience 17:20 - Welcoming The Resilient Mindset 18:30 - Creating And Acknowledging Resilience 21:54 - Organization Resilience And Adaptive Capacity * Richard Cook’s REdeploy 2019 Talk On The Resilience Of Bone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LbePBiOvZ4&t=3s) * Convincing Employers To Become More Resilient To Reduce Harm To Employees 27:15 - Resilience Related To Diversity And Inclusion * Families And Communities 31:00 - Resilience Within Software Development * Software Being Made Robust, Not Resilient * Rejection Proof (https://www.amazon.com/Rejection-Proof-Became-Invincible-Through/dp/080414138X#ace-g8881249860) - A Parallel Between People And Software * Casey Rosenthal REdeploy2019 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSLBKoFi1jk) 36:27 - What Price Do We Pay For Not Prioritizing Resiliency * Existential Risk 39:00 - Rein’s Wrap-Up On Resilience This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

02:22 - Coraline Talks About Her Work With The Open Source Movement * Seth Vargo: @sethvargo (https://twitter.com/sethvargo) * The Open Source License - The Hippocratic License (https://github.com/EthicalSource/hippocratic-license) * Bruce Perens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens) 08:14 - Who Wrote The Open Source License * The Libertarian Platform * Balancing Our Individual Freedoms With Societal Good 10:26 - The Open Source Initiative (https://opensource.org/) 11:25 - Licensing And The Evolution Of Open Source * Realizing The Impact Of Open Source On Human Society * The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thomas-Kuhn/dp/0226458083) - Thomas Kuhn * Procrastination * Assimilation * Revolution 18:43 - Litigation Thoughts * Promoting Arbitration Over Litigation * Advantages Of Adopting The License * Putting The Power In The Hands Of The Creators 23:31 - Creators’ Rights * Corporations Are Benefiting From The Free Labor Of The Community 26:00 - Tying The Hippocratic License To Open Source * The Declaration of Human Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights) * Matt Boehm: @bigolewannabe (https://twitter.com/bigolewannabe) * Accepting Critique * The Ethical Source Working Group (https://ethicalsource.dev/) 28:48 - Other Prongs Of Approach Other Than The License * Scholarship 30:50 - Coraline’s Candidacy For The OSI Board * Tobie Langel: @tobie (https://twitter.com/tobie) 34:00 - What Open Source Means To The Panelists 38:50 - The Concept Of Community * How Maintainers Have Changed Their Relationships With Communities * Writing Values And Aspirations In Codes Of Conduct ethicalsource.dev (https://ethicalsource.dev/) firstdonoharm.dev (https://firstdonoharm.dev/) This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

02:12 - Miko’s Superpower: Not Knowing Things. 03:30 - Coming To Your Senses * Breaking Out Of Thinking * Detecting - Venture Capitalism * Pattern Making And Pattern Matching 06:45 - Understand The Limits Of What You Can Know And What You Do Know * Knowing People * Knowing Industries * Most Humans Don’t Know A Lot Of Things * Impermanence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence) 11:45 - Human Decision Making Is An Embodied Process * The Gut Feeling * Enteric Nervous System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system) * Sympathetic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_nervous_system) And Parasympathetic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasympathetic_nervous_system) Nervous Systems * Central Nervous System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system) * The Heart Feelings * Feelings Are Emotions 18:30 - Interviews As Coachable And Teachable Moments * The Gig Economy (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gig-economy.asp) * Prioritizing The Development Of Relationships * Exhibited Behaviors That Match Patterns Are Coachable And Teachable 25:33 - Problems With The Interview Framework 29:23 - Human Action Is Connected To Emotion * The Human Brain 34:30 - Not Knowing As A Superpower * Action Potential (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential) 39:56 - Small Mind, Big Mind * Losing Your Mind And Coming To Your Senses 45:50 - Being Over Reliant On The Posture Of Knowing * Andrew Yang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yang) * Peter Thiel - Zero to One (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_to_One) * Human Advantage Over Machines 50:16 - The Notion Of Marriage * Dr. John Gottman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman) * The Idea Of Magic Reflections: Jessica: Favorite part is the idea that if we think we know something, that leads to despair sometimes. The release of admitting we don’t know everything is a source of hope. Jacob: Feeling like I’m known personally and professionally is important to me, but being known in a deterministic way resonated with me. Artemis: The Bob Marley principle that was mentioned. Thinking about that philosophy connects with the ideas we talked about. When you realize all the intelligence that is out there, thinking of how small you are. If we can lose our mind and come back to our senses and see that we are part of this fabric, we’re not really all that different. Miko: “You can’t fool all the people all the time.” It is a way of connecting with the world of limitation. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Miko Matsumura.