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    Software How-To

    Greater Than Code

    For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code.
    Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript.
    We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)

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    Latest Episodes:
    257: Putting Accessibility Into Action with Dr. Michele A. Williams Nov 03, 2021
    Show notes

    01:03 - Not Giving Into Peer Pressure 02:31 - Reaching Outside of the Accessibility World (Demystifying Accessibility) Everyday Accessibility by Dr. Michele A. Williams Thinking About Disability Until It’s Everyone’s Normal Way of Thinking Power Structures and Erasing Innovation Recognizing Specialty Cormac Russell: Four Modes of Change: To, For, With, By 12:37 - The Real Work of Accessibility: Organizational Change Taking a Stance and Celebrating Innovation Inclusion 17:52 - Avoiding Dysfunctional Ways of Working The 5 Principles of Human Performance: A contemporary update of the building blocks of Human Performance for the new view of safety by Todd E. Conklin PhD Context Drives Behavior How Leaders Respond Matters Set Up The System So The Right Thing Is Easy 26:46 - Moral Obligations and Social Norms: Top Down PAPod 36 - Martha Acosta Returns - The 4 Things Leaders Control Roles Processes and Practices Values/Norms Incentives 31:20 - Personas: Translating Ideas and Principles Into Action Software Security: Building Security In by Gary McGraw 37:04 - Putting Accessibility Into Action Knowledge Building: Iterate Giving Access “Appreciate the bunt.” Clearer Consequences Greater Than Code Episode 162: Glue Work with Denise Yu 51:06 - “Disability Dongles” – Liz Jackson The Lows of High Tech – 99% Invisible Infrastructure Disables Blind Navigation The Models of Disability The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me by Keah Brown Reflections: Michele: Finding room for everyone to provide their perspective. John: The real solutions are infrastructural. Rein: Accessibility has to be built-in throughout the process of building and designing software. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: REIN: Hello and welcome to Episode 257 of Greater Than Code. I'm your co-host, Rein Henrichs, and I'm here with my friend, John Sawers. JOHN: Thank you, Rein, and I'm here with our guest, Michele A. Williams. She's the owner of M.A.W. Consulting (Making Accessibility Work). Her 16 years of experience include influencing top tech companies as a Senior User Experience Researcher and Accessibility Consultant, and obtaining a PhD in Human-Centered Computing focused on accessibility. A W3C-WAI Invited Expert, international speaker, published academic author, and patented inventor, she is passionate about educating and advising on technology that does not exclude disabled users. Welcome to the show, Michele. MICHELE: Thank you so much, John and Rein. Thanks for having me. JOHN: You are very welcome and we'll start the show as we always do by asking our standard question, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MICHELE: I don't think I have the most creative answer to this. [laughs] I kind of hate those, “Oh, tell us something fun about yourself.” But the thing I thought about that came to mind was my ability to not give into peer pressure. [chuckles] And some ways that manifests for instance, I have a technology background and yet I'm almost the least technical person like I was probably one of the last people to get a smartphone. I love my flip phone and you couldn't take it from me. So this idea that everyone's doing this social media, all of that, I just joined Twitter last year. So I do things dagnabbit; when I need it, not necessarily just because there's groundswell. So I would say that's pretty good superpower. JOHN: All right. So you gave some examples there in your personal life with technology and social media. I assume that that's also a fairly powerful capability in a business context as well. MICHELE: I think so. Particularly when you're advocating for say, disabled people who aren't necessarily always advocated for, it definitely helps to have a more strong will and the ability to take a stance that turns others rather than consistently feeling like you're being turned around about what others want you to do. So I agree with that, thanks. JOHN: [chuckles] Excellent. And so it looks like you've been involved in the accessibility world on a number of different angles and capabilities and so, what have you found to be the most impactful of those? MICHELE: I tend to want to reach people who are outside of the accessibility world. Unfortunately, I think sometimes accessibility people can tend to talk to other accessibility people a little bit too much. I tend to like to recognize that it is something that everyone in the world should know a little something about. It is an expertise, but there are some ways that everyone can do it. I just recently wrote an article for A11Y Project called Everyday Accessibility. That's when you're making a Word document, for instance, using the Ribbon, using headings, and buttons, or bulleted lists. So I tend to want to bring everyone on board, and demystify accessibility and make it more attainable and easier to grasp and that feels so much like this expert field that takes years to break it down to those tangible pieces that still make a big difference. REIN: One of the things that I hear a lot when abled people are advocating for accessibility is, “Sure, this helps disabled people, but you should care about it because it helps abled people, too.” How do you feel about that? MICHELE: So that's a conversation that's been coming up a lot, too and I have a particular colleague that sent me their response, for instance and it's a stance that I don't particularly align with because the problem with that stance is you end up keeping the status quo. So there are real consequences to being in a society that does not value disability and you, as someone who doesn't have a disability, do not feel those effects. So until we are a more equitable society, we do have to call out the characteristics that make someone have negative effects. So the reality is yes, there are things like situational impairments, which is when the situation you're in mirrors the impact of a disability such as walking and texting—you're not seeing out of your periphery—or there's temporary disabilities, like you've broken your arm, and then there's just the natural process of aging. All of that is true and you can also figure designing for your future self for that last part. But again, I think that we have to be very mindful that right now we need to overemphasize and think about disability until it is our normal way of thinking. REIN: It also seems like it's conceding the ground that doing what's right for disabled people is enough of a justification. MICHELE: Explain that a little bit more, what you mean by that. REIN: So when you say it helps disabled people, but it also helps abled people, it seems to me like you're saying it's not enough for me to just say that this helps disabled people. I have to give you another reason. MICHELE: Absolutely, absolutely, and that ties back into ableism and the invisibility of disability and the devaluing of disability. Like you said, it's like a disabled person is not enough. It has to also include absolutely right with that way of thinking and that's another reason not to go that route of segmenting it in that way. JOHN: I think this ties into something that you had mentioned earlier that I find really interesting, this idea that able people are doing something for disabled people. MICHELE: Yes, and that's the big thing. When you say like, “What's been on your mind lately?” That's the one that comes to mind and it comes to mind for a couple of different reasons. None of them new, none of them – I did not discover any of this; people have been saying this for decades upon decades. But for me, my personal experience, I will give a talk, an accessibility talk, I might explain something about say, screen readers, or some other technology, or a particular disability and then the response is, “Well, it should work this way,” or “We should do this.” There's a lot of solutioning around what I've just presented without any context of ever having met say, a disabled person, or particularly a person in the disability community that has been talked about and that comes, I think from this idea, a couple of things. One, again, this idea of a power structure where, “Well, I'm doing this for you, disabled person.” Not understanding the empowerment that the disabled person has, or this misunderstanding and again, invisibility of disability in spaces like tech innovation and not understanding, okay, that touch screen you're using, that text-to-speech you love, those captions that you use at the bar; all of these things [chuckles] came from disability. We erased the innovation that came from someone designing for themselves and designing for their ability and it's assisted technology and therefore, it's an add-on when it's for disabled folks, but it's innovation when it's for people who don't have disabilities. I think we need to have a lot more discussion about this, particularly in spaces like user experience, where we're supposed to be all inclusive and all about the user. There's some ways that we really are reinforcing this mindset and this power structure, for sure. JOHN: So I want to check my understanding of what you're saying, just to make sure. Are you saying that when you present a problem, accessibility problem, the abled people, the other UX designers, the other people who want to be helpful jump in with, “Oh, we can do this, we can do that, or that” rather than saying, “Well, let's go talk to some disabled people and find out what they need and let that guide how we solve this problem rather than us just being like, ‘Oh, it would be great if dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.’” MICHELE: So to two stages to that. For the first one yes, that's the first thing that happens. In the assistive technology, broad accessibility world, this manifests in some very familiar ways. The first is the blind navigation. Every year, some engineer thinks they've solved blind navigation, pedestrian navigation. Meaning they’ve created a belt with vibrations on the left and right with an Arduino, or something and they go, “You don't need a cane anymore because it's going to vibrate left when you need to turn left and right when you need to turn right, and you can walk like a sighted person,” or some variation of that—robot guide dogs, smart cane, something like that, or the sign language gloves, or the stair climbing wheelchair. There's these sort of assistive technologies that always come out with very little context around whether it's actually happening, whether it's actually needed. But then there's something John, about what you said, too about let's see what people need and we'll build it. We have to be careful even with that, too because that assumes that I can't build for myself and that's not true either. [chuckles] Disabled folks are the most innovative people because the world is not accessible. There is a such thing as a specialty. Like I have an accessibility specialty, I have a design specialty, but I think we often think that’s someone without a disability. No, a disabled person can also have these specialties, or they can be someone who has the idea of what they need and you're partnering with them with your specialty in say, design to create those solutions. So again, I think we have to be very careful about our wording and our viewpoints of what's actually happening. REIN: There's a framework that I've been using for this that actually comes from aviation safety and there's a European aviation safety magazine where Cormac Russell published an op-ed called Four Modes of Change: To, For, With, By. The idea is that change to is the mode where change has done to us without us. So this is a sort of authoritarian top-down thing. We’ve got no say in the matter. It's not even necessarily for our benefit. Then change for is a benevolent top-down approach. “I'm trying to help you, but I'm the one who decides what to change.” Change with is a participatory co-creating the change. And then change by is change done by us for us where if I'm, for example, a manager, my role would be find out what support you need so you can make the changes you want to make. MICHELE: Absolutely. Perfect. Thank you. I knew there was some reference. This appears in disability justice spaces, in any kind of space where you're talking about inclusion, we know that sometimes inclusion can be code for do things the way that the current power structure does it. Do things the way that the current people in charge of comfortable and assimilate rather than no, we're actually going to allow you to be your authentic self and come into these spaces. Part of the reason this has also been on my mind is because I fit into some of these other spaces as a woman and as a Black person. I think that sometimes my cohorts think well, because we have experienced some of that in our lives, we are immune to them giving that out to others. So as a Black person, a woman, even someone with intersectionality, I can't possibly do that to do was done to me to someone else. But we don't realize how much ableism is steeped into our society, such that it is very easy to do that with disability and not even realize it and not even realize you have the mentality that someone is inferior to you, incapable, and particularly when the disability has to do with neurological, or anything that we really don't understand. But even still, even that kind of categorization can go away because the idea is that any sort of disability triggers usually some sort of ableist response and these things can happen even if you've experienced it yourself. JOHN: So like so many of the other things we discussed on this podcast, it sounds like the real work of accessibility is organizational change. It's getting the power structures to change to allow these things to come into being rather than forcing them in there, or trying to – like you were saying, not forcing the change on the disabled people to fit in. MICHELE: I've been thinking about the roots of this, for sure. And thank you for that. Unfortunately, capitalism drives a lot of this and again, if we're talking specifically more to tech worlds and say, including accessibility into your tech, part of that is just because the buy-in sometimes comes from the internal stakeholders, not the end customer. Again, if you're not mindful, not careful, and don't have leadership that are careful. So the dirty little secret is for instance internally yes, you may be making education software for students, but you're really marketing to the teachers who are going to buy it, and you're then even more so really marketing to whoever the management structure is internally who's going to approve it to even be on the market. So you get further and further away from actually helping a student because you have all these other checks that it needs to impress, or you need to make the case for similar to what we were saying earlier, you have to make the case for disability. For instance, you have to say, “Well, blind people to do this.” You get this pushback of, “Well, blind people don't do that so we don't have to worry about it and you keep moving on.” So there is a shift that is hard, but I do think it goes…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    256: Unbreaking the Web with Chris Ferdinandi Oct 27, 2021
    Show notes

    Greater Than Code Episode #170: The Case for Vanilla JavaScript with Chris Ferdinandi 02:50 - Project Gemini and Text Protocols Always Bet on JavaScript 07:05 - Overusing Analytics & Tracking Scripts Be An Advocate For Your Users / Ethical Obligations 12:18 - Innovations: Making Accessibility The Default 14:48 - Ad-Tech and Tooling Partytown Fathom Preact Alpine.js petite-vue Svelte SvelteKit Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? | Transitional Apps with Rich Harris, NYTimes Astro 32:08 - HTMX 46:30 - Frontend Development is Hard SPA’s and Transitional Apps Federated Multipage Apps Micro Frontends Phoenix LiveView Joint Activity Joint Cognitive Systems: Foundations of Cognitive Systems Engineering Reflections: Rein: Vanilla JavaScript + Privacy. Jacob: The web piqued at LiveJournal. Also, encouraging devs to think about what tool would be best for different jobs.Chris: Maintaining privacy on the web. Sign up for Chris’s newsletter at gomakethings.com! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. REIN: Hello and welcome to Episode 256 of Greater Than Code, a nice round number. I’m your co-host, Rein Henrichs, and I’m here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Thank you so much! I'm joined with this week's guest, Chris Ferdinandi. Chris helps people learn vanilla JavaScript. He believes that there is a simpler, more resilient way to make things for the web. His Developer Tips newsletter is read by thousands of developers each day. Learn more at gomakethings.com. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show, I should say. We had you on just before COVID, we were saying before the show started, so it's been quite a while. CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me back. It's been kind of a wild 18 months. Last time I was on the show, I think we spent a lot of time talking about how modern development best practices might be ruining the web and this time, I was hoping we might have a little bit of chat about how that's still kind of the case, but there's also a whole ton of new things that have happened in the last 18 months that maybe swinging the pendulum back in the other direction, creating a web that's faster, little bit more resilient, and works better for everybody. REIN: That sounds great. But first, has your superpower changed? Do you still have the same superpower? CHRIS: I don't remember exactly what I said last time, but assuming it's derailing conversations, then the answer is absolutely yes. [laughs] That has always been and always will be my superpower. I am great at tangents. REIN: Well, this podcast is just a series of tangents stitched together, so. CHRIS: Excellent. Always makes for a fun conversation. JACOB: Yeah. Very true. REIN: Have you heard about this new internet protocol, Gemini? CHRIS: No, I have not. REIN: So it's like somewhere between Gopher and HTTP and so, it's a plain text protocol with no mark, no markup, no XML, no HTML and you can have links, but they have to be on a separate line. So you basically are sharing these plain text documents and there's no JavaScript, there's no CSS and people are seeing it as a revitalization of what the web used to be about. No click tracking. No injected advertisements. CHRIS: Yeah. This is weird. So there's a few years ago where I've been like, “Yes, that's what the web needs.” I feel like I'm a little bit more pragmatic now as I have less hair and more white in the beard. Like that seems really cool in some ways and a huge step back in others. I have very mixed feelings about that as a gut reaction; knowing nothing else about it other than what you just told me. REIN: What do you think is the happy medium between where we are now and 1990’s text protocols? CHRIS: Yeah. So in some ways, I feel like the web maybe peaked with LiveJournal, or maybe Myspace. Myspace made it really easy to hack on the web and that was really cool. But the text-only web, I don't necessarily think I'd like to go back to. I think I'm actually not even really opposed to commercialization on the web in large part because I'm only able to do what I can do professionally because of that. But I would love something that really curtails all the spyware for profit stuff over tracking. I have none of that on any of my websites. I removed all of my analytics, all of my – I don't even track opens on my newsletter and so, I really like the interactive and immersive nature of the web. I don't mind the commerce side of the web. I really hate the whole Big Brother-esque “we’re always watching you” nature of the web. I think that's really awkward and creepy. Also, I feel like sometimes we try to run before we can walk on the web and so, we end up throwing a boatload of JavaScript at the frontend to make up for limitations in the platform and we have a tendency to create experiences that are really slow, brittle, and super prone to breaking. I think about how the web has gotten, or the internet as a whole has gotten four to five times faster in the last decade, but the average webpage still loads at about the same speed as it did a decade ago. [chuckles] The original Space Jam website loaded in about the same amount of time that the new Space Jam website loaded, even though the internet [chuckles] has gotten so much faster in that time and a large part of that has to do with the way we build and the tooling that we use. JACOB: Just consuming that extra capacity that we get through faster connections, et cetera. More people. CHRIS: Yeah, for every extra megabit of internet speed that we get, we throw a bunch more JavaScript on the frontend and we have a tendency—it's really weird for me to, as someone who teaches JavaScript for a living, tell people to use less JavaScript. But the web keeps moving to a more JavaScript driven future and JavaScript is the most fragile and bad for performance part of the frontend stack. I feel like in the last maybe 5 years, or so, we saw the pendulum swing really far in the JavaScript end of things. I still think the phrase, “Always bet on JavaScript” is a good one. I don't think JavaScript is going anywhere. I don't, in abstract, hate it. The interactivity that it brings is good. I think the challenge is around how we lean on it heavily for things that it's not necessarily the best tool for the job for. I'm starting to see a new slate of tools that take advantage of some of the things that's great at in a way that doesn't punish the users for those decisions so that's pretty cool. We can dig into that if you both want to. There's a lot of new stuff in the works that I think has the ability to maybe fix some of the challenges that we've been facing up to this point. REIN: What would you say are some of the low-hanging fruit in terms of implementations, design that people could take that would just make their app a little bit better, play a little bit more nicely, be a little less extractive in terms of tracking everything the user does? CHRIS: Yeah. So one of the weirdest things that I've just encountered on the web, there's a certain subset—a lot of times it's e-commerce vendors, sometimes it's SAAS—but they're loading eight different tracking and analytics scripts on a single page through all sorts of different vendors. So they'll load Google Analytics, Salesforce, and three, or four other vendors that I'll do some version of the same thing—racking what you click on and where you go next. The impression I've gotten from talking to folks is that this is a byproduct of having a bunch of different internal departments that all want access to data and no one wanting to be like, “This is the tool we're using,” [chuckles] and so, they all just chuck it in there. So that's probably a really big offender there and there's a couple things that you can do about that. First is I feel like a lot of developers and a lot of designers have this; I don't know how to describe it. I don't want to – I'm trying to think of the right phrase here, but it's almost like your job is to an advocate for the user. So just because your manager, or executive is saying, “We need this” doesn't necessarily mean your job is to just be like, “Okay, let me throw that in there.” I liken it to if you were building a house and a customer told you they wanted you to install a hair dryer in the bathtub. You could do that for them because they ask, but it's a really bad idea and maybe it's your professional responsibility to tell them that. REIN: Yeah. That is the thing that distinguishes a profession is that you have ethical obligations to uphold, CHRIS: And this is where I think you get into the pro and con of the web being an industry that you can get into without professional certifications and trainings. It's like anybody can do it, but there's also not necessarily that same level of there's no certification board that's like, “You're going to lose your certification if you do these things that are harmful.” For most of us, for a lot of what we do, the side effect of having eight tracking scripts on a website is not life-threatening, but depending on the type of site that you offer and the services that you provide, it can be. Like I think a lot of people get taken a little aback by that, but I've heard multiple stories in the last few years about utility companies—electricity, gas, whatever—where utilities get knocked out in a really bad storm. So people are relying on their smartphones on 3G and they live in areas where connectivity is not particularly great and their Wi-Fi's down because their power is out and trying to connect to the electric company website to be able to file a claim like, “My electricity's out,” or even just find the contact number to call them, the site just keeps crashing, reloading, and they can't open it. Not having access to your utility company because somebody was irresponsible with how they built the website really sucks. And depending on what the weather is like, like I live in a very cold climate up in the US in the Northeast and if the temperatures drop below freezing and there's a down tree blocking your ability to get in and out of the area and you don't have electricity, or heat, that can be a really serious thing. I think a lot of times we just think about like, “I'm just building websites.” But it can be so much more than that depending on the industry you work in and the type of work that you do. So the whole there's no equivalent of you're going to get disbarred if you do these bad things, there just isn't that for a profession, which can be a good thing, but is also – [crosstalk] REIN: There's no equivalent of the city code that's 2,000 pages long, but also means that you can't build a bathroom that electrocutes people and you can't put asbestos in the walls. The counterargument is that regulations are onerous and they stifle innovation, but – [crosstalk] CHRIS: And they can. REIN: Do you want innovation in less safe ways to build houses? Like, is that what we're looking for? CHRIS: Right. Yeah. I had a similar argument once with someone about accessibility on the web and how it shouldn't be legally required for sites to build themselves accessibly because it stifles innovation for one person shops who are just trying to throw something up quickly. I don't know, at some point it just boils down to a moral argument and it's really hard to have an objective conversation about should you care about other people and doing the right thing? Like, I don't really know how to have that kind of conversation in a logical kind of way. JACOB: And I'm thinking about where the innovation can happen is the big platforms—your WordPresses, your Wixes, Squarespaces. What innovations can they think of that can make accessibility the default? Like help people fall into the pit of success? What are the new innovations that they haven't come up with yet that just make accessibility just happen magically for someone who is –? CHRIS: Yeah. I also sometimes feel like it's a little bit of a – well, so there's two aspects here. I feel like the you can have innovation, or regulation, but not both thing is a bit of a false dichotomy. I think one of the things we've seen in—my liberalness is going to show a little bit here—but one of the things we've seen in unregulated capitalism is that it doesn't necessarily drive innovation. It just drives more ways to squeeze profit out of people. I think you see that on the web with the current state of internet surveillance and ad tech. Do you, as a consumer, feel like you’ve got a lot of innovation out of all the new ways that large companies have figured out how to track what you do on the web so they can sell more toothpaste to you? Because I certainly don't. So that's one aspect of it and the other is, I feel like sometimes we're overly obsessed with innovation for innovation's sake and there's something to be for the boring, predictable web. Websites that try to be different just for the sake of being different often just end up being confusing and unusable and I don't necessarily want that in my web experience. I find that particularly frustrating. I'm a really big advocate of “the boring web.” I like when I show up on a website and I know exactly how to use it, I know how to move around, and I don't have to follow a whole bunch of popup tutorials just to figure out how to achieve the task I'm there to achieve. REIN: And if you look at the context that's driving, some of this behavior from startups, from UX engineers at startups, it's often that their business model depends on being able to sell customer data. There are a lot of mobile apps that if they lost the ability to sell their customer's data would cease to exist and so I guess, the question is, is it justified? Should they exist if that's the only way they can exist? CHRIS: I struggle with this a fair bit because I use and have benefited from free sell customer data services in the past. I'm of the mind that I personally would pay for –like, let's just use Twitter as an example. If I had the ability to pay to use Twitter and they would stop recommending all these completely irrelevant ads to me in my timeline all the time, I would probably pay a not insignificant amount of money for that. But I know there's a lot of people who either wouldn't, or couldn't afford to and the value of Twitter to me would go down substantially if a bunch of people dropped off the service. So that's a really good question that I don't have a great answer for. I feel like there's a balance some…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    255: Building Global Love Bubbles with Anne Griffin Oct 20, 2021
    Show notes

    02:47 - Anne’s Superpower: Empathy & Collaboration Feeling Accepted & Creating a Sense of Safety Creating Happy Bubbles Making People Feel They Matter on Teams No Matter Status (i.e. Employees vs Contractors) No Matter Geographical Location/Timezone Equivalence in Remote Work 17:45 - Framing and Shaping Relationships + Communication Changing Company Culture Sharing Concerns with Upper Management “We are all on the same team.” Silence IS a Response Working Through Challenging Conversations 29:47 - Helping People Learn – Work Therapists: Should/Could They Exist? 38:18 - Having Support Outside of Work: Networking Find Communities First; Individuals Second Attract Your Dream Job @pivotgrowhustle #BlackTechTwitter Making Sure People Know What You Do! 48:20 - Overcoming Job Responsibility Misperceptions Managing Project Ownership and Roles “Secret Agile” Reflections: Arty: Being able to find strength and solidity within yourself so you can be someone that helps to contribute to moving things in a positive direction. Casey: Coaching men on DEI. How could it be successful? Anne: The future of where we need to go as a society, especially a tech-driven society, is to ask yourself how do you bring what you love to the table and to do it with love. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That's link.testdouble.com/greater. JACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 255 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Jacob Stoebel. I'm joined by my co-panelist, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. I'm here with our other co-panelist, Arty Starr. ARTY: And I'm here with our guest today, Anne Griffin. Anne is a product leader, a startup advisor, and subject matter expert in AI, blockchain, tech ethics, and inclusivity. She is the owner of Griffin Product & Growth, a product consulting and advising firm. Her workshop, Human First, Product Second, teaches organizations and professionals how to think about building more human, inclusive, and ethical tech products. She has lectured at prestigious universities across North America such as Columbia University and West Point, spoken at major events such as SXSW, and created courses for O’Reilly Media. Outside of her work, she loves rest, barbecue, and beaches. Welcome to the show, Anne. ANNE: Thank you so much. I am absolutely thrilled to be here today. It's a gorgeous day in New York. Arty, I know I've had a couple conversations with you. Jacob, we'll talk about this in a little bit, but we've had a conversation before and I just really love you guys. You guys are great. And Casey, I'm super excited to meet you. ARTY: Yeah, the last time we were recording, we had some challenges with audio issues and so, we weren't able to get the podcast together, which is really unfortunate because we had an amazing conversation. But we're all back here together and I'm sure we're going to have a really awesome conversation this time and it's probably going to be even better than before. So I'm excited to ask you our first question, Anne is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ANNE: I would say one of my best superpowers is, maybe this counts as two separate things, but it's a combination of empathy and also collaboration, which I think empathy definitely helps make for a good collaborator. And where I got it, I think it’s a combination of places as well is really growing up, I was never the popular kid. I was always the kid that was picked last in the gym. I had some friends, but I was really – again, I was unpopular; I didn't really have that many friends. I was picked on a bit. So for me, I was in this position where I was always super conscious, or tried to be of how the things that I was doing was making other people feel. Because being in a position where I think some people thought like, “Ha ha ha, that's funny,” and don't think anything much further than that for me made me feel not very great. So I think some of that started from there and not to say I didn't have places where I was like, “Oh, I could improve in terms of empathy,” but I really think that's really where it came from. Also, in terms of my working style, I've always worked best being in a collaborative environment. I'm not super happy when I have to work completely solo and there's zero collaboration going on. Not saying there aren't things in product management where you are working solo, but one of the things I love about product management is by nature, it is a super collaborative role. And really, you have to have empathy to be a good collaborator because I would rather have somebody doing really amazing and creative work because they feel inspired to, they feel like they can be themselves and bring them their best selves into the workplace, and that there is trust. That is the thing that makes me feel the best about anything I do honestly. And obviously, launching new things. That's great. I love that. Obviously, it's a big part of product management. I wouldn't be in it if that wasn’t important. But honestly, I think I get equal amounts, or possibly more fuel from knowing that my team feels empowered, knowing that my team actually loves being on the team, and is really just excited to be together and be able to just do their best work and not out of like a, “Oh man, I'm going to get in trouble by someone,” or “Oh, I have to be super scared of political stuff,” but really being like, “I got to show up as me today and that empowered me to be my most creative and best self.” ARTY: Wow. The story you were talking about at the beginning with how you were feeling growing, never the popular kid and how that made you kind of hyper aware of how your actions and the things that you did ended up influencing the people around you and just developing this hyperawareness that gave you this empathy and how you were thinking about things. I'm curious, did you also have environments and context where you were accepted and well left? ANNE: Growing up, obviously, I'll say I was very fortunate that my family has always been very loving and accepting. So I'll say one of the most critical environments I had that I went to daycare for a really long time and I felt like there wasn't really this I was an outsider there, but in terms of school environments, and I'm not really sure what it was, pretty much from grade school all the way through high school, I was an outsider. So I think it's also having have been in certain other critical environments where I was loved and accepted and I think I met one of my then best friends in 5th grade, which then she eventually changed schools, all this other stuff. But having certain people, even if there wasn't a lot, and then having those critical environments where I was accepted. Knowing what it feels like when you are accepted and contrast to this whole thing of feeling like people don't really care you're there, or they don't really want you to like join them at lunch, or other things like that. CASEY: Yeah, that contrast sounds really powerful. This is kind of random, but it's reminding me of, I went to physical therapy last week because my posture is bad. My hands went numb 2 years ago. It's recovering. I'm pretty good now. But they were teaching me how to do a squat with good posture and they said, “Here's the right way to do it. Bend your back here, do this, make sure your shoulders aren’t tense,” and then they had me do it wrong. So I got to do it the right way and the wrong way and that helped so much. I've had like 4, or 5 PT people. This was the first one that showed me the wrong way for contrast. It's powerful. ANNE: Absolutely. I agree that it's so powerful and I think for me, that's part of where I originally fostered like here are the feelings I know I want to have and that I can have and how do I create that sense of safety in being one's self outside of these environment? I really felt like once I got to college and especially once I was working in environments that were healthy enough and safe enough for me to be able to create this is the right type of environment where there's trust and collaboration, I was able to do that because I had experienced the wrong way of—I'll say, the wrong way as in being excluded from things, people not really caring about how you feel based on comments, but had also, this area where I had learned also the right way. Actually, one person who was very, I think, fundamental in helping me translate that into the work world is one of my mentors Dana. Actually, she used to work at Microsoft. She actually early retired from Microsoft. So she was at Microsoft while I interned there and she really taught me that well, it shouldn't be on you to solve all your workplace's problems because they're not paying you to solve a culture problem that they should be handling. But you should really act at work in terms of implementing the type of culture that you would want to work in. Don't just be, “Oh, I'm just upset because all this bad stuff's happening,” and that kind of stuff. You have the right to be upset if bad things are happening in your workplace. But if there are certain things that you can foster that you have control over in terms of the attitude on your team and how you empower other people to be able to talk about what are the problems, what is going well, what don't we like, how can we change it, what are little things that can nudge the atmosphere and really foster that? Because there's some places, they're going to be toxic; [chuckles] they're not going to be big impact there. But there's also a lot that can be done in places where you are empowered to do that. Especially as a product manager on your own pod, or your own team, so that it is a happy place to be, that people do feel included. People don't feel like people can just jump into your Slack channel, say a bunch of trash, and then leave and it's completely fine. I think that's that contrast there is learning what is the right way, the right posture, I guess, for that type of environment really helped me and especially from my mentor Dana at Microsoft. CASEY: Anne, I feel like you are saying so many things I say all the time and I’d love to hear it from another person's voice. I believe strongly that you can make a small bubble that you're in. Like a happy and effective environment, a team that you're on. Even if it's a toxic culture overall, you can have your own happy bubble, but I don't know. A lot of people don't value that, or they don't celebrate it when they manage to get even one bubble and that can be frustrating. That’s why it's so cool to hear that you have felt like you've made some bubbles happy before. ANNE: Yeah. When I say empathy and collaboration are my superpowers, I would say also creating bubbles are one of my superpowers, even in remote environments. Even before the pandemic, one of the places I worked was a remote first company. It's always really interesting because I think because again, empathy and collaboration are my superpowers, I crave that a lot and I'm going to be working for 8 hours a day so I try to create that everywhere I go. Not saying I'm trying to exclude people from the bubble, but anybody who wants to be a part of that type of culture, I welcome them into that and it's amazing because I'll go into places and even that small startup people are like, “Whoa, when you started, I noticed this big culture shift.” It was really small so it was much easier to make that kind of impact, but people started feeling a lot more connected to each other, especially we were remote first. We weren't really centralized in New York, or in the United States. So there were people who were either based in Nepal, or Mumbai where they said because of the time zone differences, people didn't really think about okay, is that person getting the support they need when there's hours where people are not up and if we have more people in other time zones, how do we make sure those people feel included? Because there's a lot of ways you can actually make people feel excluded, even if it's unintentional and people may still resent that, or still may feel bad and even if they don't resent you, or blame you, those are things where I think a lot of people just say, “Well, it's not really my problem,” or organizations say, “Well, if they want to get a paycheck and they want to work remotely from that region, they're just going to have to deal with it.” I also think I'm like, “But if you don't care, why are you hiring people in that region if you're not going to foster a culture and just an overall company bubble of making people feel like they matter, that they're included, that they're getting support and being creative with how you also support people asynchronously?” JACOB: I think like in addition to that often is the case, the geographical differences, there's other differences at play that are specifically about power, or just in terms of country of origin. You might have a lot of circumstances where you've got people on salary in the States and everyone is a contractor in India, or something. I think there's a lot of intersecting issues that can come up with people working internationally. ANNE: I would say, I completely agree. At that startup, everyone was an employee, but I definitely think there was a difference because people are used to, “Oh, those people in that time zone are usually a contractor.” I've worked at plenty of companies where if somebody was remote, it was because they were contractor and they usually were from a country of a lot of brown people and how people treated them was different. It's very fascinating because consistently I see in cultures where there is not conscious messaging from the leadership about “Yes, these people are contractors.” Yes, we've outsourced this work to this place.” Conscious culture shaping and messaging from the leadership. “Hey, they are part of our team. We're working on the same goal. This is how we treat each other in this environment.” You get very inconsistent results in how people choose to treat those people and I've seen it where I've worked with a team and it was like, “Oh wow. This was such an amazing project. We work really, really well together.” And then that same team gets passed to another person next project, that sort of thing and I talk to the contractors and they're like, “Yeah, no, that person just yells at us and tells us every time we do something wrong and they don't ever bother setting up t…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    254: Transitioning Into Tech with Danielle Thompson Oct 13, 2021
    Show notes

    01:17 - Danielle’s Superpower: Empathy & Communication 01:56 - Going From the Hospitality Industry => Tech @CodeSchoolQA / twitch.tv/thejonanshow 04:58 - Education Technology (EdTech) Disruption = Reinvention 07:18 - Anthropology + Tech / Working With People Anticipating Needs 10:25 - Making Education Fun + Inclusive Cultural Relevance Revamping Outdated Curriculum Connecting With Kids 16:18 - Transitioning Into Tech 27:57 - Resources Learnhowtoprogram.com Documentation YouTube Community #TechTwitter Virtual Coffee Twitch 32:39 - @CodeSchoolQA / twitch.tv/thejonanshow 34:08 - The Streaming Revolution New Opportunities For Connection Hybrid Events Introvert Inclusive Accessibility Reaching New Markets 39:45 - Making Tech Safe, Secure, and Protected Greater Than Code Episode 252: Designing For Safety with Eva PenzeyMoog 44:03 - Advice For New Devs: Work on Technical Things Sooner Reflections: Mandy: The secret in tech is that nobody knows what they’re doing! Danielle: Ask questions and lean into community. Tech needs you. Arty: Don’t be afraid to reach out to community members for help. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 254 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hey, everyone! It's Mandy Moore and I'm here with our guest today, Danielle Thompson. Danielle is a newly minted software engineer working in the education technology sphere of the nonprofit world, after making a major career change from working in hospitality and events for many years. As a code school graduate herself, she loves to help demystify tech for others with non-traditional backgrounds and works to open doors into tech with her friends at Code School Q&A, weekly on Wednesday nights at around 7:00 PM Pacific at twitch.tv/thejonanshow. Outside of work, she can typically be found with a nose buried in a book, hanging out with her doggo, and making delicious craft beverages. Welcome to the show, Danielle! DANIELLE: Thanks so much for having me, Mandy and Arty! MANDY: Awesome. It's great for you to be here. So before we get into the meat of our conversation, we always ask our guests the standard question of what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? DANIELLE: Totally. I think that my superpower is a combination of empathy and communication. I think I came by both pretty naturally—popped right out of my mom having both, I'm assuming. But both have definitely been amplified over the years by all sorts of experiences and hardships and just keep working to make them even more of a superpower. MANDY: That's really great. So I want to know about before we dive into your experiences as a new developer, I wanted to know about how you came into technology from your career change in hospitality, because I did the same thing. I was a waitress when my daughter was born 10 years ago and I was working for about a year before I was able to walk out. It was Mother’s Day, my boss was being a complete jerk to me, and I was making enough money at that point that I just said, “You know what? I don't need this. I quit,” and I started my career in tech full-time. So I'm curious about your journey as well. DANIELLE: Yeah. Obviously, COVID has happened in the last couple of years and that was one of the major factors in me getting to this point of leaving hospitality and getting into tech. But I had already kind of been thinking about what comes next. I've been a manager for a few years and was trying to figure out how else I could grow and what new things I can learn and challenge myself with. And outside of ownership, which is a major headache, there wasn't really much that I could push further into, within hospitality. So when COVID happened and I lost my job because I was working as an events and bar manager for a local catering company, it was pretty obvious that things were not going to be coming back for the hospitality industry anytime soon and I needed to figure something else out then. And so, I started looking into different returning to education opportunities because I actually have an anthropology degree, of all helpful things that I could have gotten a degree in. But I found a code school in Portland, Oregon and jumped on that within a few months of COVID hitting to the full-time track and connected with a number of my cohort mates that we started doing the Code School Q&A on Twitch with the director of developer relations at New Relic and have been doing that for almost a year now and have officially made it in the industry as a software developer, too in the last few months. So you can do it, you can get into tech. [laughs] It's pretty funny, too because the type of job that I ended up getting is in education and technology sphere and I actually had a job in ed tech about a decade ago when I was still in college and had a remote job working with some family friends that got me hooked up with their company. And here I am doing something a little bit more in-depth technically than I was doing a decade ago, but it's funny how things come full circle. ARTY: Well, education in particular is something that also really needs some reinvention and innovation and with all the disruption, where do you see that area going? Just curious. DANIELLE: Yeah, absolutely. I feel that a lot of the changes that we've seen in COVID with remote work being such a prominent thing now and people wanting more balanced, more time with their family, more time with their critters, more time just not being miserable and commutes and stuff. I think that that's going to have a really long-term effect on how education happens and trying to make education more quality as well. I think it's really rad what the company I do works for. Our whole mission is to work to make education in America more equitable. So we do that by working very hard to work with experts in the curriculum sphere that ensure that our curriculum materials are as inclusive and culturally relevant as possible, that they are representative of a large and diverse group of people, and they even do a ton of anti-racism work as well and work to embed that within our internal and external culture, as well as the products that we create. So I hope that our company will continue to grow and make changes in the education world in America in general, because I think what we're doing is really, really, really important. ARTY: Definitely important and with all the change and stuff happening, I'm expecting some new and cool and exciting things that do make things better. One of the upsides of lots of disruption is it's an opportunity for us to sit back and rethink how things could be. DANIELLE: Yeah. ARTY: And one of the benefits of not being entrenched in the existing fields of the way things have been is it's also an opportunity to look at all the stuff we're doing with a fresh set of eyes from outside of that existing world and bring some new fresh insights to tech. Maybe my anthropology degree will come in handy in some different sorts of ways. I imagine some of those skills that you learned in that have some applicability in tech as well. Have you found your degree helpful in other ways? DANIELLE: It's funny. I think I ended up using my anthropology degree as a bartender far more than I ever would have as an actual anthropologist. That whole study of humans thing is something that is directly translatable to working with people no matter what field you're in. I feel that both my anthropology degree and my many years of hospitality experience have all led to a specific skillset that is very different from a lot of people that come into tech with more traditional backgrounds especially folks that go to college and get computer science degrees, and then they go to the tech industry and that's all they've ever known. I've known so many other experiences outside of that and my ability to think about what other people need and want, to be able to respond to that, and embed that in all of the work that I do as an engineer to really be thinking about the user and the people that are interacting with whatever I'm building and even just thinking about working on a team and how I have so many communication skills built up from what I've been doing for work in hospitality for many years. I think that it definitely gives me a very specific and unique way of moving through the world and way of being an engineer as well. That anthropologist hat definitely comes into play sometimes thinking about like, “Oh, like how do all of these dots connect?” and like, “How does this change over time and how do you see people like doing things differently now?” It's a definitely a fun lens to carry with me. MANDY: Yeah. Having been done hospitality, I'm just shaking my head because – [laughter] I know I've brought so many skills from being in that world for 10, 15 years at one point. DANIELLE: Yeah. MANDY: Just the way you talk to people and interact with teams and anticipate what other people need before they even know what they need, that's definitely a skill. DANIELLE: Yeah, definitely. I think that whole anticipating needs thing, too, it's like it can be both an internal and external benefit where you can think both about who you're building products for and also who you're building products with, and how best to communicate within teams, especially having management experience. That is definitely at the forefront of my brain a lot of the time, but then also thinking about like, “How can I make the best experience for somebody else that's actually going to be using this? How can I make this easy and intuitive and fun?” Especially within education, have to make sure that things are fun and interesting targeting kids that are K-12; it has to be meaningful, impactful, interesting, and engaging. MANDY: So how do you do that? What are some ways that you and your company make education fun for young kids? DANIELLE: I think I'm still figuring that out. We have many curriculum products that I'm still just touching for the first time, or haven't even looked at it yet and so, there's lots of fun, new things to discover. But I think the types of people that we bring on to work at my company, they're all experts in their field and renowned for the work that they do and so, I think that the quality of people that we bring into work with us and the kind of commitment that they have to work towards making education better and more inclusive, that is incredibly important. And how they also do an immense amount of work to make not just inclusivity a part of the major formula, but also that they work to make things culturally relevant. So like, thinking about how to tell stories to kids that actually means something to them today. I don't know, a weird example is thinking about some outdated curriculum that's talking about using a landline for a phone, or something. Kids are like, ‘What's that?” Actually integrating modern things like cell phones and things like that into the curriculum where kids actually touch that and use that every single day so it means something to them. Whereas, outdated curriculum that is just some story to them. It doesn't have tangible meaning. Being able to bring that into materials is really important to keeping things engaging and also, relevant and fun. MANDY: So the time when little Tommy was walking to the Xerox machine. DANIELLE: [chuckles] Yes, yes. MANDY: Somebody brought up a Xerox machine the other day. DANIELLE: Oh wow. MANDY: My goodness. DANIELLE: [laughs] Yeah, definitely. But I think it's just a constant looking at how we do things, and making improvements and making real connection with the people that are actually using our products to use. That both means working with teachers and getting a better understanding of what is helpful to them, what makes things easier for them, what helps them bring better quality curriculum to their classrooms? But then I think it's also connecting more directly with those kids that are engaging with our curriculum, too and figuring out what works and doesn't work for as many parties as possible. I think that's the anthropologist hat coming on again like, how can we bring as many people to the table as possible on the expert side, on the academic side, on the teacher side, on the student side? And even working to bring families to the table, too and looking at how families interact and not just parents, because it's really important to know that kids don't have just parents that are taking care of them—sometimes it's grandparents, sometimes it’s foster families. And really thinking about a wider range of who is around these kids, and how to get them onboard and make things easy for them to interact. ARTY: It seems like getting into tech and these new tech skills that you've learned are also relevant in figuring out how to teach kids tech because we've got this new generation of kids coming into the world and learning how to code becomes more like learning how to read and write is fundamental skills move forward in the future. Are there ways that some of the things that you've learned through your own tech experiences you can see application for in education? DANIELLE: Absolutely. From what I've been seeing, I feel like there are a lot more resources out there for teaching kids how to code and teaching them more things about technology. I think that's amazing and should totally keep happening. I think having been a bit more focused on adults in my own outreach for helping people find their ways into tech I might be a bit more acquainted with reaching out to those folks. But I'm sure that that intersection of being in education for K-12 students and this passion that I have of helping to find their way into tech, or build more technical skills because they are skills that are so transferable in many industries. I'm in education, but I have a technical job. So there's lots of ways that those technical skills can be incredibly valuable and frankly, life-changing. The amount of opportunity and even just financial stability that can be found within tech is one of the main reasons that brought me to this industry and has really been a life-changing opportunity. It has opened so many doors already and I'm just like three months into my first developer job. Even before I was ever actually officially an engineer, I was able to find community and able to find an outlet for helping others and outreach to immediately turn around and hold a handout to try to help others make their way into tech as well. I hope to continue doing that work in more meaningful and impactful ways over time, and have wider and wider reach as well. ARTY: You had mentioned earlier about some of the difficulties of getting into tech and some of the challenges with finding resources and things that you were specifically missing when you actually showed up on the job. I'm curious, what was your experience like going through coding bootcamp and what were some of the gaps that you experienced that once you got on the job, you were like, “Oh, I didn't learn that.” DANIELLE: Yeah, definitely. Coding bootcamp was an incredibly grueling experience for me personally. I was on a full-time track six-month program and [chuckles] not having much technical experi…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    253: Reframing the Value of Open Source with Jen Weber Oct 06, 2021
    Show notes

    00:47 - Jen’s Superpower: Being Optimistic Recognizing Negative Loops Intentionality & Prioritization Preventing Security Vulnerabilities 10:13 - Working On Open-Source Projects vs Commercial Software/Products Gathering Feedback (RFCs) Baby Steps = Big Impact 12:57 - Major vs Minor Releases Semantic Versioning Deprecation Warnings Advanced Notice Incremental Rollouts 18:45 - RFC / Feedback Processes Dealing with Contradictory Feedback Reaching Consensus Visionary Leadership Additions 23:25 - The Ember Core Team ~30 People Funding LinkedIn (Corporate Sponsorship) Consultants & Consultancies Volunteers 26:31 - Doing Open Source Better Sponsor Company (Time) Knowledge Sharing Framing Work As How It Values Contributors Reframing How We Think About Open Source Sustainability (i.e. Company-Wide Open Source Work Days) Frame Value to Company Frame Value to Users Frame Value to Engineering Teams Attitude Shifts 39:56 - Participation Encouragement & Engagement Tips Use The Buddy System Having Well-Scoped Issues Increasing Levels of Challenge (Subtle Cheerleading) Help People Spin Up Quickly 46:00 - Widening the Pool of Participants Being Easy to Reach Social Media Activity Working In The Open 47:36 - UX-Driven Design (User Experience-Driven Design) Reflections: Damien: Perspective of those impacted. Sponsors, users, etc. Arty: What it’s like to work on a big open source project and the challenges we face. Jen: Exploring small-project lifecycles. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone and welcome to Episode 253 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I am here with my fabulous co-host, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: And we are here with our fabulous guest, Jen Weber. Jen Weber is a member of the Ember.js core team and is a senior software engineer at ActBlue Technical Services. Jen loves open source, rapid prototyping, and making tech a more welcoming industry. Jen, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show. JEN: Thank you so much for having me. DAMIEN: So you should have gotten an email preparing you for the first and most difficult part of every appearance on Greater Than Code. Are you ready for this? JEN: I am.
DAMIEN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JEN: All right. So I did get that email and I've been thinking about those for the last couple of days. I think my superpower is being able to imagine the ways that things can go well. DAMIEN: Wow. That's very special. JEN: Thank you. DAMIEN: How did you acquire that? JEN: So I used to be very good at imagining all of the ways that things can go badly. Those are still the patterns that my mind walks whenever I'm confronted with a challenge, but someone gave me some advice. I was recounting to them all of the ways that things could go badly, they were like, “What would it look like if things went well?” I've been trying to build that as a muscle and a skill anytime I'm working on a new project, or something hasn't gone well, something's already gone badly, and I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I found that helped me open up to more creative thinking. ARTY: I really think that is a superpower and in order for things to go well, for us to manifest good things toward a good direction, we have to be able to see the steps to get there, imagine ourselves walking in that direction to be able to do it. And if we're caught in a loop of worrying about all the things that are going to go wrong, anticipating those things going wrong, then it's like we're going to be waiting for him and doing things that help bring those things that we don't want into being. So if you find yourself in this mode, it sounds like this is something that you struggled with and learned this adaptive skill to break out of this pattern. So what kind of things do you do? Like, do you tell yourself things or ask yourself certain questions, or how do you snap out of that mode and get to a better place where you're thinking about things in a positive frame? JEN: Sure. I think for me, the first step is just recognizing when I'm in that negative loop and accepting that it's my first reaction, but that doesn't need to be my conclusion to my thought process. If I'm working on let's say, there's a real-world challenge. Just to give an example as part of my work on the Ember core team, I might think about how do I engage the community and announce that there's going to be this new version of Ember? If I imagine things going badly, I imagine like, “O, wow, nobody even retweets it a single time,” and if I imagine things going well, I think like, “Wow, it's this big moment in tech.” And if it was a big moment in tech, what would have the involved people done to get to that successful end point and trying to work backwards from that to connect the dots. It takes some intentionality, it takes having enough rest, it takes not being over-caffeinated to be able to unlock that kind of thinking. DAMIEN: But it sounds so powerful, especially as an engineer, or as an advocate. It's like because we're in the role of making things into what we want them to be, which is things going well, right? JEN: Yeah, and it's a little different than a wishful thinking, I would say, because you're still thinking in order for things to go, well, you have to overcome challenges, you have to solve problems, you have to prioritize, there's going to be difficult moments. So you're not just dreaming that this good feature is going to come into existence, but actually figuring out what are the nuts and bolts, and pieces, like, what are the ingredients to that recipe? When we think and reflect on that, how can we take those ingredients and apply them to right now to get where we want to go? ARTY: So you take that vision and then work backwards and translate that to actual action. These are things that we can do right now to walk the path of getting where we want to go. JEN: Mm hm, and it might take you somewhere totally different direction. It might be very different by the time you're done. But usually, you can figure out a few things here and there that are steps in the right direction, and the right direction could be one of many different directions. ARTY: Do you find yourself ever getting disappointed that things don't go the way you envisioned? JEN: Oh yeah, for sure. [laughter] Yeah, and I think that's a little bit part of the rollercoaster of being involved in software. Like every single day is a series of things going a little different than you thought they would. You read the code; you think it's going to go a certain way. You're wrong; you change your plan. You have this idea of a direction you're going to go, you've thought about what are the successful steps to get there, and then you end up in the wrong corner and you have to go back to the drawing board and surviving those cycles is just part of what we do. ARTY: So does that superpower help you escape those feelings of disappointment then? JEN: Oh yeah, I think so because not that I have some way to see the future, but more that I have tools for helping to figure out what my next step could be. ARTY: So then you're always focused back on action. JEN: Mm hm. ARTY: And how can I take what I learned and this vision of what a good direction would be, taking these new data points and things into account, and then reimagine and translating that back into action. JEN: Yeah. ARTY: I think that qualifies as a superpower. DAMIEN: Yeah, I think about it, I guess because I was writing code this morning, and so often, when you're writing – when I'm writing code at least, it's like oh, the phrase was “defensive programming” from a long time ago. How can this go wrong? What happens if this is nil? What happens if some evil guy in a black hat comes in and tries to do something here? And what I've had to learn and still need to remind myself of is the good case. What is it that we're doing good for our users, or whoever else the code touches? What are they trying to accomplish and what experience are we trying to create for them? And so, both, as an engineer and a product manager, just being able to ask that question and see an answer on a small scale on a feature in stories, super important. JEN: Yeah, and even if you're thinking of that adversarial aspect where it's like, you're trying to think through all of the security risks that are involved in developing some software, you can still use this thinking to your advantage. What would a successful future be where somebody tries to exploit that vulnerability and they fail? You've got them. What are the things you built? What are the strategies and habits that that team had? What is the monitoring and infrastructure that resulted in successfully preventing this, or that problem from occurring? DAMIEN: It's not only a useful strategy and also, feels really good. JEN: Mm hm. DAMIEN: That’s great. ARTY: I like that, though just thinking from a standpoint of just vulnerability, or even a case where things go “wrong,” in the case that you do have somebody hacking your system, or trying to exploit some vulnerability, what's the logging and information infrastructure? What does that story look like where even though these things are happening, we're prepared, we have the right things in place to give us visibility into what's going on, and be able to catch it and address it quickly. Like what do all those things look like such that we're ready to go and can still have a success story, even in the case of these challenges that come up? DAMIEN: That sounds connected to something, I think we want to talk about today, which is what goes well when you get a major library upgrade, what does that look like? JEN: Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot lately; informed by two things. So one is that I'm involved in an Ember, which is a frontend JavaScript framework, and we're getting ready to do a 4.0 major release. So going through all of those exercises to have preparedness all comes back to how do we do this, or what do our users need, what are the resources that are missing? That's one thing on my mind and the other is that I've recently updated some dependencies in the apps that I work in and had a hard time. What can I learn for myself about what to do differently? What can I learn that might be takeaways for library maintainers? What can I share with my coworkers and my collaborators to make this easier next time? ARTY: What's it like working on an open source project and how does that feel different? What are the different aspects of that from working on a commercial product versus something in the open source community? JEN: There's a couple of pieces. The biggest one is that when you're working in your own code base, you have at least a fuzzy picture of what the product is, what the constraints are, how many users there are, and the things that the developers on your team generally know and the things that they don't know. You have all this information that would help you inform how do I roll out some new, big feature, or something like that. When you're working at open source, your universe of possible products, developers, and users is huge. Like, you could never write down a list of all the ways that somebody is going to be using that software and so, it becomes really different than having a set of well-defined products requirements; we want to get from point A to point B. It's like, we need to give everybody a path forward even though they're using this tool in all these different ways. To do that, a lot of effort goes into gathering feedback from other people in the community. So we use a process called RFCs, or Requests for Comments where someone says, “Hey, I think this would be a good feature. Hey, I think this thing should be removed, or deprecated,” and you have to get feedback. Because we can't imagine all the ways ourselves that someone could use this feature, or tool and then once there's consensus amongst the core team, then something can move forward. But everything goes through a lot of iteration as part of that process. So the overall progress can sometimes feel slow because you have to think through all of this extra weight—the weight of depending on thousands and thousands of developers and billions of users on you to make the right decision. It means you can't just “Oh, let's just merge this breaking change and I'll make this breaking change and I'll just post on Slack to everybody like, ‘Hey, watch out. I just changed this one thing. I documented it here. Good luck.’” You can't really quite pull that lever in the same way, but when you do have a step forward, it's a step forward for all of these apps, for all of these projects, for all of their users and so, little baby steps can still translate into really big impact. ARTY: So when you have something that's a major release in that context, like a major release of Ember versus a minor release. How are those different? What kind of things do you do in major releases? JEN: Yeah, that's a good question. So I'll just provide a little bit of background information on this vocabulary that we're using for anyone who's listening in. A lot of projects follow semantic versioning, which is a set of rules that a lot of projects agree to follow that if you ever see a version number that's like 4.2.1.—oftentimes, that's semantic versioning and action in the first number—is for major releases and a major release is one that has a breaking change. So that means that I make a change in that code base. I would expect that other people would have to change the code in their own apps and they would be forced to go through that—make that change—in order to upgrade to that version for the library I'm working on. Minor is usually used for features. Patch, the last one, is used for bug fixes and internal refactors, things like that. Not all projects follow in the same way. Some projects have time-based cycles where they say, “Oh, we do a major release every six months,” or something like that. But for us major releases are breaking changes and the things that are different about them is that we have to give people a path forward to get to the next version. That could include putting some deprecation warnings, any code that's going to get removed or change any API that are going to shift in the next major version. We want to let people know, with a little warning, if they're using those older syntaxes, or APIs, whatever's going to be removed. We also want to try to give a lot of advanced notice about what's going to change, or be removed via blog posts, things like having a help channel set up maybe that's just for those upgrades. When it's time to actually do the major release, we try to make it boring. This is something that I would like to see happen across the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem. It does seem to be catching on more, which is that when you do a major version release, all it does is it removes the things that need to be removed. You make your breaking changes and that's it, and then in follow-up releases is when you add in all the new features. So let's say, some API is just the old way of doing things. It doesn't match up with a new rendering engi…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    252: Designing For Safety with Eva PenzeyMoog Sep 29, 2021
    Show notes

    TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic Violence, Abuse, Interpersonal Safety 01:26 - Eva’s Superpower: ADHD and Hyperfocus Workplace Accommodation At-Will Employment 08:19 - Design for Safety Tech Used For Interpersonal Harm Might vs When Eva Penzey Moog | Designing Against Domestic Violence Weaponizing Technology 12:45 - What Engineers Need to Know Control/Shared Accounts Surveillance Location Data 15:02 - Expanding Our Understanding of What “User” Means “User as an abstraction.” 20:43 - Parallels with Security Personas / Archetypes Adding Layers of Friction Ongoing Arms Race 22:23 - Spreading Awareness Across Teams Focused on Feature Delivery Safety Designers as a Specialized Role? Generalists vs Specialists; Literacy vs Fluency This Book Is For Everyone: Engineers, Designers, Product Managers, etc. 31:38 - Thinking Beyond The User Constituency Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need By Sasha Costanza-Chock 35:25 - Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy We Prioritize The Safety of Marginalized People Over the Comfort of Unmarginalized People How Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy (Workshop) Kim Crayton: Intention Without Strategy is Chaos Sitting with Discomfort 40:21 - Putting Ergonomics, Safety, and Security Behind Paywalls “Ergonomics is the marriage of design and ethics.” The History of Seatbelts Government Regulation Worker Organizing 45:58 - Tech Workers and Privilege Overpaid/Underpaid Reflections: Mandy: Inclusive and accessible technology includes people experiencing domestic abuse. Damien: If a product can be used for harm, it will be. Coraline: How systems are weaponized against marginalized and vulnerable folks. The internet is good for connecting people with shared experiences but we’re breaking into smaller and smaller groups. Are we propping up systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences? Eva: Who didn’t teach you about this? It’s our job to keep ourselves safe in tech. Tech companies need to take more responsibility for user safety. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDY: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 252. My name is Mandy Moore and today, I'm here with Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Hi, and I am here with Coraline Ada Ehmke. CORALINE: Wow. I actually showed up for once. [laughs] I'm very happy to be with y'all today and I'm very excited about the guest that we have today. Her name is Eva PenzeyMoog and Eva is a principal designer at 8th Light and the author of Design for Safety. Before joining the tech field, she worked in the non-profit space and volunteered as a domestic violence educator and rape crisis counselor. At 8th Light, she specializes in user experience design as well as education and consulting in the realm of digital safety design. Her work brings together her expertise in domestic violence and technology, helping technologists understand how their creations facilitate interpersonal harm and how to prevent it through intentionally prioritizing the most vulnerable users. Eva, I'm so happy to have you here today. Hi! EVA: Hi, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. CORALINE: So if I recall correctly and it has been a while so Mandy, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we open with the same question that we've been opening with for 251 other episodes and Eva, that is, what is your superpower and how did you discover, or develop it? EVA: Yeah, so my superpower is my ADHD, actually [chuckles] and specifically my ability to hyperfocus and I didn't really acquire and start to until the age of 25, which is when I was diagnosed. For people who don't know, hyperfocus is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's a state of very intense focus that people with ADHD will sometimes go into. It's not something you really have control over, it's not something you can just turn on, or off, and it isn't necessarily good, or bad. But for me, I'm really lucky because it often gets triggered when I start to code. So as I was starting to learn code and then I switched over to focusing on design and frontend like CSS and SAAS. But as I was learning that stuff, it gets triggered all the time. So I can sit down and code and oftentimes, hours have gone past and so long as I don't like miss any meetings or forget to eat, it's totally a superpower. CORALINE: That's amazing. I've talked about before, I live with bipolar disorder and I tend to stay in a low-grade manic state as my resting place and I experience very similar things with that hyper focus and just losing hours on a task and sometimes, it's very positive and I get a lot done and sometimes, I'm like, “What the hell did I do?” [chuckles] EVA: Right. CORALINE: But I think it's great that—I've been talking to some other folks with ADHD, with bipolar—the judo moves we can do takes something that really negatively affects us in a lot of ways and finding a way to turn it around, like you said, and use it as a superpower. Those are the strategies we develop when we live with things like this and I'm always happy when people have figured out how to get something good out of that. EVA: Yeah, totally and realizing that you have this thing that happens. Because I'm sure it's been happening my whole life, but I didn't recognize it, or understand it and then just being able to name it and see that it's happening is so powerful. And then to be like, “Oh, I can maybe do certain things to try to get into it,” or just being aware that it's a thing it's like very powerful. CORALINE: I'm kind of curious, Eva, if you don't mind us talking about ADHD for a little while? EVA: Sure. Yeah. CORALINE: Okay. I have a friend who is – actually, a couple of friends who were very recently diagnosed with ADHD and they had so much trouble in the traditional tech were workplace, especially working for companies that have productivity metrics like lines of code, or number of commits, or something like that. It was really difficult for both of these friends to operate in an environment where you're expected to have very consistent output day over day and not having accommodation, or not having the ability to design their work in such a way that maximizes the positives of how they work and minimizes the negatives of how they work. Is that something you've struggled with as well? EVA: Yeah, and that’s so unfortunate that your friends because like I said, I feel like it is a superpower and most workplaces, they should be trying to harness it and understand that, you can have really, really awesome employees with ADHD. If you set them up for success, they can be so successful. But it is something – so I've only ever worked at 8th Light actually, when I was interviewing, over 5 years ago now, and started doing, trying to find my first job in tech, after doing a bootcamp, I interviewed at a couple different places and none of them felt super great. But obviously, I was just really eager to get my first job. But then I went into 8th Light and 8th Light was one of the places where I really, really did want to work there and was really excited for the interview. But when I got to the office, it was very quiet and there was an open workspace, but people were working very quietly and there were like lots of rooms. I got into that and I was like, “Oh, thank God” like, this is exactly the space I need. I can't handle too much activity. I can't handle offices where they're actually playing music; that type of thing is my nightmare and I don't actually like wearing headphones all day like that. That's not just a easy fix for me and for a lot of people with ADHD. So I felt like right away, now I want to work here even more and I've been really lucky that it's been a really good setup for someone like me to work and I have gotten some accommodations which has been good. I feel like if you don't give accommodations, they're breaking the law, they need to do that. DAMIEN: This is really, really validating because I've had similar experiences of that. Even just this morning where I was in the code and I had no idea how much time was going by and I had no awareness of anything else. That's possible because of the environment I have that I work in. Whereas, previous jobs I've had with bullpens and just open office plans, I was in incredibly miserable there and I didn't understand how people could get any work done in those environments. So just this understanding of how people are different; in what environments some people thrive in and other environments other people thrive in. EVA: Yeah. So have you always worked from home, or has this been a pandemic thing? DAMIEN: This has been probably about 10 years. Yeah. [laughs] I went home and never left. [laughs] EVA: Nice. [chuckles] CORALINE: I've done something very similar. I started working from home, I think in 2015 and not for a great reason, but I found the exact same thing that you're talking about. Like I am very sensitive to my environment. I use music to control my mood and like you, Eva, I hate headphones. So I do wonder, you mentioned accommodations and the legal perspective on that. In Illinois where – Eva, you live in Illinois, too. Are you local for 8th Light? EVA: Yeah. I live in Chicago. CORALINE: We have that will employment and it's really easy to discriminate against folks on multiple axes rather than providing our accommodations. Without will employment, they can just let you go and you have no proof that it was because they're ableist, or racist or transphobic, or whatever. EVA: Oh, yeah. That's so rough. Pritzker's got to get on that. Our governor. [chuckles] CORALINE: So do you want to tell us a little bit about the book that you just wrote? I understand a lot of people are finding a lot of value in it and really opening their eyes to a lot of maybe issues they weren't aware of. EVA: Yeah. So my book, Design for Safety, came out in early August and it's been really great to see people's reactions to it. I got my first formal book review, which was really cool and it was overall very positive, which has been very exciting. I'm hopeful that it is helping people understand that this is a thing because it's different, I feel like than a lot of other problems. Someone else explained this to me recently and I had this light bulb moment that I'm not providing a solution to a problem that people know that they have this problem, like how their tech is used for interpersonal harm and now I have a solution like, here's this book that's going to tell you how to fix it. It's more that people don't even know that this is a problem. So I'm educating on that as well as trying to give some of the solutions on how to fix it. It has been a lot of people just saying like, “I had no idea about any of this. It's been so eye-opening and now I'm going to think about it more and do these different things.” So that's been really great to see that just people’s awareness is going up, basically. MANDY: I really like on the website, the sentence that there's a pullout quote, or I'm not sure if it's even a pullout quote, but it says, “If abuse is possible, it's only a matter of time until it happens. There's no might, so let's build better, safer digital products from the start.” I like that. EVA: Yeah, thanks. I was very intentional and well, this goes back to when I was doing a conference talk. Before I wrote the book, I did a conference talk called Designing Against Domestic Violence and I thought a lot about the type of language should I use; should I say might happen, or should I say will happen? I eventually settled on it's going to happen even if it hasn't happened yet, or oftentimes, I think we just don't know that it's happened. People who have gone through domestic violence, some of then we'll talk openly about it. But most people just don't, which makes sense. It's this really intense, personal thing to go through and there's so much judgment and survivors get blamed for all these things. So it makes sense that people don't want to talk that much about it. I ended up thinking we just need to say that it will happen. DAMIEN: That's amazing. So I really want to know everything about this book. [chuckles] but to start with, you said the book is designing for safety and you witnessed this a little bit with domestic violence, violence and abuse. Can you talk about safe from what sort of things you mean when you say safety there? EVA: Yeah, for sure because I know safety is a big word that can mean a lot of different things. But the way that I'm talking about it in my work is in terms of interpersonal safety. So it's like how is someone who has a relationship with you in an interpersonal way going to use technology, weaponized technology, in a way that was not meant to be used? We aren't designing tech with these use cases in mind, but how is it ultimately going to be weaponized for some type of abuse? Domestic violence is really the emphasis and my big focus and was mentioned in the intro, some background in domestic violence space. But there's also issues with child abuse and elder abuse, especially in terms of surveillance of those groups as well as surveillance of workers is another thing that came up a lot as I was researching that I didn't get as much into in the book. But it's basically anytime there's an interpersonal relationship and someone has access to you in this personal way where you're not just an anonymous stranger, how is tech going to be used to exert some form of control, or abuse over that person? DAMIEN: Wow, that is a very important subject. So I'm an engineer who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about interpersonal violence, domestic abuse, anything of that nature and I know you've written a whole book [laughs] and we only have an hour, or so here, but what are the first things that people, or engineers need to know about this? EVA: Yeah, so I think the first thing is to understand that this is a problem and that it's happening and to go through some different examples of how this happens, which is what the first couple chapters of the book are all about. It's different forms of this interpersonal abuse via technology in the form of shared accounts is a really big one and this question of who has control and nebulous issues of control. There's also surveillance is a really big one and then location data as well. So I guess, I don't want to say like, “Oh, just read the book,” but learning a little bit about the different – there's so many different examples of how this works. Just to start to build that mental model of how this happens like, someone taking advantage of certain affordances within a shared bank account software, or someone using an internet of things device to gaslight someone, or torment them. There's so many different examples. Location data shows up in all sorts of really sneaky in terms of stalking. It's not purely putting a tracker on someone's car, or even like Google Map and sharing your location is a more straightforward thing. But there's also, it shows up in other ways like, a grocery store app that has a timestamp and location. You can learn someone's…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    251: Diplomatic Accessibility Advocacy with Todd Libby Sep 22, 2021
    Show notes

    01:09 - Todd’s Superpower: Advocacy For Accessibility Getting Started Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman The A11Y Project W3C 06:18 - Joining The W3C The W3C Community Page 07:44 - Getting People/Companies/Stakeholders to Care/Prioritize About Accessibility Making A Strong Case For Accessibility by Todd Libby Diplomatic Advocacy You Don’t Want To Get Sued! / $$$ “We are all temporarily abled.” 15:20 - The Domino's Pizza Story Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino’s over site accessibility 18:21 - Things That Typically Aren’t Accessible And Should Be The WebAIM Million Report WCAG Color Contrast Missing Alt Text on Images Form Input Labels What’s New in WCAG 2.1: Label in Name by Todd Libby Empty Links Not Using Document Language Triggering GIFS / Flashing Content Empty Buttons – Use a Button Element!! Tab Order Semantic HTML, Heading Structure 26:27 - Accessibility for Mobile Devices Target Size Looking at WCAG 2.5.5 for Better Target Sizes Dragging Movements 28:08 - Color Contrast Contrast Ratio 33:02 - Designing w/ Accessibility in Mind From the Very Beginning Accessibility Advocates on Every Team Accessibility Training 36:22 - Contrast (Cont’d) 38:11 - Automating Accessibility! axe-core-gems Reflections: Mae: Eyeballing for contrast. John: We are all only temporarily abled and getting the ball rolling on building accessibility in from the beginning of projects going forward and fixing older codebases. Mandy: Using alt-tags going forward on all social media posts. Todd: Accessibility work will never end. Accessibility is a right not a privilege. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 251. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mae Beale. MAE: Hi, there! And also, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hi, everyone! I'm Mandy Moore and I'm here today with our guest, Todd Libby. Todd Libby is a professional web developer, designer, and accessibility advocate for 22 years under many different technologies starting with HTML/CSS, Perl, and PHP. Todd has been an avid learner of web technologies for over 40 years starting with many flavors of BASIC all the way to React/Vue. Currently an Accessibility Analyst at Knowbility, Todd is also a member of the W3C. When not coding, you’ll usually find Todd tweeting about lobster rolls and accessibility. So before I ask you what your superpower is, I'm going to make a bet and my bet is that I'm 80% positive that your superpower has something to do with lobster rolls. Am I right? [laughter] Am I right? TODD: Well, 80% of the time, you'd be right. I just recently moved to Phoenix, Arizona. So I was actually going to say advocacy for accessibility, but yes, lobster rolls and the consumption of lobster rolls are a big part. MAE: I love it. That's fantastic. MANDY: Okay. Well, tell me about the advocacy. [chuckles] TODD: So it started with seeing family members who are disabled, friends who are disabled, or have family members themselves who are disabled, and the struggles they have with trying to access websites, or web apps on the web and the frustration, the look of like they're about ready to give up. That's when I knew that I would try to not only make my stuff that I made accessible, but to advocate for people in accessibility. MAE: Thank you so much for your work. It is critical. I have personally worked with a number of different populations and started at a camp for children with critical illnesses and currently work at an organization that offers financial services for people with disabilities – well, complex financial needs, which the three target populations that we work with are people with disabilities, people with dementia, and people in recovery. So really excited to talk with you today. Thanks. TODD: You’re welcome. JOHN: When you started that journey, did you already have familiarity with accessibility, or was it all just like, “Oh, I get to learn all this stuff so I can start making it better”? TODD: So I fell into it because if you're like me and you started with making table-based layouts way back in the day, because what we had—Mosaic browser, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer—we were making table-based layouts, which were completely inaccessible, but I didn't know that. As the web progressed, I progressed and then I bought a little orange book by Jeffrey Zeldman, Designing with Web Standards, and that pretty much started me on my journey—semantic HTML, progressive enhancement in web standards, and accessibility as well. I tend to stumble into a lot of stuff [laughs] so, and that's a habit of mine. [laughs] MAE: It sounds like it's a good habit and you're using it to help all the other people. So I hate to encourage you to keep stumbling, but by all means. [laughter] Love it. If you were to advise someone wanting to know more about accessibility, would you suggest they start with that same book too, or what would you suggest to someone stumbling around in the dark and not hitting anything yet? TODD: The book is a little outdated. I think the last edition of his book was, I want to say 2018, maybe even further back than that. I would suggest people go on websites like The A11Y project, the a11yproject.com. They have a comprehensive list of resources, links to learning there. Twitter is a good place to learn, to follow people in the accessibility space. The other thing that, if people really want to dive in, is to join The W3C. That's a great place and there's a lot of different groups. You have the CSS Working Group, you have the accessibility side of things, which I'm a part of, the Silver Community Group, which is we're working on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 3.0, which is still a little ways down the road, but a lot of great people and a lot of different companies. Some of those companies we've heard of—Google, Apple, companies like that all the way down to individuals. Individuals can join as individuals if your company isn't a member of the W3C. So those are the three things that I mainly point to people. If you don't really want to dive into the W3C side of things, there's a lot of resources on the a11yproject.com website that you can look up. MANDY: So what does being a member entail? What do you have to do? Do you have to pay dues? Do you have to do certain projects, maybe start as an individual level, because I'm sure we have mostly individuals listening to the show. Me as a newbie coder, what would I do to get started as a member of this initiative? TODD: Well, I started out as an individual myself, so I joined and I can get you the link to The W3C Community Page. Go to sign up as an individual and someone will approve the form process that you go through—it's nothing too big, it's nothing complicated—and then that will start you on your way. You can join a sub group, you can join a group, a working group, and it doesn't cost an individual. Companies do pay dues to the W3C and if your company is in the W3C, you get ahold of your company's liaison and there's a process they go through to add you to a certain group. Because with me, it was adding me to The Silver Community Group. But as an individual, you can join in, you can hop right into a meeting from there, and then that's basically it. That's how you start. JOHN: What are the challenges you see in getting not only the goals of a W3C, but I'm assuming specifically around accessibility? TODD: Some of the things that I've seen is buy-in from stakeholders is probably the number one hurdle, or barrier. Companies, stakeholders, and board members, they don't think of, or in some cases, they don't care about accessibility until a company is getting sued and that's a shame. That's one of the things that I wrote about; I have an article on Smashing Magazine. Making A Strong Case for Accessibility, it's called and that is one of few things that I've come across. Getting buy-in from stakeholders and getting buy-in from colleagues as well because you have people that they don’t think about accessibility, they think about a number of different things. Mostly what I've come across is they don't think about accessibility because there's no budget, or they don't have the time, or the company doesn't have the time. It's not approved by the company. The other thing that is right up there is it's a process—accessibility—making things accessible and most people think that it's a big this huge mountain to climb. If you incorporate accessibility from the beginning of your project, it's so much easier. You don't have to go back and you don't have to climb that mountain because you've waited until the very end. “Oh, we have time now so we'll do the accessibility stuff,” that makes it more hard. MAE: John, your question actually was similar to something I was thinking about with how you developed this superpower and I was going to ask and still will now. [chuckles] How did you afford all the time in the different places where you were overtime to be able to get this focus? And so, how did you make the case along the way and what things did you learn in that persuasion class of life [chuckles] that was able to allow you to have that be where you could focus and spend more time on and have the places where you work prioritize successful? TODD: It was a lot of, I call it diplomatic advocacy. So for instance, the best example I have is I had been hired to make a website, a public facing website, and a SAAS application accessible. The stakeholder I was directly reporting to, we were sitting down in a meeting one day and I said, “Well, I want to make sure that accessibility is the number one priority on these projects,” and he shot back with, “Well, we don't have the disabled users,” and that nearly knocked me back to my chair. [laughs] So that was a surprise. MAE: There's some groaning inside and I had to [chuckles] do it out loud for a moment. Ooh. TODD: Yeah, I did my internal groaning at the meeting so that just was – [chuckles] Yeah, and I remember that day very vividly and I probably will for the rest of my life that I looked at him and I had to stop and think, and I said, “Well, you never know, there's always a chance that you're able, now you could be disabled at any time.” I also pointed out that his eyeglasses that he wore are an assistive technology. So there was some light shed on that and that propelled me even further into advocacy and the accessibility side of things. That meeting really opened my eyes to not everyone is going to get it, not everyone is going to be on board, not everyone is going to think about disabled users; they really aren't. So from there I used that example. I also use what I call the Domino's Pizza card lately because “Oh, you don't want to get sued.’ That's my last resort as far as advocacy goes. Other than that, it's showing a videotape of people using their product that are disabled and they can't use it. That's a huge difference maker, when a stakeholder sees that somebody can’t use their product. There's numbers out there now that disabled users in this country alone, the United States, make up 25% of the population, I believe. They have a disposable income of $8 trillion. The visually disabled population alone is, I believe it was $1.6 billion, I think. I would have to check that number again, but it's a big number. So the money side of things really gets through to a stakeholder faster than “Well, your eyeglasses are a assistive technology.” So once they hear the financial side of things, their ears perk up real quick and then they maybe get on board. I've never had other than one stakeholder just saying, “No, we're just going to skip that,” and then that company ended up getting sued. So that says a lot, to me anyways. But that's how I really get into it. And then there was a time where I was working for another company. I was doing consulting for them and I was doing frontend mostly. So it was accessibility, but also at the same time, it was more the code side of things. That was in 2018. 2019, I went to a conference in Burlington, Vermont. I saw a friend of mine speaking and he was very passionate about it and that talk, and there was a couple others there as well, it lit that fire under me again, and I jumped right back in and ever since then, it's just then accessibility. MAE: You reminded me one of the arguments, or what did you say? Diplomatic advocacy statements that I have used is that we are all temporarily abled. [chuckles] Like, that's just how it is and seeing things that way we can really shift how you orient to the idea of as other and reduce the othering. But I was also wondering how long it would be before Pizza Hut came up in our combo. [laughter] MANDY: Yeah, I haven't heard of that. Can you tell us what that is? TODD: [chuckles] So it was Domino’s and they had a blind user that tried to use their app. He couldn't use their app; their app wasn't accessible. He tried to use the website; the website wasn't accessible. I have a link that I can send over to the whole story because I'm probably getting bits and pieces wrong. But from what I can recall, basically, this user sued Domino's and instead of Domino's spending, I believe it was $36,000 to fix their website and their app, they decided to drag it out for a number of years through court and of course, spent more money than just $36,000. In the end, they lost. I think they tried to appeal to the Supreme Court because they've gone up as high as federal court, but regardless, they lost. They had to – and I don't know if they still have an inaccessible site, or not, or the app for that matter because I don't go to Domino’s. But that's basically the story that they had; a user who tried to access the app and the website, couldn’t use it, and they got taken to court. Now Domino's claimed, in the court case, that he could have used the telephone, but he had tried to use the telephone twice and was on hold for 45 minutes. So [laughs] that says a lot. JOHN: Looks like it actually did go to the Supreme Court. TODD: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think they did not want to hear it. They just said, “No, we're not going to hear the case.” Yeah, and just think about all these apps we use and all the people that can't access those apps, or the websites. I went to some company websites because I was doing some research, big companies, and a lot of them are inaccessible. A little number that I can throw out there: every year, there's been a little over 2,500 lawsuits in the US. This year, if the rate keeps on going that it has, we're on course for over 4,000 lawsuits in the US alone for inaccessible websites. You've had companies like Target, Bank of America, Winn-Dixie, those kinds of companies have been sued by people because of inaccessible sites. MAE: Okay, but may I say this one thing, which is, I just want to extend my apologies to Pizza Hut. [laughter] MANDY: What kinds of things do you see as not being accessible that should be or easily could be that companies just simply aren't doing? TODD: The big one, still and if you go to webaim.org/projects/million, it's The WebAIM Million report. It's an annual accessibility analysis of the top 1 million…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    250: Employee Resource Groups with Adrian Gillem Sep 15, 2021
    Show notes

    01:19 - Adrian’s Superpower: Humor Making People Feel Comfortable Through Humor Self-Deprecating Humor & Authenticity 04:57 - Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): What are they? Employees Share Effective, Measurable, Impactful Insights Connecting New Hires with People Who Look Like Them Making Employee Experiences Better 09:20 - How ERGs Operate “Build with not for” Making Fellow Colleagues Heard 18:03 - Successfully Policy Implementations: Examples Transgender Healthcare 23:18 - ERGs and Management / Executive Sponsor Partnerships 30:41 - ERGs vs Unions Equity 34:19 - Inclusivity Training Reflections: Casey: “ERGs are only as strong as the management supporting them.” Mandy: Live programming + fireside chats over slideshows for inclusivity training. Adrian: Pushing ERGs and DEI initiatives to the next level is crucial and keeping these efforts authentic. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDY: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 250. My name is Mandy Moore and I’m here with my friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I’m Casey! And we’re both here with Adrian Gillem. Adrian is a Technical Project Manager with Booz Allen Hamilton focused on deploying next generation digital transformation capabilities to public sector clients in Washington D.C., Honolulu, Tokyo, and Seoul. Beyond his technical client-responsibilities, Adrian’s true passion is grounded in diversity, equity, and inclusion program management and partnership building. Over the years, Adrian helped lead Booz Allen’s LGBTQIA+ and African American Employee Resource Groups to new heights; instituting new internal and external partnerships and programs under a DEI strategy committed to representing and empowering our BIPOC, Black, Indigenous and people of color, queer, and ally employees across the firm. Welcome, Adrian! ADRIAN: Thanks, everybody! Good to be with you guys. CASEY: All right, we’re going to ask you our first question, we always ask. What, Adrian, is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ADRIAN: [laughs] I've had to think about this. My superpower is humor and I only acquired it because I was able to tell the same bad jokes over and over to my friends and loved ones, and I've just stuck with the ones that people laughed at. CASEY: Testing. You tested them live. ADRIAN: That's right. That's right. They had no choice. [laughter] CASEY: How many of them did you get full on laughter versus nervous laughter versus glares, which were also a sign they liked your pun? ADRIAN: Yeah. I would say that my sarcastic humor definitely got 70% eye rolls, 10% hm and has and then the other 20% were slight laughs, maybe a smirk, or two. But over the years, I hope that it's gotten better more in my favor. People tend to smile a little more when I make a joke, but can't say it's a 100% success rate so far. But we'll see. Maybe I will start my life career as a comedian in the next 10 years since and just retire from technology, or I'll just do both. Who knows, who knows? CASEY: Yeah. There's space for that. ADRIAN: There is. CASEY: Multi-passionate. You can be multi-passionate; you're allowed. ADRIAN: Absolutely. I can make live jokes and do live coding on a set. I'll probably do really bad coding, which will be enough for people to laugh at anyway, so I'll already have material ready to go. MANDY: That's awesome. CASEY: You've got me smiling and laughing. [laughter] Even just the levity you're describing is funny. MANDY: Yeah. ADRIAN: Thanks. I appreciate you both for already bearing with me. [laughs] CASEY: So I have a feeling you incorporate humor like this into your work with employee resource groups. It's hard to imagine you wouldn't. Tell us something like that—some of the joke that you've told, some scenario that you've managed to reframe. ADRIAN: Oh boy, that's a really tough question. I think the way I try to incorporate my humor, especially in my work with our employee resource groups within the firm and especially with our partners outside of our company, is just to make everyone feel comfortable through humor. You start to meet with different folks of different backgrounds for the first time, maybe even for the second, or third time, whether it be at your water cooler, or in the kitchen, or at an actual meeting where you're talking about a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. Some folks might walk in and not necessarily know everyone in a room, not feel comfortable to speak in the way that they would like, or act as authentic as they should. So luckily for me, humor seems to break that ice very quickly. It's always very – in my case, I choose to do self-deprecating humor first and then that just gets the ball rolling in making sure that everybody feels open and welcome to be themselves in the space that I'm in. But absolutely, in the ERG, the last place you want to have this stoic, maybe stale environment is an ERG whether it be an ERG meeting, or an ERG get together, or anything like that. You want to make sure that everyone feels very comfortable being in that space and you don't want to have as any hesitancy to that authenticity. So I try to do my best with making many people laugh, even if it is at my own expense and that's perfectly okay, I signed up for it. CASEY: So for listeners who may, or may not have been part of an employee resource group before, an ERG, can you tell us a little bit about what it's like being part of one? ADRIAN: Sure. So being in an ERG, it's an interesting mix. You either are in an organization that has had ERGs for a very long time and there are predetermined ways that it operates. There's a leadership structure. There are formal rules and procedures in place. There's a lot of hype behind it. Folks feel that it actually represents their interest and they can use that to communicate up. By up, I do mean up to management, senior leadership on ways they are not feeling included, or feeling equitably represented in a particular company. And then there are other organizations where unfortunately, a formal ERG structure might not exist and so, you'll have situations where employees informally get together based on shared experiences, based on shared connections, based on shared racial identities, or gender identities, or sexual orientation identities. But they don't have a formal way, or a formal mechanism to do that. So in our case, in organizations that do have formal ERGs, really what it is used for is to make sure that staff have an effective, measurable, an impactful organized mechanism to really share insights on things that are affecting them as an individual employee and share it across colleagues that also might be feeling similar impacts, or might have similar experiences. To provide a specific example in this case, I lead, or I'm on the board, rather of our African American Network. That's what we call it. Really, it's focused on engaging our African American and more generally, our brown and Black persons of color employees across the firm to make sure that their voice is not just heard, but felt, that their impact is not just seen, but felt in the way our company operates and the things that we focus on and try to improve on. In that, most of what I'll do is typically liaise with our employees that are, let's say, onboarding for the first time to the company and they want to feel connected to that wider corporate group. We are a company of 26,000 employees, so it's very hard to feel like I can connect with a bunch of people pretty easily. So connecting with new hires via this mechanism of an ERG provides an easy way for folks to get together with a smaller subsect of our staff. But get connected with a subsect that actually looks like them, talks like them, has had shared experiences and memories and livelihoods and lives just like them and so, that's just part of it. The other part of it is representing our respective employees and our members within the ERG and their interest to upper management, to our human resources division, and folks with just a stake in understanding what is impacting our employees that are particularly aligned to this group and how can we make their experiences better. But better in the sense that they're able to be more effective in their job, feel more authentic in their day-to-day, and feel more appreciated for the unique contributions that they're bringing each and every day that they support the work that we do. So I think that's a lot and I'm happy to break it down even further because I think that this is such a really, really important element that companies that have it formally structured sometimes take for granted because they might not be effectively funding it, or giving it the oomph, I'll say. The energy and relevance to do that kind of impact that I'm describing that I feel is unique to Booz Allen. But in a way, it's also a call-to-action for maybe smaller or mid-size companies that, like you mentioned, might not have a formalized structure like this and yet have employees who want to band together and make it so, so they have a way to drive that type of impact I was talking about earlier. MANDY: So you create these groups—people who look like me, act like me, are like me identify in the same way that I do and we see things, where do we go from there? We identify the things that we want, or need. Do we go management? Do we go to HR? What's the kind of, how is it structured? ADRIAN: So that's a very good question. I think ERGs and really, business resource groups, depending on the company, have varied reporting structures. In the case of Booz Allen, we as an ERG work very closely and almost hand-in-hand with our formal diversity, equity, and inclusion departments, our human resources specialists, our recruiters, all those within that part of the company, to make sure that what we're hearing at what we like to consider at the grassroots level is actually delivering change that can be felt by our employees. Now, what that does not mean is that employees would somehow come to us as an ERG with let's say, a formal employee level, or human resource level complaint, and we pass it on their behalf. No, no, no. That's not really the focus. The focus really is to make sure that everyone, broadly speaking, has a chance to voice things that are really important to them and their situation—basically connected to their identity and however they choose to identify in a particular space so that we collectively can share those insights to departments and components of a business that drive that policy discussion and policy change in response to situations arising. So in our case, in the wake of the increased exposure of Black Lives Matter protests across the United States, in the wake of the murder of our brother, George Floyd, in the wake of so many impactful events that have happened over the last 2 years, not to mention a pandemic that we're all kind of living through in our own way, ERGs have become the focal point to articulating what really is, or are the needs of our workers, our colleagues, our friends in this company—whichever company that you might work for—and how can we represent what they are actually dealing with on a day-to-day basis? Because I think one of the things that we forget is not all employees feel comfortable to go to human resources with an issue. Not all employees feel comfortable going to management with an issue—and I speak as a project manager myself. Especially when it comes to particular situations that are specific to issues that might be affected by their race, by their sexual orientation, by their gender identity, and so on and so forth. So an ERG provides that formal, but not management connected mechanism to gather all of those insights, gather all of those feelings, and tell a narrative that's structured, but impactful to the human resources and management leadership elements of a particular company to drive that change. Now, all of what I’ve described is the ideal. That's the ideal way that ERGs ought to operate in a particular environment. But I am very well aware that some, if not a lot, of companies don't do it that way. They're playbook for employee resource groups is I one of two things. Either you will have a loose band of employees that may have won, what we call, executive sponsor that doesn't have a lot of weight to throw on it and by extension, financial support, leadership recognition to then drive that kind of impact. And then another is where there is no ERG presence whatsoever. But in this context, I'm also still talking about big companies, larger companies, even companies at my scale where all of the discussions, all of these things that I've talked about are really just management led. So to provide an even more specific example that I think we've all heard about time and time again, especially in the wake of all of what we've experienced over the last 2 years, a lot of companies just hire a chief diversity and inclusion officer and call it a day. That's their impact, or they put out a press release that says, “We are going to revamp our recruiting strategies and we're going to “do better” to represent our minority employees, our employees of minority, gender identities, or sexual orientations.” But at the end of the day, that doesn't really translate to a grassroots level initiative of that delivers that kind of change. So taking it all back to your question of is an ERG seen as that formal mechanism to interface between staff and human resources? It is, but only in the context of with it, we can get a lot more critical insight that feels more authentic, that is more authentic, because it's driven by our employees, vice waiting for one or two employees to feel comfortable going to HR directly with an issue, or concern and not really driving that kind of impact the way we would like to. CASEY: It reminds me of the phrase “build with, not for.” So the second scenario where you just hire a DEI officer and they just do it on their own without including the people who are affected is like a build for. But if you get people involved who are affected without forcing them to either, which is the other end of the spectrum. [chuckles] Like you’ve got to invite them and they have to accept it and be content happy working with it. Maybe you have time. I'm wondering, do you feel like you have working hours, time dedicated you can spend on the ERG work, or do you squeeze it in between everything you do? ADRIAN: That's a good question, actually and a good point to bring up. I, myself, am very passionate about this stuff and I love doing it. So even if I feel like I'm adding on to my day-to-day work, it's not really a big deal for me because I know that what I'm doing is driving an impact that I am very, very excited to do each and every day. But more importantly, I get to go to sleep at night because I know that I'm just not doing a day-to-day job, that is doing day-to-day monotonous work, that there is a value add to it that I'm able to do liver to my colleagues, my friends in my company, and send a clear message of what I stand for and what I want to represent, what I want to share. But for others, and especially in some corporate environments, you might see two structures. One structure is companies might devo…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    249: #TechIsHiring + eSports and Software Engineering with Chad Stewart Sep 08, 2021
    Show notes

    01:19 - Chad’s Superpower: Making People Laugh Using Comedy to Deal with Problems 03:46 - #TechIsHiring Bot: @TechIsHiring Amplifying Others Using Networks For Good Being a Bridge/Connector Actively Working to Benefit Others (Possibly Professionally?!?) Diversify Tech @DiversifyTechCo Veni Kunche Greater Than Code Episode #212: Diversify Tech with Veni Kunche 31:03 - eSports and Software Engineering Street Fighter Strategy & Feedback Online vs In-Person Events GGPO Rollback Networking SDK github.com/pond3r/ggpo Tony Cannon Chad on Twitch Netherrealm Studios Guilty Gear Strive Reflections: John: The simple act of connecting others with a hashtag. Mandy: Follow @GreaterThanCode for new content and RTs! Amplify others. Mando: Drawing comparisons and connections between playing fighting games and software development and engineering. Bringing experience from one realm to another. Chad: The possibility of being a connector in a professional sense and the validation of comparing fighting games and software development as a discipline worth talking about. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 249. I’m John Sawers and I'm here with Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thanks, John. Hi, and I'm here with my friend, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hey! And I’m here with our guest, Chad Stewart. As a software engineer and esports athlete with many years of experience in both fields, Chad dives deep into issues that he comes across, drilling down to the core of a problem and finds solutions others may miss, letting the lessons of the journey guide future expeditions into the unknown. If you’re confused at comparing esports to software engineering, you’d be surprised at how similar they are. Welcome, Chad. CHAD: Thanks. Thanks for having me. I never imagined that writing that [chuckles] and it being literally the thing introduces me on a podcast. Wow, I’m sorry, I’m a little mesmerized. MANDY: I really do want to ask about how we compare esports to software engineering. But before we do that, we have to ask our standard question that we ask all of our guests, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? CHAD: So, funny enough, I listened to a few episodes before coming on and I wanted to tell a silly joke, but that segues into what my superpower is, is I make people laugh. That's just something I like doing, it’s a big thing for me and I guess, I acquired it by watching Cartoon Network way too early in my life [laughs] and just being, I don't know, I just enjoy making people laugh. I enjoy making myself laugh and I guess, it's just fun. To be honest, that's what I kind of do on Twitter all day, make people laugh. MANDY: That's awesome. That's a great coping mechanism. Especially these days, I find myself doing the same thing, trying to make light of situations so things don't seem as dark. [laughs] JOHN: Years ago, a friend of mine, it wasn’t exactly a criticism but he was like, “Man, you’ll laugh at any joke,” and I'm like, “Oh, that's the option. I can either laugh more, or I can laugh less and I choose more.” MANDY: Yeah, I always say I'd rather laugh than cry about it. CHAD: I completely agree. There's so much sadness in the world at the moment. We've been in this pandemic for an extended period of time now and there's been people who've lost family members and friends, people who've lost livelihoods. Obviously, comedy is not necessarily going to fix all of that, but at the very least, it makes it easier to deal with those problems. We were all hoping that we were going to come out of that this year and it feels like that's not even going to happen. There is some level of normalcy, but long story short, definitely I'd much rather see people smiling and having a good time and if I can add more of that into the world, then great. Just trying to make people laugh and it's fun, it's good for you. It's physically good for you. MANDY: That's awesome. So I know that I reached out to you to come on the show because I wanted to talk to you specifically about, I think it's something you started around the beginning of the whole pandemic situation, The #TechIsHiring hashtag, do you want to talk about that a little bit? CHAD: Yeah. So #TechIsHiring is a hashtag that is specifically for job seekers and people who are looking for candidates for their jobs. What I noticed is people would post their jobs, or post that they're looking for a job on Twitter and depending on how strong their network is, it would get a lot of traction, or not so much traction at all. So I was thinking, there are people out there who are maybe looking for work and to be fair, it started mostly from that in the first place. More people are looking for an opportunity and posting about it on Twitter and if their network isn't very strong, or for whatever reason, the tweet doesn't get a lot of traction, then it may potentially become difficult for them. I started the hashtag so that if I saw a tweet like that, I could add it to the hashtag. If you have a job tweet that you're looking for somebody to fill this position, I’d just go out and ask if I could add it to the hashtag and if you say yes, I just tag it with #TechIsHiring and obviously, the same for if somebody is looking for an opportunity. It's been fairly successful like within the last couple of weeks, there've been a lot more usage of it. I don't necessarily have great ways of coming up with data on obviously how, if people are really benefiting from it outside of me maybe probing to see, but for the most part, I have the Twitter bot that I created for the hashtag. I have notification alerts for that and it's like my phone goes off all the time with notifications and I'm just like, “Hey, at least people are using it and people are retweeting it.” So I'm pretty happy about that. There's a few things I'd like to do to kind of expand it, but I'm definitely happy with where it is right now. JOHN: So you're saying that the need you saw was that people are posting about that they're looking for a job, but maybe their network isn't particularly good, or they're not getting a lot of reach out of that and so, they're not really getting the benefit of all of Twitter being available to them. So you wanted to create this way to amplify those tiny voices that are saying, “Hey, I need a job.” CHAD: Yes, yes, yes. To be fair, the #TechIsHiring, it's growing, but ultimately, what I wanted to be is pretty much the thing that people can rely on. You know what I mean? So in essence, I want to build the network for #TechIsHiring so I go and look for like jobs and for people who are looking for jobs, I will actively go and search for them on Twitter and initially, this was to add to the hashtag because obviously, the hashtag didn't have too much when I started it and it's just become a habit of mine. There are definitely some people who are looking who, by the time I get come across their tweet, which may be even a week after they've done it, they've maybe had two, or three, or so retweets and likes. I was like, “Hey, if I add this to the hashtag, maybe at the very least, people will see it.” My network is decent. It's not the best I'm not super Twitter famous, but I have a fair amount of people that follow me. So what I do when I'm asking is I always make sure to like and retweet whatever I find and ask so at the very least, other people on my network could see it and so, even if they don't reply—and to be fair, some people don't reply for whatever reason, maybe they never see it, or whatever. But even if they don't reply, at least some people are seeing it potentially and even a lot more now, I will retweet some people's job postings, or some people's looking for jobs tweets and people will retweet it themselves. I'm just trying to, I guess, be that bridge, or I guess, middleman. I don’t know, I can't come up with a better term, but I've just tried to be that person that helps because it's like, everybody's kind of been there. Like, you're looking for a job and you're doing your absolute best and you're stuck with whatever information you have. Information, or resources you have and it's like, if I can make this thing so that people can of latch onto it and use that, then maybe a lot more people can get in contact with somebody who can offer them an opportunity. But that's pretty much it. MANDY: That's awesome. I used to use the Greater Than Code account to do a lot of that—amplify the voices of others—and I used to be on Mondays, I would go and fill a buffer queue of just content that I found on the internet that I could retweet others. Ever since my daughter got “laid off the school,” that's been a little more difficult, but I'm hoping that in the near future, I can start that up again and do the same thing with the #GreaterThanCode hashtag. But what you're doing, it's not easy work and it takes time to sit there, look, curate, put all that stuff together, and then amplify it out and get people to notice it, and engage with posts and it’s hard work. So thank you for trying to be that bridge and trying to use your network for good. I think that was awesome and part of the reason I wanted to get you on the show was because you've been doing it for a really long time and you keep up with it and it's amazing. CHAD: Yes. Thank you, thank you. There's a few things that I want to do like, I would like to reach out to more employers and it’s just always an awareness thing. I just definitely like to reach out to more employers and be like, “Hey, there are candidates here who are tweeting on Twitter and they're in this hashtag, you can look through that.” I kind of do it, but I do it like – so I was thinking about it the other day and to be honest, I actually did this way before I actually officially started the hashtag. When I first got on Twitter, or at least when I first got on tech Twitter, what I would do is I'd be doing the Twitter thing and just kind of oh, this person's interesting so I'd make a reply and have maybe a small conversation. And then I would see somebody who's like, “Hey, I'm looking for work,” and I was like, “Hey, I passed the thread that's talking about all of these jobs.” So I’d just link it to them and I was like, “Hey, hopefully, they'll get something out of it,” and I just did that. That was just something that just came to be naturally like sometimes I'll be on Reddit and they'll be like, “Oh there was some job posts here. I'll just link it to this person, they're looking for somebody,” and I guess, it makes sense that I ended up making a hashtag to do that in a more official capacity as opposed to one off. But what I definitely want to do is just to reach out to people, or to more people actually who have positions and I probably should reach out directly to the people who I'm retweeting who’s saying that they're looking for people and link people, especially people who I've already retweeted and be like, “Hey there's a candidate here,” and just stuff like that. That's something I want to do. There are a few organizations that talk about jobs on Twitter a lot and I want to reach out to them and just ask them if they could use the hashtag. I tend not to mess with them too much because they're out trying to make money and so on and so forth, and it feels kind of weird. I don't want to retweet their stuff. I don't know what their marketing plan is. But I just want to reach out to them and be like, “Hey I'm doing this thing” because I don't have any numbers on who benefits from the hashtag. It's all in hopes of type thing. So I just want it to be a little bit more direct with, “Hey employers, there's actually people here that you can look at.” So that's pretty much the direction that I'm hoping to go in while obviously, also, actually adding opportunities and people who are looking for options. But hopefully, people start doing it on their own, which is the ultimate goal is that I don't have to curate it myself because everybody understands that it exists. But for now, I don't mind doing that work. MANDY: So I love the fact that you're a connector in that sense. That's what I consider myself and what I would do before actually being a host/panelist on the show. I feel like you should really hook up with this person and talk about this thing because do you know this person? And then I've had so many people come back from conversations with all the people that I've hooked up on podcasts and they're like, “So-and-so is like my new best internet friend now, thank you so much for introducing us.” [chuckles] I love being able to take people and being like, “You like this, you like this, do you two know each other?” and forging relationships like that. That's one of my greatest superpowers I feel so it seems like you're in the same boat, which is really cool. CHAD: Yeah. I would definitely say that I've been doing that for some time more in an unofficial capacity. It's more like, “Oh, this person needs something. I know somebody who can help with that.” So I go, “Hey, this person needs so-and-so,” and I just bring them together. I haven't been doing it too much of late. Well, I guess, I have because of the hashtag, but I haven't been doing it too much lately because I feel like the tables have turned; I'm the person that's in need more often than not. But it's definitely something I would definitely like to do more. Again, obviously I'm doing it with the hashtag, but it's definitely like, I've always been like that even as a kid. I've just always been the person who will just help just for helping’s sake. I'm not necessarily trying to like, “Oh, I'm going to help you so you can help me.” Like, no. “You need something. I think I can help you with that. What can we do?” I don't know, I like working to benefit people. I feel good doing that. You know what I mean? You hear people like, “Hey, things really worked out because of what you did,” and I'm just like, “Hey, I'm happy I could help.” I've always been like that since I was a kid and I intend on continuing to do that professionally. I guess, now that you bring it up, I'm like, “I really should think about it more actively” because I do it very passively. It's usually, I have a friend who’s looking for a specific job and I will just be minding my own business on Twitter and then I'll see a job that looks like something he wants and then I'll just send it to him. [laughs] He'll give me his reply and he'll be like, “Oh, thanks for thinking about me.” It's like, “Yeah, no problem. I just want to help.” I've always been that person. MANDO: I'm really glad you said that because I've been hearing you talk about how much you get out of this in addition to everything else that other folks get out sparked this question in my head, which was that have you thought about doing this professionally? Because there are a lot of people who get paid very well to do this kind of stuff very poorly and so, I wonder [la…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    248: Developing Team Culture with Andrew Dunkman Sep 01, 2021
    Show notes

    01:27 - Andrew’s Superpower: Stern Empathy 03:30 - Setting Work Boundaries Matrix Organizations 18F Acknowledging Difficult Situations (i.e. Burnout) Health Checks Project Success Time Tracking Heart Connection / Motivation Work Distribution Greater Than Code Episode 162: Glue Work with Denise Yu 18:54 - Providing Support During a Pandemic Stretching/Growth Work Comfortable/Safety Work Social Connection 23:37 - Keeping People Happy / Avoiding Team Burnout Project Aristotle by Google Collecting Honest Data Psychological Safety & Inclusion Earned Dogmatism “The Waffle House Solution” 36:26 - Developing Team Culture “Gravity People” Honing Communication Skills Staying Ahead of Big Problems The ACE Model of Leadership Appreciation Coaching Evaluation Learning Skills Managers: Coaching How To Coach Communities of Practice Hiring External Consultants Online Courses, Books, Podcasts 43:08 - Knowing When to Jump Ship and Understanding Your Skills TKI Assessment Competing Collaborating Compromising Avoiding Accommodating 46:51 - Developing & Enforcing Boundaries Summarization Normalization Asking For Support 59:05 - Making Mistakes Demonstrating Vulnerability Acknowledge, Internalize, and Learn Rebuilding Trust Acceptance: Start Over – There’s Other Opportunities Dubugging Your Brain by Casey Watts Reflections: Arty: The intersection between identifying and acknowledging creates the precedent for the norm. Jacob: Evolving culture to enable vulnerability more. Casey: Andrew’s river metaphor and Arty’s cardboard cutout metaphor. Andrew: Talking about and building psychological safety is foundational. Going first as leadership or being first to follow. How to start a movement | Derek Sivers (being the first follower TED Talk) This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 248 of Greater Than Code. I'm Arty Starr and I'm here with my co-host, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Hello! Nice to be here, and I'm here with my other co-host, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here together with our guest today, Andrew Dunkman. Andrew, he/him, is an engineering leader and software developer with 17 years of experience. He’s worked on and launched tools for contact relationship management, predictive sales, radiology and healthcare, learning and management, business-to-business timekeeping, and most recently in government at 18F, a part of the US General Services Administration that’s helping the federal government adopt user-centered technology approaches. He loves those. He also likes building community in his free time. He helps moderate the DC Tech Slack, a 10,000-person community of tech workers in the DC area and he helps to run DC Code and Coffee, an informal hacking and community-building event every other weekend. Even though his cat, Toulouse, is glaring at him for talking too loud, he is excited to be here with us today. Hi, Andrew! ANDREW: Hey, y'all! So nice to be here. I'm honored to be a guest. CASEY: Let's start with our standard question to kick stuff off here. Andrew, what's your superpower and how did you acquire it? ANDREW: Thanks for asking. Yeah, this is whenever I answer the question of what my superpower is, it feels like bragging so I did what I normally do when I'm uncomfortable asking a question and I ask other people that question. I asked a few friends and they highlighted both, my ability to empathize with people and also, my sternness in that empathy. I think sometimes when you get caught up in empathizing with people, you can allow their emotions and their feelings to overwhelm you, or become a part of you in a way that you're not necessarily hoping for. So I like to draw a firm boundary there and then allow other people to see that boundary, I suppose. [laughs] I don’t know, it's hard for me to say that that's a superpower, but I'm just going to lean into what other people told me. ARTY: That's a pretty good superpower. I like it. How did you acquire it? ANDREW: I credit my mom a lot actually. My mother is a dual major in psychology and English and as growing up, she had the worst way of punishing me, which is anytime I’d do something wrong, she would say, “Can you describe to me what you did and tell me how it made the other person feel?” which is the absolute worst thing to do to a child to make them explain how they've hurt you. [laughs] So I credit that a lot for developing those skills. CASEY: That's so funny. You think it's the worst thing you can do? Could you imagine yourself doing it ever if you're around children like that? ANDREW: Oh, totally. [laughs] Absolutely, yes. I now do it to my friend's children. I have no children myself, but I do to my friend's children and it's appropriately uncomfortable. CASEY: I like that. Yeah. It can be the worst and it can be helpful and productive. I believe it. ANDREW: Yes. As one of my coworkers like to say, “Two things can be true.” JACOB: That boundary, I've been thinking about something along the lines of that recently, particularly in work settings where you can get really burnt out in everything is high stakes emotionally at work. I think that's a really good boundary to have. ANDREW: Absolutely and it's also super hard to know. [chuckles] Both know where that boundary is and what to do when you are coming up to it. I think some people and myself occasionally notice you've crossed that boundary in retrospect, but not necessarily in the moment and it's hard to start off just know your tells when you're getting close to that line and when to pull the e-brake and take a walk, or go out and find some way to disengage, or reengage in yourself as a human and your human needs. CASEY: I'd love to hear an example of a time when you pulled the e-brake recently, Andrew. It's so vivid you must have a lot of stuff under that sentence. ANDREW: So my current organization, 18F, is one that's a matrixed so we’ve got our chapters is what we call them which is our disciplines. Those are engineering and design, product acquisitions, they're groups of people that do the same kind of work, and then our other angle of the matrix is our projects. Those are business verticals like the kinds of people that we're helping and the organizations that we’re assisting around public benefits, or around national security, or around natural resources. So the result of a matrix organization is that you have two aspects to who's managing you—you have the manager of your work and you have the manager of your discipline—and the positive thing about that is that you can use both angles of the organization to support you in different ways. Sometimes in your work, you need someone to speak up for you as a person, or as your skills development angle and sometimes you need someone to speak up for you in terms of the project work that you're doing, advocating for success in the specifics of your project, regardless of the way you're contributing to that project. The result, as you zoom out into upper layers of management, is that you have a conflict designed into the system and that conflict, when things are working well, benefits the health of the organization, both the health of people and the health of projects are advocated for and supported. But when things get out of balance, which happens all the time, in every organization I've ever been in you've got pendulum swing back and forth between different balances and when things out of balance, then suddenly you find yourself overextended, or advocating to an empty room. A recent example was a conversation around advocating for the benefits of – I'm on the chapter side of the house so I support people within engineering and I had to pull an e-brake in a conversation where I was advocating for the health of people, but that I didn't have the right ears in the room to make a positive change. I found myself getting ahead of myself. One of the tells that I have is that I often feel tension in my jaw, which is usually a sign that I'm stressing too much about something. So I decided to take off a few hours and went to a gym [chuckles] and did a work out just to get the energy out of my system. ARTY: It seems like those conflicts can become pretty emotional depending on the circumstances where you've got folks that are overworked and stressed out, and wanting an advocate to help support them in those challenging circumstances. You just think about product deadlines and things coming up and the company's trying to survive and it needs to survive so it can keep people employed. Those things are important too, but then we've got these challenges with trying to live and be human and enjoy our lives and things become too stressful that we lose our ability to the function and we need advocates on various sides. So when you engage with someone, let's say, there's someone on the team that's burnt out and really stressed out, how would you approach empathizing with where they're coming from to help work toward some good the solution to these things? ANDREW: Great question. I think in these kinds of situations, I always come in with the acknowledgement that no one in this conversation owns the truth. We're both working together to understand what the best thing to do is and what the reality of the situation is. From my perspective, in trying to support someone seeing that they're burnt out, or overworked, that I think that's a misnomer. We can sometimes think of being burnt out overworked as an inherent state, or as something external. But I always try to encourage people to bring it internal because we all set boundaries and orders. The reality of an organization is that there will always be a resource constraint, whether that's people, or time, or money and it's up to the organization to effectively solve what they need to solve within the boundaries of those constraints. So when people are feeling overworked, or when they're feeling burnt out, oftentimes there's an imbalance there where the organization perhaps is trying to achieve too much, or perhaps there aren't enough resources supplied here. If you can both internalize it to yourself and say, “Okay, it's up to me to set responsible boundaries so that I'm not burnt out, so that I'm not overworked and how do I, as a manager, support you in finding that boundary and helping push back when people try to violate your boundaries?” Also, how do we, as an organization, understand where that line is and understand what kind of slack do we have? Because I think a lot of times in organizations, it's hard to see are we at 20% capacity, 200% capacity? It's hard to see because the more work you throw at people, unless you're getting pushback, it seems as if you still have more slack, more line you can pull. Part of this is acknowledging that there is a systems level problem here where there's a lack of visibility into how overworked someone is and also, helping someone recognize hey, here's my boundary. We're over at. Now let's figure out a, how do we move that boundary back to where it needs to be so that I'm a positive contributor to this team and I can live my life [chuckles] in a happy way and also, how do we raise this in a way that the organization can see so that we can ultimately be more successful?” If an organization is burning people out and making them feel overworked all the time, the work is not going to be successful. You care for people first and great people who are cared for then care for your projects and deliver great work. JACOB: Yeah, and it’s like how can there'd be a health check for every person and what would that look like because I think if people are left to determine that for themselves, you can get really different conclusions from person. ANDREW: That is a great question I don't know the answer to. [laughs] I've been thinking about this a lot recently. My organization has a project health check where weekly, or bi-weekly, I can't remember, each project team talks about the different aspects of the work and whether, or not they're feeling well-supported, or if there are things external to the project that are getting in the way of project success. That gives you a data and interesting insights. We also track our time and there is a way that we track our time that's flagged as support to the team. So that's where managers and people who are assisting in making big project decisions, those people track their time to that separate line. That's also interesting to look at because typically people ask for help after they already need it and the people that are close to the project can see that they need help. So if you're looking at the time tracking, usually a week, or two before something shows up on this project health tracker, you see a spike in hours in the kinds of support that people are providing to the project. We have a lot of interesting data on the project health side of things, but it's really hard to collect data on the people part of this in a way that like makes people feel supported and it doesn't feel creepy. [chuckles] There's a whole aspect to this on whether, or not people feel comfortable reporting that they are feeling overworked and I haven't solved this problem. I'm curious if you all have ideas. [chuckles] I'd love to learn. ARTY: One of the things I'm thinking about with burnout in particular is I don't think it's directly correlated to the volume of work you're doing. There's other aspects and dimensions of things that go into burnout. So if I'm working on something that I'm really excited about, it can be difficult, it can be really challenging, it can be a huge amount of work, and yet as I work on it, as I get to the other side of that mountain I'm climbing, burnout isn't what I'm feeling like. It's a rush being able to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile as we don't necessarily burn out directly in correlation with working too many hours say, or something directly related to that. The things I find that happen when people get burned out is when they lose their heart connection with what they're doing. When you love what you do, when you're excited about what you're working on, when you're engaged and connected to a sense of purpose with what you're doing, then we usually stay in a pretty good, healthy state. We’ve got to maintain not still keeping in someone in balance, but we're doing pretty okay. Where I see developers usually burning out is there's some heart crushing aspect of things where people are disconnecting disengaging with what they're doing emotionally and they go into this mode of not caring anymore, not having those same compelling reasons to want to do those things and such that when that love connection dissipates, that work becomes too hard to maintain, to force yourself to do. So you start getting burnt out because you're forcing self yourself to do things that aren't an intrinsically motivated thing. I feel like the types of things that we need to do are activities that encourage this sense of heart connection with our team, with our project, with our customers. We do need visibility into those things, but maybe con…

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