JESSICA: Good morning. Welcome to Episode 169 of Greater Than Code. Today, we have some amazing panelists here to talk about something. I'm happy to be here today with Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Thanks. I'm so excited to talk about something with John Sawers.

JOHN: Something is always on my mind. So I'm excited to be here with Rein Henrichs.

REIN: I don't have a funny thing to say, but I am here with my friend, Avdi Grimm.

AVDI: And I am very excited to be here with Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Oh yeah, now we went in a circle. Speaking of circles, today we've been thinking about curves, transitions, maybe more of a bend like an elbow, because several of us are at a transition point in our careers. I read somewhere the other day that a previous generation had a job and then our parents had a career but multiple jobs. And these days we can have multiple careers. Personally, I kind of feel like I'm at an elbow because I recently left Atomist which was a full time job and I've had full time jobs forever. But now, it turns out that I'm going to be independent for a while and I never thought I would do that. But now I am. Rein, you just moved.

REIN:Yeah, it's interesting because I was consulting for this client for a year and then they hired me, so I kind of haven't moved, but I'm also going to do on-boarding on-site next week so I can learn what it's like to work at the company I've been working at for a year already.

JAMEY: I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I feel like working as a full time employee is different, but it might also be totally stuff you've already experienced, so I don't know.

REIN: I'm being about half sarcastic.

JAMEY: [Laughs]

REIN: It's interesting because as a contractor there's a bunch of stuff that I didn't experience working there and the on-boarding will include stuff that I didn't get to do. So, for example, actually seeing what it's like for real people to use the product we build, some better understanding of what their workflows are across the whole app rather than just the piece I've been working on, stuff like that. So, it is good that I'm doing that, but it's also somewhat annoying because I'm currently working on a big project and I really don't want to take a week away from it to go do a thing that will teach me how to do the work I'm already doing. So, it's about 50% sarcastic.

JESSICA: That is a pretty common transition though. Avdi and I were talking about this the other day, the best way to know that this is a good job fit is to fricking do the job.

AVDI: Yes.

REIN: Yeah. I turned down another offer that was very attractive in part because the team I'm working with is the best team I've ever worked with. But also because like you're saying, even though that offer seemed very attractive, there's still a risk that what I find is actually there is not what I was sold. And I know exactly what I'm getting with this company. I've been working here for a year and I'm happy here and so that was a huge reason for the decision I made.

JOHN: You definitely don't want to underestimate that like the risk of the unknown with switching, especially when you have something that isn't a toxic environment. It seems very prudent to think, it's still kind of a crap shoot to some degree jumping into a new team.

JAMEY: I recently left my job, I worked at Artemis, which I've talked about at length on here. I worked there for about three and a half years doing agriculture stuff and it was hard because I actually really quite liked it there. I thought that it was interesting stuff that we were working on and I liked the people that I worked with and I felt very respected by my team. And so it was kind of like I was at this weird crossroads for a while where I was like, three and a half years is a long time at an early stage startup. Ultimately, I'm still pretty early in my career. I've worked at three places and was interested in the idea of trying something new but it was very hard to make a decision to leave a place where I already felt respected, to go to a place where I'm not sure what it will be like. And so, I was lucky to be in a situation that I felt good about for a long time. But it also kind of like, how do I want to say, like it almost trapped me in a weird way. I feel like that's a hard word to use because I don't want to accuse my old team of trapping me. It's more like myself trapped me in this place.

JESSICA: Yes. It's like when you get someplace good then it seems like a ridiculous risk to do anything else. And yet sometimes exactly what you need in order to grow is anything else.

AVDI: [Inaudible] are extremely attractive.

JOHN: Yes. I was just going to say.

JESSICA: I've got a friend who just emailed me yesterday and he works as a software developer for a government agency. And so, the thing you get out of that is stability. And his family values that stability. And even though I laughed when he told me what his salary was because it's, I don't know, a good 20% below the minimum, I would expect, he really valued the benefits. And yet it was not a place that was pushing him. He was not growing. He was very stymied. There were times he could only get something done because he had connections in other part of the organization from people he worked with at previous jobs. And yet he couldn't justify leaving. So he just found out that his job is going away in a couple months. And on one hand it's like, "Oh my gosh, I feel so screwed because I was in this for the stability and it turns out it's not stable." And I'm like, "Dude, awesome. You have like four months to find a job that's better for you and you have the kick in the pants that you actually get to do it. And nobody can say why did you give up such a stable job?"
 
REIN: I think one of the challenges here is that we know on some level that that's what we can expect in the new job. There are just these large scale structural reasons why work has to suck. And so, there is some sense of learned helplessness here. We don't think that things can be better.

JOHN: Yeah. And I think part of that is also just the imperfect nature of our knowledge of the new environment. We can talk to people, we can do whatever we can to try and figure out what that environments could be like. But there's no way to really know for sure. And that's, I think, where that gap comes in because even if you think that it's the perfect move for you, there's always that risk.

JESSICA: There's something else I've been thinking about recently with respect to changing jobs. I mean, we talk about it sometimes. Personally, I have in the past have talked about it like it's no big deal. If you don't like it, why don't you just change your environment? You can't change your environment, change your environment by leaving. And that is one of our powers as individual humans. But yet I don't think we appreciate how hard that is because when you're in a job, when you're on a team, like Rein was talking about this, especially this team that he really likes, you are part of a system. And to disengage from that, I mean to a much lesser degree, it's like, why don't you leave your family and go pick a new one? And I mean, some of us totally do that and it is fricking painful. It is not an easy thing. It's not so much with the job, but a little bit, you're part of a system. And to go join another system instead is really jarring.

REIN: Yeah, I hate it when companies try to talk about their family, but it's still true that work relationships are real interpersonal relationships.

JESSICA: And like Jamey said, it's hard to leave a place where they feel confident and competent because you are a part of a system and you know the people that you need to know to get things done and people have respect for you and then to go somewhere else where you don't have those interconnections and you have to grow all of that.

JAMEY: I think, in a way, I'm kind of excited about that because I wasn't employee number one when I joined, but when I left, I was the most tenured employee at my entire company. And so, it was hard. I was like, I'm leaving this place that I've put a lot of effort into and I have a lot of clout, I guess. But in a way, it's like one of the things that was becoming very hard about my job is that people came to me for everything. And stuff that wasn't necessarily part of what I did, people still came to me because I knew it and I had been there and some things it felt like I was the only person that had the background. And so it was hard to leave because I felt like I was putting people in a situation but that's part of business. But I'm kind of excited about going. It's scary to have to build up all of those things that you just said all over again. But I also feel kind of like, I like the idea of being the new person that's learning rather than the tenured person who's expected to already know everything.

JESSICA: Yeah, totally. It's like [crosstalk] move to a new city so I can get lost again.

REIN: Yeah, the 'don't be the smartest person in the room' thing is pretty good advice, I think.

JESSICA: By leaving, you leave that system in a place where it will grow the connections that needs to and grow the capabilities that it needs to, that it was just leaning on you for.

REIN: And the converse is also true that by moving into a new situation, you will grow your own capability to adapt to unexpected situations. Have any of you heard of the shared space movement in urban design?

JESSICA: Does it involve Virginia Satir?

REIN: Not directly. I already didn't quote her once when I wanted to. So I hope you appreciate that.

JESSICA: [Laughs]

REIN: Also, just let the record show that I am not the person who first said her name on this episode.

[Laughter]

REIN: Hans Monderman created this idea of shared spaces around the idea, there was this traffic intersection, I think it was in Germany, that had a high accident rate. And they were trying to figure out what to do with it. This is very regulated space with zebra crossings and traffic lights, all this stuff to make sure that cars and bikes, because it's a very bike heavy city, all move where they were supposed to and didn't crash into each other and so on. And so, there was all this structure and regulation and rules around safety. And what he suggested was very almost revolutionary, which was just take all of that stuff away. And so, what they did is they made a square that was just tiled with paving bricks, no stoplights, no stop signs, no indications of where people were allowed to go. It was cars and bikes and pedestrians all using that space at the same time. And what they found is that this increased safety because people couldn't just drive through the intersection without looking at what they were doing and being aware of other people and continuously negotiating their shared use of that space. So to relate it back to our discussion there, this idea that when you have all of this structure and all these rules and all these regulations that make you safe, there's an unintended consequence, which is they reduce your own ability to create your own safety.

JESSICA: That also reminds me of our culture's impression, that the best way to change anything or to make something happen is with rational thought, with the central nervous system, with the will. You must carefully think about it from the top down and impose more rules so that it will go as you plan. And it's not how our bodies work. It's not how biology works. It's not how our social systems work. Apparently, it's not even how traffic works, in some cases.

REIN: Yeah, exactly.

JESSICA: It's like the best way to regulate cellular interactions is not with the central nervous system, it's with various little connections and communication mechanisms that happen between the cells.

REIN: Yeah. It is not centrally controlled or regulated. It happens actually with very little communication. Everything just does it. There's a great video that's up on YouTube from the REdeploy 2019 conference by Dr. Richard Cook.

JESSICA: I was just about to talk about that one.

REIN: Okay, you can talk about it. I won't. I was there, and I gave a talk there. But I won't because I want you. But I won't.

JESSICA: You talk about it because I just watched the video. So this talk by Dr. Richard Cook was about resilience in bone. And bone as the -- what was the word he used? The archetype of resilience. And he talked about those regulatory mechanisms.

REIN: Yeah. It's fascinating because there's no central coordinator. And the shared space movement was explicitly about that. They were very aware that what they were doing was they were taking top-down centralized and standardized control mechanisms and they were replacing it with this organic and emergent cooperative behavior. That was an explicit thing that was part of the design of the system for them. So, this is not an accident.

JESSICA: Right. And Dr. Cook talked about how resilience engineering is not creating stoplights and stop signs. It's understanding enough about the existing resiliences, the existing communication paths within the body, in this case or within our software systems. It's what makes it successful and how can we just gently influence that.

REIN: It's about constructing the conditions in which the resilience that's already there can occur. And specifically what you can do with conditions where it occurs in a direction that you think is favorable. So, like the idea with bone is that when a doctor fixes a break, they don't go in there and knit the bone back together. What they do is with a cast or whatever, they put the pieces of bone that are broken in the right places so that the natural healing mechanisms the reconstruct bone can occur.
 
JOHN: Yeah. It sounds like there's like a larger theme here, which I've heard echoed in earlier things we've talked about of rather than imposing safety on the system by putting in all the checks and the extra process and the sort of scar tissue that organizations develop when things go wrong and they put in something, you can never do it this way. Like scar tissue makes things more rigid and less flexible and less able to actually handle new things that come at it. And the biological metaphor I think works really well here.

JESSICA: And companies, you know where a lot of that scar tissue shows up? Interviews.

REIN: As a consultant, I do probably more interviews than most people because I'm continuously getting new clients and they often want me to go through some sort of process. And so, I get to see a lot of different interview styles and I can definitely, I have learned how to detect certain, should we say organizational pathologies?

JESSICA: Isn't that the talk you did at REdeploy?

REIN: Not quite. The talk I did at REdeploy was about blame specifically [crosstalk].

JESSICA: Sorry, I was thinking of the organizational trauma talk. Never mind.

REIN: Oh no, that's fine. That's a good talk too. But these things show up. They present in interviews. They can't not because it's embedded into the way people work.

JESSICA: Do you have an example?

REIN: When you do some sort of coding interview, watch very carefully the way they react when you challenge some sort of boundaries or framing around that interview? So for example, one of the things I do is I ask people to describe the ETTO decision, efficiency-thoroughness trade-off decision they would like me to make when I implement an algorithm. Specifically, do you want me to get everything working and without worrying about how clean the code looks? Or do you want me to develop things in this sort of careful way I would as a professional even if I don't get everything done? And the way they respond to that is very, it both helps me to do the thing they want me to do but also tells me something about how they respond to challenges to the sort of structure that they're trying to impose.

JOHN: So are you saying that those structures that are coming through and the way that they're presenting and the way they react to your challenges are some form of scar tissue or more that the way that they react to pushback sort of indicates their level of flexibility in thinking and process?

REIN: I think that organizationally, people are trained to respond in a certain way to these sorts of challenges. It says a lot about whether, like in their day to day work, when someone gives them a design to implement, do they say, "Hey, what if we did it this other way instead?" Or do they just try to do the thing that they know is wrong because that doesn't work. So people are trained again, learned helplessness to not challenge let's say the boundaries that a PM sets for some story. Even though they think as the implementer that there are technical issues and maybe there's a better way, but they've been trained in the past by just pure behavioral, they get slapped on the wrist somehow for doing it, not to challenge the boundaries of the tasks that they're given. And so when I do that to them, it can sometimes generate erratic behavior.

JESSICA: So that kind of training, that kind of -- you talked about the doctor sets the bone in the right place so it can heal well, like where you're positioned affects how you grow. And that gets back to sometimes you need to go to a new place in order to grow in new directions.
 
REIN: Yeah. And the contrast to this is if the bone isn't set carefully and with care, you can have a limp for the rest of your life. The thing can grow back in a way that is healing but leaves the organization as a whole profoundly changed.

JESSICA: Oh, but most of the time, it has no effect at all. I read Jerry Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting over Christmas and one of the core tenets of that book is most of the things that we do have no effect whatsoever in the larger system and that's kind of comforting.

JAMEY: Yeah, I agree that that's kind of comforting actually. I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do and it all feels very scary and the idea that ultimately I can do what I feel like I want to do and it doesn't totally matter. It's like, nice.

REIN: I mean, think about how many people, many of whom are white dudes, go through entire careers without contributing any significant value because they're just not good at their jobs, but they don't get fired.

JESSICA: Or they are good at their jobs but their jobs aren't to contribute value.

JAMEY: [Laughs]

JESSICA: I think that's a lot more of us.

REIN: One of the things that I've been saying lately is I wish that everyone could have the career success of a mediocre white dude. I wish that everyone could just have a job where they didn't have to be great all the time.

JAMEY: Yeah.

JESSICA: The safety of the space of people assuming you're generally competent.

REIN: There was a thread that came back up on Twitter recently where a customer service manager impersonated one of the women on his team, signed his emails with her name and she signed her emails with his name. And what he found out was that it was impossible for him to get his job done as her.

JESSICA: Wow.

JAMEY: I have that in one of my talks. I do a talk about spoon theory and I use that example. It's like you can't necessarily understand how much energy other people are putting into doing the same thing that you are doing.

JESSICA: Oh, that's an important thing because often we look at other people and we're like, "Oh my gosh, that person gets so much done. I feel so wimpy." But they might be able to do it with less effort.

REIN: The 10X engineers are the ones where it's just 10 times easier for them to do everything.

JESSICA: Well, yeah, because they know the system.

AVDI: Because they wrote the system.

REIN: They don't get sexist or racist pushback on every little thing they tried to do all the time.

JESSICA: And yet they're trapped. That traps them because then they're the experts and they have to stay in that system and they don't get to grow. Purple developer in my symmathesy talk. This is illustrated with a purple developer who knows the system and then a blue and green developer come in who are new and suffer because they're trying to grasp the system. But purple developer can change it faster than they can ever get a grasp on it. And after that talk, people come up to me and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm the purple developer. Thank you." Or, "We have a purple developer and now I understand what's going on."

REIN: You know, tech is interesting. People like Richard Cook who gave that talk on bone are really fascinated by safety and resilience in the tech industry because of how rapidly the tech industry changes, things that changes that wouldn't occur in their lifetime in aviation and so on happen regularly in tech.

AVDI: Yeah.

JOHN: Yeah.

JESSICA: That's my favorite thing about it, that I feel like in software, we get to work with systems that change fast enough that we can actually learn how to change systems.

REIN: I mean, think about how no one knew what Kubernetes was, what? A decade ago?

JESSICA: Yeah.

REIN: And now it's completely changed the way that those organizations do their jobs. There's nothing like that in aviation.

JESSICA: Right. Most industries are like aircraft carriers and we have the little motor boat that can zip around.

JOHN: And there's a downside to that, move fast to break things, breaks things in people.

JAMEY: I was going to say I saw, I think it's an XKCD comic. I can look it up. I thought of it because it's specifically tech and aviation compared because like the aviation people are like, "We have such confidence in our system and this is how safe it is. Like 99.99%," blah, blah, blah. And then it has like a tech person that's like, "Oh, you shouldn't vote on computers. That's a bad idea."

[Laughter]

REIN: The thing that's really fascinating is that the only way, like we talk a lot about how awful computers are, and it's true that they're generally terrible, but they're actually surprisingly not terrible when you consider how terrible they ought to be.

[Laughter]

REIN: The reason that they do generally work as well as they do and things are as safe as they are, is this is created by people making local decisions, local adaptations that aren't captured in top-down rules and structure and regulations and this people creating safety in their work by being adaptive is the only way tech can function. Tech is glued together. The whole tech industry is glued together by these things. And this is true in aviation and other industries too, but it's so incredibly magnified in tech because of how fast things change, how frequently things break.

JESSICA: And how much leverage we have as developers to change what happens.

REIN: I was just going to say that large companies can have incident responses going on multiple times a day. Stuff is always failing. This is true everywhere, but it's so true in tech. And there's no way, like, I think I'm just repeating myself, so I'm going to shut up and let you talk now. But it's really incredible how much stuff fails, but how the larger system still keeps adapting.

JESSICA: Yeah. I mean there are tire fires, but they're well contained and Abeba Birhane says in her latest paper that behind every machine system is really a human machine system.

REIN: One of the themes in resilience engineering is that the resilience comes from people. Resilience isn't a property of technical systems. Resilience is what humans do. There's a great paper, I think it's from David Woods, called Resilience is a Verb. The idea is that resilience comes from the actions of people, the decisions, and the interventions of people.

JESSICA: Yes. And when we think about our careers, resilience is kind of the opposite of security. You can work for the government and have job security that isn't. Or you can be able to join new systems.

JOHN: Yeah. Among the panelists that are here, I've been actually at my job for more than seven years, so I'm not in the midst of a transition.

JESSICA: Yeah, that you know of.

JOHN: That's true. [Chuckles] But I do have this sort of background concern that my interview skills are probably not great because I haven't been on one. And even this job I got because I knew the VP. And so, I had a couple of fairly easy interviews, just basically rubber stamped. So in 14 years, I haven't had a really hard interview. I still try and do interviews even though I'm not looking to top up those skills. Don't do it as much as I should because interviews suck and they're stressful.

JAMEY: I've never had a hard interview and I'm super stressed about it and the idea of doing a real job hunt for the first time. My last couple of tech jobs either kind of fell in because I knew people or something kind of opened up when I wasn't super looking and I did like one interview. And so this idea of going out and be like, "I need to find a job, I'm going to apply in a bunch of different places," is completely new to me. It sounds terrifying and it had been holding me back from job hunting for a long time, but now I have to do it.

AVDI: This is something I've been hearing a lot, which is that there are a lot of developers who did fall into, every role they've had so far, I've heard from a lot of them that they fell into whatever they had, it was just a friend of a friend. And going through the "real" interview process is extremely jarring.

JAMEY: I did a lot of hiring at my old job and I worked a lot on our process. When I got hired there were like two engineers and we didn't have like a proper technical interview because we were so new. And so it was kind of like, "Yeah, I've worked with them. They know what they're doing." So then I was like developing our hiring process as we got larger and we're hiring more people and needed a better process. And one of the things I thought about was like, "I wouldn't have passed this interview process." This is something that we talked about. I'm like, "Do you like that I work here? Do you think that I'm a good person on the team that is valuable to have?" And my co-workers were like, "Yes." And I was like, "Cool, I wouldn't have gotten hired if this was the process because I would have failed it. And other people that are like me aren't going to get hired by this process and you're not going to hire them and they could be good." And so we thought about that a lot in pretty explicit terms of that while we were developing our process. It was kind of interesting.

AVDI: So much of what I've observed in the interview process so far, now that I'm actively interviewing is it just feels like a lot of work that was like, "Okay, we need to do something to make our interview process more rigorous. Having the candidate eat an entire bunch of bananas is something. So therefore, let's include that." We don't actually know what to do but we can darn well come up with stuff to fill time and that looks a lot more like being rigorous than just being like, "I like you. You're in."

JESSICA: If feels like we're trying to make -- okay. By we, I mean tech industry, especially startups in San Francisco or mostly the startups that have grown big enough to have a rigorous interview process that they try to make really fair by having you interview with more people, which actually amplifies group bias. I don't know. We talked about the two ways of getting in that we like or have had positive experiences with which involve knowing someone as in 'I have been part of a work system with this person before and I know they function well in a work system as a developer'. Or Rein's 'I have already been on this team, I have worked with you as a contractor'. So both of them involve actually placing a human in at least a system with other people and an interview doesn't do that.

JAMEY: What just struck me about what you said is like we talked at length earlier about the risk of being an employee and finding a new job and you don't know for sure what it's going to be like until you get there. But I also think the reverse is true when you're on a team and you're hiring a new person on the team, you can't really know if you've never worked with them before, like what it's going to be like once they're on your team and working. Maybe their skills aren't what you expected or maybe their skills are what you expected because you tested for that but they don't get along well on your team in other ways. And so I think that what Rein described is like I've already been on this team and I have confidence in it is kind of like the employee to company version, and then like I know this person is almost kind of like the company to employee version. Like I've worked with this person and I know that they can function with other humans in this way.

JESSICA: Yeah, and that gets back to like that safety of assuming competence because what if someone is a long-time Java developer and you're a Java team. But when they arrive on the team, everyone is a little startled because their coding style is just different because they were part of a team that had different standards and conventions and habits. And if you don't have that safety then you can be like, "They're not good enough. They're not a fit." When really it's just a matter of a few months of adjustment. But that can be really painful if you don't have the assumption of 'this is going to be okay' on both sides.

JOHN: Yeah. I think part of that, at least on the team side of things is, and this is something I re-iterate when I talk about this internally is, the team is an immutable structure. And so when you add a person to it, you get a new team. The new team has to figure out how to work and you probably want to set it up so that this new person can feed information into the team. They can bring new learnings, they can bring new perspectives, they can bring an outside perspective on the team processes and be like, "Why do we do this? Because this does not make sense to me." And that's really valuable because when you're deep into it, you thought, "That's the way we do it. I don't care, whatever." And so, I always try and consciously do that when I bring people on to teams is try and bring that information in so that both change when they form a new whole rather than just the team being the hegemony that absorbs an amoeba from somewhere and doesn't change anything.

JESSICA: An organization is big enough that the amoeba is going to be assimilated, but a team is not. A team is going to be modified.

JAMEY: That can be painful on both sides, I think. I think part of the reason that I was starting to get frustrated at a job that I legitimately liked was because I had been there for so long that so many things had changed that I was like, logically, I don't think it's bad that things are changing as we grow because that's what happens. But emotionally, I'm having trouble handling how different it is than it used to be.

JESSICA: Oh, wow. Like you have expectations?

JAMEY: Or that I just felt comfortable, I think. I think having been at a job long enough that I was starting to feel comfortable and like the way we were growing, I wasn't feeling comfortable in that way anymore. It was a good thing for the company, but that's kind of when I felt like, if I'm going to feel uncomfortable then I can feel uncomfortable on a new team also.

REIN: The thing that's interesting to me is I think a lot of teams would benefit from feeling more uncomfortable more often. Teams get pretty habituated to certain ways of working even though the material conditions have changed to where maybe a different way of working would be better. But there is a sort of 'fish don't know what being wet is' thing going on here. Where if you're habituated to your way of working, it can take a significant event to cause you to reevaluate that. And so teams get comfortable with the way of working because it continues, like it has diminishing results but they diminish very slowly. And what's much more risky is some dramatic change that could have unpredictable results. And so, this habituation is a problem for team dynamics over time too, not just for new people. So actually, I think that if a team can absorb and and be modified by a new teammate and if that can all go in a way that there is discomfort but that it's viewed as healthy and people, there's this sort of shared belief that 'we can adapt to this change and then grow as a result', that's a good sign for team health in general because a new member to a team is only one sort of disruptive event. There are all sorts of things that can disrupt the way a team functions. And so, getting resilient to changes in general is -- I'm going to stop now. Go ahead.

[Laughter]

AVDI: I mean, you're basically going where I was going, which is, that gets back to the resilience discussion. I read Sidney Dekker's book on Understanding "Human Error" recently and one of the things that he talks about is the safe organizations are by nature uncomfortable. The least safe organizations are the comfortable ones. And safe can mean a lot of things. He's addressing primarily organizations that deal with actually physically dangerous equipment and stuff like that.

JESSICA: He's from aviation.

AVDI: Right, he's from the aviation background. But safety also has a lot of implications for just how you handle any surprises. And one of the things he talks about is that you have to have a certain amount of discomfort in your organization. You have to always be a little bit off balance or you'll inevitably start deviating farther and farther into, in that case, unsafe practices. But I'm sure there's an equivalent even when we're not worrying about planes blowing up in the sky.

JOHN: Normalization of deviance.

JESSICA: Yeah, so you get into like some really weird habit, like not using version control.

AVDI: Right. We've avoided using version control this long or we use version control except we slowly have worse and worse habits around it, but it hasn't beat us yet.

JESSICA: We have 500 branches and counting.

AVDI: Right.

JOHN: That actually ties right back with what you were talking about, Rein, earlier about the sort of open urban design where the curbs and the stoplights in the crosswalks create that feeling of safety. And so you think, "Well, I'm in a safe environment."

JESSICA: Which is a proposition to safety.

JOHN: Yes. So then you don't have to pay attention to it and not paying attention is where the accidents happen. So if you take those away, you put everyone on sort of this alert that something could go wrong. I've gotta be paying attention here. And then because you've got attention, things go well.

REIN: It demands awareness. This awareness is one of the things that creates safety. When you've got these guardrails in place and you don't have to think about the danger that's represented by the guardrails, then when you're in a new situation where the same danger is present but the guardrails aren't, you are less safe. Actually, I got the shared space example from Dekker. It's in a book called The Safety Anarchist which is more my bag. All of his books are very good, but this one is my favorite.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: I had a thought when we were talking about being comfortable and Avdi brought up stuff from other industries and it kind of made me think of like feeling comfortable in tech as a general thing, which is something I've been thinking about lately because I am not 100% sure that I still want to stay in tech. I think that I do, but I'm kind of trying to give myself the space to think holistically about what I want to do and decide. When I first started studying tech and computer science, my dad was an engineer and he didn't want to push me to like, "Do the same job as me," or whatever. So he kind of waited until I was having an interest in it myself. I'd taken some computer science classes and he was like, "So, how do you like your computer science classes?" And I was like, "Oh yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty fun and I think I'm pretty good at it." Then he felt like he could talk about it and he was like, "Because you know, computer science pays pretty well. And also, it's pretty easy." And I think about that a lot because sometimes I'll be frustrated, I'll be like, "It's not easy." But ultimately, I don't lift anything heavy. I never get injured at my job. My husband is a welder and works in a machine shop. And he'll come home and be like, "Oh, I got slagged today," or whatever. And I'm like, "That never happens to me ever." And so I feel very comfortable in the tech industry in that way when it comes to those kind of things. It's a privileged industry in a lot of ways. And so when I'm thinking about like, "Is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life," it's kind of like an interesting balance of trying to be true to what feels right and what I want to be spending my time doing. But it's balanced by this idea of like, "But I do have more privilege here than I would in a lot of other industries," and that kind of security is hard to just give up too. So, it's kind of interesting dynamic.

JESSICA: We get to have blue hair.

JAMEY: True.

JESSICA: And pink.
 
JAMEY: I applied for an acting job. I'm supposed to find it out this week if I'm getting hired.

JESSICA: Wow!

JAMEY: I told a couple of you this already, but I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to do acting."

JESSICA: [Laughs] Circus number.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: It made me think of it because I'd like to shave my head. I'm thinking about shaving my head. I've done it before. I look pretty good with a shaved head, but then I was like, "Oh, I should maybe find out if I'm getting cast in this production first and see how they feel about it." Normally I wouldn't ask for permission, but maybe they don't care.

JESSICA: [Crosstalk] then you can have any hair.

JAMEY: I suppose. It's a science fiction themed thing, so I'm like, "Dude, like a buzz cut. That would be great." It would be totally thematic for like a spaceship. I don't know.

JOHN: That was very futuristic.

JAMEY: I think so.

REIN: Does anyone think that Jamey would be a great voice actor for Steven Universe? [Chuckles] That's kind of like --

JAMEY: Putting it out into the universe.

REIN: Or some such show? That just seems like very much your bag.

JAMEY: That's like, thank you for this nice compliment actually. I feel kind of, even though I think realistically at the end of this, I'm going to come back to tech, it feels kind of free that I'm like, "I could do whatever I want."

JESSICA: Yeah. I've noticed a difference between looking for a new job. Like I have a job and I'm looking for a next job versus looking for work when I'm not currently working. I happen to have started an LLC back in August for income from speaking and stuff like that. And so, when I moved from an employee to an advisor role again at Atomist, I put my employer on LinkedIn as JessiTRON LLC. And people were like, "Congratulations on going independent." And I was like, "That wasn't my intention." But when they put that out there, I was like, "Well, maybe." And I looked around and now I spend a lot of time with Avdi, and he has his own business and I'm on Slacks with a bunch of like agile consultants who were independent and now another conference speakers and stuff. And now, the people around me are doing independent consulting or owning their own business. And suddenly that doesn't feel weird and I can like picture it as something I could do. So now, that's what I'm doing. And I never thought I would do that, but it feels really good. It feels really good and resilient and stuff to have varied income streams. And now to be fair, privilege, I can do this because I have health insurance through my husband who has had the same job for 21 years. Bless him. Now, that I'm trying it, it feels great. It feels right to have more than one employment relationship as opposed to becoming a piece of a company.

REIN: When I moved to independent consulting, it was the scariest thing I've ever done in my career, which should tell you something about how privileged my career has been. Health insurance was a real concern, it's very expensive. But one of the things I realized that sort of helped me make the decision is that every company I've ever worked for has hired consultants. Pretty much any company you talk to, they could potentially become your client. And there are also a lot of firms that subcontract or have existing relationships. And so, that's a good way to maintain a steady income while you're trying to go fully independent.

JESSICA: Oh, right. Sub-contracting totally counts. I am totally up for other people as middlemen. I think that's important. That's connection making. That's valuable.

REIN: I have a friend who basically provides that function and then says, "I'm going to charge you for..." Instead of like, "I'm going to skim money off the top of your hourly rate," says, "Here's the service I'm providing and here's what it costs." And I look at that and I go, "You know what, that makes sense. Rather than you just being a capitalist and taking money I earned, here's what you're doing for me." So I actually like that a lot.

JOHN: That's a good reframe. Also, we were talking about career transitions and I don't have anything planned that we are all talking about leaving tech. And again, I don't have anything specific or on a timeline. But I've just started doing workshops based on my Emotional API talk and spending those hopefully a lot more this year. And it's something I'm really interested in doing. And it's possible that that could be something I end up doing full time. And what's interesting is that I don't think of that as leaving the tech industry because I feel like I'll still be doing all the things I do now with all the sort of companies and people I do now. But probably won't be coding most of the day, which I don't actually know if I'll like that yet because I've been coding for 25 years. I don't know what happens when I stop. [Chuckles] But I'm also kind of curious about that. And it's interesting because I hadn't conceived of that as leaving the industry. But it is a pretty significant change in day-to-day work. And I don't know if it's actually ever going to happen, but it is something I've been thinking about as a possible branch coming up for me.

JESSICA: Yeah. I've had to give up identifying as a full time developer. I mean, I haven't been full time development for a while really, but I figure I can code in my spare time. I do, anyway.

REIN: I had a sort of mid-career crisis that I hinted at like five years ago where I thought that what I needed to do was move into management so I could have a larger influence and impact on the organizations. And what I realized is that -- I didn't have the right sort of language for it at the time, but what I realized is that I needed to stay at the sharp end. I needed to be with the people doing the work so that I could understand. What I realized was that my goal in being in this industry was to reduce human suffering for the people doing the work. And so in order to do that, I need to be with them doing the work. I can't just be a VP somewhere. I have to know what it's like. I have to be with them at the sharp end so I can understand how they're suffering, or otherwise, I can't be effective in that capacity. So that's why I've decided to stick with IC. But having that purpose has really helped me to understand what kind of a role I want. I want something where I'm still writing code, I want something where I'm still on call. I also want something where I can do things like work with agile coaches to help teams change the way they work together. So finding a healthy mix of that has been my challenge for the last five years or so.

AVDI: Someone recently gave me the very wise advice of it's really easy when looking at potential jobs to list a whole bunch of pros and cons and try to add that up, spreadsheet-wise. But he said instead, try and visualize how you will feel while you're working there or while you're in that position. And that clarifies a lot of the decision making.

REIN: Part of that, I believe, comes from this sort of thinking fast and slow idea of system one and system two where if you can recruit this sort of effective judgments, this feeling and emotion based judgment that you make better decisions than if you just analyze.

JESSICA: Yeah, that gets back to the rational thought does not in fact solve our emotional or connective problems.

REIN: And if you read Gary Klein in Sources of Power, you learned that experts don't make analytic decisions the vast majority of the time. They make decisions based on much more immediate processes that are based on their experience. What happens for most experts most of the time, especially in high pressure situations, is they just think of a thing that could work to solve the problem, then they mentally simulate whether it will work. And if that works out well, they just try it. They don't weigh options. Almost never. So in this context, if you're thinking about whether to take a job or not, you want to mentally simulate what it would be like to work there because that'll help you make a better decision.

JESSICA: Now, making that spreadsheet might help you mentally simulate it better but make the spreadsheet and then throw it away.

JOHN: I think one interesting part of that is, and this is something I've noticed over my career at different companies, is like when you're embedded in the company and working with them, the things you care about change because that's what the team cares about, it's what the company cares about and these are the things you pay attention to and optimize [inaudible]. And so, I think one part of that equation of like what is it going to be like to work there is like what things am I going to now care about? Is it going to be because I'm on call and I care about the resilience of the systems. Is it because I'm in healthcare and now I really need to know what's going on in healthcare? There could be a lot of those things and what does it feel like to care about all those things and make those really important in the decision makings that you do all day?

JESSICA: Because that is alignment, you will adopt a common purpose with that team. And is that compatible with your personal purposes?

REIN: This gets back to how do you detect these things within the structure of an interview?

JAMEY: Interviews, ugh!

REIN: What I've learned is that no one in tech knows how to interview. Even the people that think they do find out that they're wrong. So famously Google had a plan for how to interview and then they actually did a study and found out that it didn't work. No one in tech is an expert in human performance and certainly not in measuring human performance. All of the interviews, structures that I've ever been in have been pretty terrible.

JESSICA: Humans aren't, we aren't. Whatever it is you want us to be, we're not that individually. We're only that within a system, within the team system.

AVDI: It's like evaluating a light bulb when it's not in a socket.

JAMEY: Yeah.

JESSICA: And usually you break it.

[Laughter]

REIN: And light bulbs are very simple devices.

JAMEY: Thank you so much for making me feel less anxious about my interview process, everyone. Really comforting.

REIN: The thing I was going to say is even though interviews totally suck, you are also interviewing them. And you can ask questions, you can find ways to make the interview work better for you. So for me, the 'what questions do you have for me' time is the most valuable time of the interview for me. And in fact, if they only give me five minutes, then that's a red flag.

AVDI: Yeah. And I would go a step further and say you are only interviewing them because them interviewing you is terrible.

REIN: It's a given that they suck at it. Who cares?

AVDI: Yes. Right. Assume that they don't know what they're doing. Assume that they're not going to drive the correct information from it and assume therefore that it is not a test you can pass or fail regardless of what they think about it. This is not a test that you can pass or fail.

JESSICA: Whether you pass the interview says something about them, not so much you.

AVDI: It's just sort of a terrible TV show that you have to have to sit through.

JESSICA: [Crosstalk] You can find out about them. As an extrovert, I can enjoy interviews.

REIN: I am somewhat cynical about this in that I do try to figure out what they think a good developer looks like and then I try to perform that for them because I like having jobs and money, but I don't care about that except that it helps me get the job if I want the job. I want to be the one who gets to make the decision, basically.

JESSICA: As you're from a place of extreme privilege of, "Oh, I want a job, let me tweet." And having heard from Avdi and other people about interviews lately -- I did [inaudible] four years ago? It's not that long ago. When I'm talking to companies about a few weeks after I started this, I've switched to, "Look, I am not going to come anywhere full time that I haven't worked on a contract basis." And not everybody can do that because health insurance, thanks America. But when you can, I'm just like, "No, let's work together and find out if we want to work together."

REIN: That's the only thing that could possibly work, but it's also so unavailable to so many people. And that I think is the tragedy that structurally this is the thing that doesn't work because of healthcare being what it is and so on.

JESSICA: Right. So first we need to fix healthcare and that'll go a long way. In the meantime, for people who can do contract because they're on COBRA already or they have a partner with healthcare or something. If that's an option, we should do it.

AVDI: Ooh, I have a rant about this process. [Inaudible] this whole conversation is that I have so much to say about this process that I have nothing to say about this process because there's just too much.

JESSICA: I've avoided egging you on.

AVDI: Thank you. [Laughs] But you know what, I'm going to say something about the meta around it rather than the hiring process itself or the interviewing process itself. I will say this, I'm somebody who is in an incredibly privileged position when it comes to getting hired. I'm somebody who can put my name out there. Say, I'm looking for work and have a dozen people get in touch with me and say, "Hey, would you please come interview at our company?" And then everything goes South once we hit the actual interview process, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But here's the thing that's been really kind of disappointing to me is noting that like, even at my level of privilege and most people understand where I'm at there, especially like on Twitter, I have people saying to me like, "Oh, talking about your dissatisfaction with the hiring process is you're really endangering your chances there." Or, "Talking about your mental health publicly, you're really putting your chances at risk by being public about this." Or saying things that we all know about the hiring process and about the interview process is like, "Oh, you should not have said that. That should not have come out of your mouth." One that I had was, I actually said that I hope to have multiple offers to choose from. And like, I was not supposed to say that. I should not have said that I might indicated publicly that I might be entertaining other suitors besides the one, like everybody is supposed to think that they're the only people interviewing me or something or the only people making offers to me. Can I cuss on this show?

JESSICA: Yes.

AVDI: That is fucked up that we all go into this process and we go into this fucking cone of silence where we believe we can't talk about it. We can't commiserate about it. We can't like let on that we have weaknesses. We've got to enter this hyper competent mode where we don't let on that we might have mental health issues or problems in our lives or we might be concerned that we might not be able to keep up the level of investment that somebody seems like they're looking for in the interview process. The fact that we all muzzle ourselves as soon as we're looking for a job is horrible because then nobody knows what the process actually looks like.

JAMEY: I'm literally doing the thing that you're describing on the show right now while we're talking about the fact that I quit my job, like keeping some of it to myself because people could listen to this and I'm going to be job hunting.

AVDI: Yeah. There's been shit that I haven't said publicly that I've been dying to say because I'm scared. Because even I am a little bit scared that somebody will see it. For me, it's not so much that it's like, "Oh, they won't hire me." But it's like that somebody interviewed me might be hurt. Yeah. Or that they might not hire me or that I'll be blacklisted on some secret lists of hiring managers somewhere. The fact that we don't talk about this shit is really, really effed up.

JOHN: Like the salaries, it's like the don't ever mention that kind of thing because it will ruin something.

AVDI: It's exactly like the salary thing.

JAMEY: Yeah. Don't let on that the reason you want to work is to make money to live.

REIN: You know how earlier I said perform the thing that you think will get you hired. I've realized that for me that's kind of actually mostly not true in that I do want them to think that I'm good at my job, but I also don't give a shit if I say things that are true and authentic for me. And then they decide that that disqualifies me because I want to be -- I have basically two goals in tech. One is to help other people and the other is to bring more of myself to work, to be more authentically myself at work. And that's a privilege that I have but I want to maximize it. And so, if companies decide not to work with me because they found a tweet where I talk about ADHD or socialism or some other thing. Cool, great.

JESSICA: Dodge the bullet. You didn't want to work with them either.

REIN: But that's a huge privilege and I acknowledge that. There was a time in my career where I very much was scared to not get hired because I needed the job.

JESSICA: This all is very privileged in the sense that there are enough jobs that we don't have to scramble [inaudible] for every individual one. That's not true in all industries. This is another way that software is doing it right is discovering how to make better systems because it is a healthier system where we don't want the wrong job, where we do want to bring ourselves to work because then our creative knowledge work that is development. We need that. We need to be alive in the system and that's healthy. In other industries, I want that for them too. Jamey, on one hand, we [inaudible] about the interviews and you're like, "Oh my God, I have to do that." But at least my hope is that this conversation, when you do have to go through the interview and it sucks and you're exhausted and you feel miserable and then you go through all of that and they're like, "Nah, we don't think so. There were lots of other candidates for this position. [Inaudible] for you and we're going to pass." If that happens to you, you'll be like, "Sure enough! Interviews suck. Expectations met."

REIN: Can I make one suggestion for a thing that I think could really improve the situation? Tell more stories. Don't talk about this problem in abstract terms. Tell more stories about how these problems affect hurt, harm, real people. Avdi, when you were talking just now about your experience, seeing you be so passionate made me feel a certain way because I'm not a psychopath.

[Laughter]

REIN: I have mirror neuron. I'm serious because when I see someone who is affected, I feel affected. So it was again, like the system one stuff, whatever. But telling stories causes people to not just think analytically, rationally about the problem, but to feel a certain way about the problem. And for a long time I've said, I don't know how to get you to care about other people, but that's not true. I do know now and the way is through telling these stories.

AVDI: Yeah.

JESSICA: Awesome. Well, thank you for this episode you all.

JAMEY: Yeah, it was cool.

JOHN: It's nice.

AVDI: Thanks a lot.

JESSICA: Thanks for listening. And now that we've been talking about jobs and money to survive, please remember that the people who work on this podcast, especially Mandy, who is awesome, also need money to survive. And we would appreciate your support in our Patreon at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. And then you can join us in Slack and say hello and we will all wave at you and be happy.