JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 158. I'm John Sawers, and I'm here with my friend, Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Thanks, John. And I'm glad to be here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel.

JACOB: Hello, thanks. Our special guest this week is Ariel Caplan. Ariel is a developer, speaker, and proud dad. In past stages of life, he has been a biologist, periodical editor, molecular animator, rabbinical student, stem cell donor, and award-winning amateur poet. Ariel currently works as a software engineer at Cloudinary, learning new things each day about building and scaling software and peopleware. Welcome to the show.

ARIEL: Thanks, Jacob. So I guess I am here with my friends, John and Jamey, and my new friend, Jacob. I'm Ariel and very excited to be here today. It's day for you, it's evening for me. We're on a little bit of a time zone difference, which always makes things lots of fun.

JAMEY: We're super glad to have you on the show.

ARIEL: I'm super glad to be here.

JACOB: The question we always like to ask our guests first is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

ARIEL: I would say that my superpower and it's okay if you laugh, but I'm just going to own that. My superpower is extreme irritability. What I mean by that is basically the idea that I have, I would say, a very low tolerance for things that kind of seem off. And just to kind of make it clear what I'm talking about. I think it was mentioned in the bio, I was a periodical editor for a few years. That meant that I was able to notice all the small details in the articles that I was editing. And it's the same thing in terms of software and in terms of teams. So I tend to notice things about processes or code that could be better, and then I have this deep urge to fix them. So I don't think that you would want a team of everybody like me because it would just be horrible to work with. I think it's good to have that with someone on your team, someone to kind of raise all those flags and and try to point out where things could be a little bit better. How did I acquire it I think is basically down to when you're younger, you are irritated by a lot of things and I just never learned to not be bothered by them, I guess. I don't know. I kind of feel like all of us have certain things that bother us more or less and maybe I just have more of those things. But yeah, that's what I would summarize my superpower as.

JAMEY: I have a question about it. You just talked about examples of it in code and programming, but one thing I thought of when you first said it was like, "Do you find that you also have the superpower in other aspects of your life?" Because my first response was like, "Oh, if you don't take dumb bullshit from people, like I do take dumb bullshit from and I wish I did less." Do you find that you've experience it in that way also or no?

ARIEL: I guess probably the way that I would, or the example I would point to is I spent some time being kind of a tech lead for a team and I noticed that there were a lot of elements of process that again, that irritated me that could be improved. But kind of the wisdom that comes over the years, it's one thing to notice, but it's another thing to know how to apply it and when to speak up and when to kind of say, "Okay, well this is not the right time to address it." And I'm definitely not perfect about it, but that was actually a great learning experience for me to learn when to address these things and when to kind of let them go. But it definitely helped me to be able to kind of notice the broad picture of -- so I'm walking in, like immediately I took notes. And actually in my current job, one of the things that I did, and I wasn't actually even asked to do this, but I just thought it would be a really good idea, is that every day at the end of the day, I would sit down and just write out all the things that happened today. And here's the things that I noticed, those things that were really good and here's the thing that I noticed that bothered me or that I thought could be improved or things that were just confusing. Maybe some notes to try to help the next person who has to be onboarded. So it definitely applies to a lot of areas of life. It's not just about technical things like code or writing or things like that. It's also about the human interactions that we have every day and trying to make sure that you're aware of what's going on which is a thing, as I've learned over the years, you can have many levels of awareness of what's going on. But beyond that, thinking about, "Okay, so what here is actionable and how can I improve the situation?"

JOHN: Yeah. Sort of related to that, I was wondering at what point did you figure out that that was your superpower versus just, "I'm annoyed all the time."

ARIEL: It might've been when I was preparing for this podcast. [Laughs] But the truth is it's definitely something that I've noticed over the years against specifically in the context of editing, writing. There's all kinds of ways that this could manifest itself, elements of things being orderly or aesthetically pleasing. I remember I was once part of a group that was organizing a social event and I was inviting a speaker and there was a gift basket for the speaker. And I couldn't resist the urge. And I said, "I think that we could arrange these fruits a little bit more nicely," because just noticing all those things, kind of having that constant influx of things. So it's something that I've always known about myself. And again, it's also something that you kind of have to control. You can absolutely go too far and you have to make sure that you're not hurting other people in your desire to see things exactly as you want them. But again, it is a good signal to have. It's like that spidey sense of like, "Oh, something is a little bit off here," and being aware of how you want to change it. I actually think that kind of relates to the thing that led to me, I wouldn't say meeting because I knew John from before, but it certainly seem to be developing a close relationship with Jamey as well. But I gave a talk not too long ago about without children's books and the hint messages in them and how that relates to the community of programmers and the hidden messages that we send each other. And again, it's just about noticing these things and realizing like, "Oh, there's something that's a little bit off." And just kind of being, let's say a little bit bothered by the things that are there and then knowing how to address them. I don't want to really give the talk. I mean, I can totally re-give the talk in the conference style context, but I don't want to give a free talk right here, so I'm not going to get too far into that. But yeah, I think it does relate to that as well.

JOHN: Strikes me that that sort of heightened awareness of the discomfort of certain arrangements of whether it's UI elements or code or fruits or people, like being able to be aware of when those things are subtly off is actually pretty powerful. Because you becoming aware of the means you can bring it to the team and make them aware of them rather than like, at least for me, a lot of times those little things are just background noise. They're like just a little bit of sand in your shirt, but you don't really notice, you don't really address, but it's there just causing cognitive load as you're trying to filter it out, causing friction on the team that no one's really talking about. Being able to bring those into awareness and start a conversation is incredibly powerful.

ARIEL: I think this actually applies to accessibility as well. Most of us aren't naturally attuned to the accessibility needs of those who, let's say don't set certain abilities that we may have. So for example, if you can see color just fine or you have, let's say, standard tri-color color vision and then someone else doesn't have those. So, you might not notice, "Oh, this design has a lot of red and green used to contrast things." So, very basic things, that for someone else is very, very obvious, but it is actually possible to develop over time a sensitivity to these things. I think another example is all tags and images. If you've never experienced using a screen reader to look at a web page, you probably aren't as bothered as someone who uses it all the time. But it's also possible to kind of feel like, "Oh, there's something wrong about an image without an all tag and just kind of learning to be bothered by it, learning to notice it, even if it's not something that impacts your day to day life. So, I think that's kind of the empathy element of it, I would say, is learning the things that irritate others and learning to be irritated by them as well.

JAMEY: I think there's also value in pointedly irritating others on purpose to make a point, which I thought about earlier. One of my talks recently, I talked about the screen reader [inaudible] thing and I have a clip in it where I have like a video of a screen reader reading one of those tweets that has the clapping hand emoji in between every word that people like to do. It's like a minute and a half clip. And when I was writing this talk, I was like, "I can't make everyone listen to this for a whole minute and a half." And I was like, "Oh yeah, I can." And I think it was really effective because I just awkwardly stared at the audience and made everyone feel annoyed that they had to listen to it.

ARIEL: I was at that talk and that was a powerful moment.

JAMEY: Thank you. Not to toot my own horn about it, but I really struggled with, "Is it appropriate to put this in my talk?"

JOHN: Very much so.

JACOB: I had a screen reader moment yesterday where there was this sort of accessibility question that came up and there was sort of like a general consensus if you Googled it that like, "Oh yeah, you need to do it this one way." I had been thinking like, "Oh, it seems like for as a sighted person," I guess I should say as a person who doesn't use a screen reader, I'm often relying by just sort of Googling it and finding out like, "Oh, this is what you're supposed to do." But I've never actually tried using a screen reader. I've been meaning to for a long time, but I spent probably an hour just teaching myself the basics of it, which was frustrating, but definitely worth it because I sort of got to this point where I wanted to just sort of experience it for myself and sort of [inaudible] as to why we do some of these things as opposed to just sort of taking someone else's word for it.

ARIEL: Actually, at my previous company since after I left, but the [inaudible] practice, I think it was called no keyboard Tuesdays. Oh sorry, no mouse Mondays, maybe something like that. It wasn't cute, but the point was you could use a keyboard and you couldn't use mouse. And so basically the point was to experience the site that you're working on from a five a week compliance perspective for basically making sure that your site is accessible to people who don't have the ability to use the things that most people use to work with their computers. And it was really interesting how suddenly when they in their own work had to live with those disabilities effectively. And that was just a standard practice in the group. They started noticing these things a lot more and they started being bothered by these things because now, this is part of my experience and I have to make sure that all these things are fixed.

JACOB: Also like semantics, like things that are perfectly legitimate for a screen reader. But if you actually try it out, you'll find like, "Oh, the meaning is different," or the meaning could be interpreted differently. And that's something you couldn't just know by Googling it, but you have to sort of realize that it's almost like you're creating something for almost two different media, like one for visual and one as something to be read out loud. And it's the same code. That really blows my mind. This is really interesting conversation.

JOHN: Do you have an example of that? I'm really curious.

JACOB: Yeah. I maintain some legacy code and we found that for whatever reason, we had a forum that was in two columns. And for whatever reason, the column to the left, the second column appeared above the first. So semantically as you tab through the form, you come through the second column. So you come through like some fields and then you get to the submit button before reaching fields that would be in the first column. You know what I mean? So, that's something you would never know unless you just tried it out.

ARIEL: I just want to point out. So, I live in Israel and so I have to work with a lot of Hebrew language websites just to get tasks done - government websites and bank websites and things like that. And the task order is totally messed up sometimes because all the fields are right to left. And the standard way that HTML works is everything is left to right. And it's interesting how sometimes their goal, it's very clear that their goal was we just want it to look the way that it was in the design mock-up. And sometimes their goal was there's like, "An order to things we're going to have, proper semantic HTML and we're going to control left and right with CSS and then tabbing is going to work properly." So, that's just sort of an interesting experience that I've had. I don't have any particular disabilities in this area and it's still like just irritating. Or I'll click on a field, I'll be like, I tab around the page when I use the internet because it's just I don't want to use my mouse all the time. And I'll click on the field because I think that's the first field and I'll just start tapping around and it's not the first field at all. And then I have to figure out, "Oh, but then this field I just filled it. Now I have to actually just go back to a different field because that changes the options for this field." And it's super, super irritating. So yeah, it's much easier to be irritated when it's something that impacts you personally.

JOHN: Yeah. Or if they have JavaScript that wipes out the field whenever you click or tab into it. [Chuckles]

JACOB: That made me think of something else, which is -- and this isn't really about disability at work, not about disability at all. So for example, my wife doesn't really like using hotkeys. She just prefers to use the mouse for pretty much everything. And it made me think of like, I use hot keys a lot too. I try to use my keyboard wherever I can when I'm browsing. But lately I've been trying to use my mouse more because I'm curious of like what is the experience of someone who has to sort of push their mouse everywhere around the page and what would that feel like for them? And again, that's not about disability. But again, we're talking about a potentially very different experience and sometimes I find myself curious, I'm like, "What is that?" So then that it becomes a question of like, "We have no mouse Monday. Should we have only mouse Tuesday?" I don't know. What are the different ways you can differentiate and sort of pretend to be different users at different times?

ARIEL: I think that there's this often cited statistic and I don't remember what the numbers are. But basically the number of people who will fill out a whole form goes way down for every field in the form. And I think that that's exactly the point to someone like me who just tabs through like whatever. Okay I'm typing and I tab and I tab and I type, whatever. And I'm just using my pinky to hit the tab again. But for someone who scrolls down and clicks on every individual field, that's really, really, really annoying to have more and more and more fields. And especially when -- so I recently had to to fill out a government form that they distributed via PDF. And you kind of click around the PDF and fill in different things. And I'm like, "Oh wow. So, I can't tab around. This is weird because it takes a long time." That was definitely an eye opening experience.

JOHN: Yeah. I think these are all, what we're talking about here is all different ways of stretching your experience to encompass parts of the experience of people that aren't like you and thus increasing your empathy and bringing their experience into your consciousness so that you can keep that in mind as you design and as you work going forward.

JACOB: I have a question, if we're ready to switch topics. When you said you went to rabbinical school?

ARIEL: Yeah, I did. I was a rabbinical student. I was careful not to say rabbi because I am not one. But I spent some time in a rabbinical studies program.

JACOB: Okay. So, in my limited knowledge of rabbinical school, it's sort of my understanding of you sort of become very adept at asking questions that complicate everything and usually very good at taking something that appears simple and making it really complicated. (A) Would you say that's true? And (B) If so, how has that impacted your work?

ARIEL: Yeah, it's an interesting question and it's something that I've thought about a lot. I have actually a Trello board where I keep a list of talk ideas that I'm working on and that's been there for like a few years. And I'm just not sure what to say about it. But yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a lot of -- the way I would actually describe it is less making things complicated but revealing the complexity in apparently simple things. It's actually not that dissimilar to get a ticket from a product and they say, "Okay, so I want you to add this to the UI." And you say, "Well, what about this edge case?" "Actually for this segment of users, that's not going to work properly and maybe they shouldn't even have access to that." So we have to think about access control. And just taking this very, very simple thing and saying, "Well, it should feel simple at the end, but there's a whole lot of complexity that we need to think about." And yeah, that's definitely a lot of it. To me, yeah, it has definitely honed my mind to be very comfortable thinking in that way. It maybe makes me a little bit too quick to jump to like, what about this and what about that. It probably causes me to massively overblow my estimates sometimes because I'm anticipating all of the things that can and maybe well but maybe just won't go wrong or at least reveal some hidden complexity. So yeah, that's definitely a point.

But I think there's actually also another point in terms of rabbinical school in the way of thinking and this definitely varies from school to school. But one of the things that I was always taught is it is a form of Occam's razor. But essentially the way that you try to understand a law is basically by looking at edge cases. And by defining the edge cases, you define the boundaries of the law. So once you have all these edge cases defined, you then have kind of a question as to how you're going to explain them. You could say basically the law is as I always understood it, and these edge cases are because of conflicting values or some kind of corner thing. Or you could say, once we have all these edge cases and we can kind of draw the pattern between them and see actually an overall simplification that will cover a lot of these edge cases and explain why the boundary is drawn in this particular way. And I think that actually also has helped me out in thinking about code because when I think about a problem, I think about the edge cases. So I'm sort of also pushed at the same time to think about what is the simplification that will cover a lot of these edge cases. What are these edge cases is really getting at and how do I have to rethink the system as a whole in light of these edge cases? Is it going to be easier to just program the edge cases into the system or to modify the system to more naturally accommodate the edge cases? I don't know if that made sense to someone who has not gone through that particular training. But that's probably the best way I would describe it in fairly general terms.

JACOB: Yeah, definitely.

JOHN: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense because the happy path, the things that aren't edge cases don't require a lot of thought because they're the straightforward thing, you just go do it, versus the edge cases. Like you're saying, they sort of define a boundary around what it is you're talking about, whether it's functionality or some other edict. And I like thinking about it that way because the intersections between where the change or the the idea or, as you're saying, the law intersects with other domains, whatever those might be. And I like thinking about it that way.

So when we were discussing topics earlier, you mentioned that you're currently working on defining the corporate values for the company that you're working on. That's a very rich topic. Certainly I've been through a similar process at the team level recently. So, I'm curious to what your experience has been with that and what you think the benefits are.

ARIEL: So company values are definitely a complex topic. Pretty much every company that's out there has some set of values. But there's one company that had a lovely sounding list of values. So I'm going to tell you the values. I'm going to mention the company and I think it'll be pretty clear why company values are often viewed with a certain degree of skepticism and [inaudible]. So the values that this particular company had were communication, respect, integrity, and excellence. The company in question was Enron and this was their statement of values in their 2000 annual report. Obviously, this is a fraught topic and it's absolutely possible to have a bunch of values that you'd put on paper because they sound nice, but then maybe they don't actually work or people don't apply it in their work because the incentives are all set up for them to act exactly in contradiction to the values. So I kind of want to think a little bit about, or think aloud with all of you, about what is the purpose of company values and how do we basically give them teeth so that they can actually be meaningful. And then kind of in light of that, we can also start thinking about the process of how we get there to the right set of company values and when is the right time to actually do that, to actually have that process. I'm not sure. I mean, I think there are some people who could say, "On day one, you should have a clear set of corporate values." I'm not so sure, but we can we can discuss that as well. So that's sort of the setting the stage for the whole conversation, I would say.

In terms of the purpose of company values, I think that's kind of maybe the most important question because everything else should naturally follow from that, like what we were talking about just a minute ago. From the definition, [inaudible] all the rules in the edge cases. So to me, it's like what is the goal of these things? Why do companies have them? Again, the answer could be they happen to sound nice and they're just marketing material and whatever. But hopefully they should be more than that. And it really does matter a lot because just speaking about my personal experience with them. So, the company that I worked with in tech did not have a set of values and they recognize that that was a problem. At some point, they did develop a set of corporate values, but the process that they followed basically led to a bunch of pretty, I would say, bland values. And I can say that because I don't work for them anymore. And I think that they're a lovely and wonderful company, by the way. They're doing amazing work and the people there are fantastic. But just the value that were chosen, I found them kind of generic and uninspiring when I moved to my current company. So again, there was no list and set of corporate values. I really bothered the CEO about that a lot, actually. And basically, I don't know, it probably wasn't just because of me. I mean, it's a conversation that they were having among upper management for some time. But we recently had our annual gathering and that was one of the big things that we did was sort of kickstart this process of defining our values as a company. And after everyone kind of had our input, there's a smaller group including me that's now jumping in and we're trying to sort of gather all this input together and figure out what are the common threads and what actually defines us as a company and what are our values.

So it's something that I have, I care a lot about it. I have a lot of thoughts about it, I guess I would say. I want to make sure that I'm giving room for other people's thoughts because I think it's going to be more fun if we all have something to throw in about it. But that's kind of where I'm coming from on this in terms of my personal history and just seeing how values can be -- I mean, they can be nonexistent and what happens when there are no values? What do values want to contribute? What do you kind of feel is missing and what's our way to get there? Because I think I've seen maybe not the right way to get there, which is basically gather all the managers into a room and figure out what generic values they can all agree on. But I think that there are kind of better ways to get there. And I'd be interested to hear, not just my own thoughts, but what you all have to say about it.

JOHN: Last year I went through a process of getting our team, which is about 25 people, to decide on what the team values were. Because we were going to use these as part of our interviewing rubric basically as a way of defining for ourselves what our values were, but also for when we're evaluating people like what things are we going to evaluate them on so we can say, "We have value X, tell me about a time where you were able to demonstrate that value." And I like that because there's no wrong answer to that as an interview question and it allows the person to come up with what they think a good demonstration of that value is. And then you can sort of evaluate how they think that that would play out versus whether they guess the magic answer to your tricky interview question.

So that was sort of the impetus behind that, and that process has been rolled out to the whole company. But the process, basically we had our team offsite and use that time to brainstorm values and have the team collectively come up with them, which I like a lot better. And I think it goes to your point a little bit about like if there's a point too early in a company to do that. Like If it's just two co-founders, you could probably do that. But it's probably not necessary at that point because ideally, you're so closely on the same page that you don't need to write that stuff down. But at some point, enough people are going to be added that you need to proactively create the culture versus just letting it happen, however it happens.

JAMEY: I agree with that and I also think that coming back and revisiting them is a big part of that. My company did a similar thing in an offsite and wrote our original core values maybe like a year and a half ago when there were maybe 10 of us at the company. And then now there's like 30 of us at the company and we did a refresh on them where we had a similar discussion maybe six months ago or so. I think it's kind of interesting to see the original list is not the same as the new list, but I think you can tell that it was the same group of people. Some of them are the same, but I think even some of the values behind them are the same. But we changed the way that we wanted to express them over time after having used them, which was kind of interesting because we didn't have the insight when we wrote them the first time to be like this is the way this sentence that we're putting on this piece of paper is going to get wielded in the future. And then we could see how it got wielded and then potentially change the way we want to say it even if the meaning is similar. And I think that that was really valuable.

ARIEL: I'm really curious. Jamey, did you delete any values or was it more like an edit and add? Because I've seen cases where companies will add to their values. I saw actually really cool posts from Buffer about how they added a value. There was like a whole discussion in the company for [inaudible]. Like, "Yeah, I think we need this to be a value." And then there was like feedback and then they kind of settled on the final framing of the value and everything. There's like really great examples out there of saying like, "Okay, so our values [inaudible] completely add something." But I'm really curious at what point you delete a value. Is that something that happened in that discussion?

JAMEY: Yes, actually. We had values in our original list that had to do with what we were attempting to achieve as a company. I work in agriculture and our original number one value was we help indoor growers succeed. And we ended up removing that one from our list of values, which is kind of funny because I still think we would like to help our customers succeed. But there was some consensus on like, our core values are something about the way we conduct ourselves within our company and how we interact with each other. And we kind of ended up making a distinction between things we want to achieve as a company aren't the same as core values of how we want to base our behavior. And so, we got rid of a couple that were kind of more goal-driven about the success of our company and we replaced some with -- one of our original ones was we respect each other, which I think is important. But it ended up changing into, we foster an environment of respect and openness, which I think is another example of like, you can look at those two lists and be like, okay, both of these lists have something to do with this idea of respect that we think is valuable, but there's meaning in the way that it got changed, if that makes sense.

ARIEL: I totally agree with that. One of the things that I tend to pay attention to about values is who is impacted by the value? Who has to change their behavior because of the value? And it can be about just as -- maybe one example. A lot of companies have values like grit, determination, work hard, or some variant of that and maybe more inspiring terms, but basically something that comes down to that. And it's not people on top who are changing their behavior because of that. It's the frontline workers who are now being asked to basically make sacrifices for the sake of the company. That's not a value. That's a statement to the workers. It's a threat almost of, " You have to do this." And I think that respect for each other definitely impacts the individual workers but obviously, it's a thing. It's something that you're doing it because it's good for everybody else and it's good for you when other people respect you. It's good for everybody. It's not just good for somebody's wallet. But fostering an environment of respect, that puts a lot more pressure on the people who are more influential in the company to create a certain kind of environment and to make space. Another example that I think about a lot is some companies will say the value is we challenge people, we ask questions, things like that. And maybe it would be a better value to say we create an environment where it's safe to ask questions, where it's safe to challenge ideas and where it's safe to take risks. Don't push the individuals to take risks, push the company as a whole, push the higher ups to make it an environment where it is safe to take risks. A lot of the time, you have to think about, again, this really goes back to what's the purpose of company values. Are they about how much we can squeeze from the individual workers or are they about creating certain environment where really everybody can succeed and everybody can feel comfortable.

JOHN: That's such a fantastic distinction for evaluating a set of values. I really, really like that. I have one example. I'm wondering if you can go too far with values. This is something that I've heard [inaudible], it may not even be true anymore, but I heard at least at one point that when you're working at Amazon, they have their seven core values. And every single project initiative, activity, whatever, that you do or propose has to have backing of one, like it has to roll up into one of these values. And I can see the point of trying to keep the values top of mind and have them baked into the process, but that also feels somewhat draconian. So, I'm wondering what everyone thinks about that.

ARIEL: I think this relates to one of the questions that I brought up which is how will you give teeth to the values and that obviously is a situation where you're really able to give a lot of power to those values because they impact your daily processes. So on one hand, that's good. On the other hand as you said, that might be a bit too draconian. It might be a little bit too restrictive. I think it's important to be open to the idea that our values should be really good, but maybe they're incomplete. Maybe they're missing something. Maybe they need some tweaks which goes back to exactly what Jamey was just talking about, about how the values should be open for discussion. It doesn't mean that, like you can have a value of integrity that probably shouldn't be open for discussion as to whether we should have integrity or not. There is a limit to it. But whether these are the values that best represent what we are and what we aspire to be, it should absolutely be up for debate, I think. And again, it's a question of what's the right place and the right time and the right way to address it. Definitely, that was one of the things that made me a little bit uncomfortable in my last company about how the values happened is they just sort of announced one day as far as I recall. And maybe I'm misremembering history. But basically they were decided in a closed room of of managers and VPs and stuff. And there was not necessarily a whole lot of involvement by individual workers. If you have a gigantic company, you can't get everybody into a room and really be so effective at having a conversation, but there should be representation because first of all, that makes everyone feel like they're a little bit more involved. They're more represented. A representative government is still better than just a [inaudible] even if not everyone can actually cast a vote on every issue that comes up. And I think it's the same thing with creating values that there should be representation. I think it also changes nature of the values, again, to represent not just what is good for somebody's wallet, what's going to make their shares go up. But also what's good for individual contributors, what's good for the people, what's good for the customers, what's fair to them. Because very often the people who are actually interacting with customers will care more about them than the people who are just kind of trying to make the company work like a well-oiled machine. So I think who is creating the corporate values really does make a difference in that regard, as well. I feel like I drifted a little.

JAMEY: I also have a thought about John's question, which is that like I think we have had disagreements at my company about are we using the values in too heavy handed away. And I think that there is still some disagreement like on my team where some people are like, "I think it's really important to use the values." We use them in our peer feedback and we use them in our hiring assessments and we use them in all these places. And there's been a lot of discussion about like, are we using them in too many places? Are we forcing our discussions into them too much? Some people think we are, some people think it's like an important structure. But actually we changed one of the values based on it where we were like people were complaining like, "Oh well, we use them in hiring and we're supposed to be able to like..." I mean, it's kind of John said earlier, it's great for interviews because you can questions in the context of the values in a way that's helpful. But then we were getting into situations where people wanted to say, particularly with technical hires, we would want to have a discussion about like, "I did some pair coding with this person and I have thoughts about their technical ability as a programmer." And there wasn't a core value that was like, we value someone who's really good at what they do as a programmer. And so it was almost like we couldn't talk about that, which is an important thing. And so we used to have one about, I forget the exact wording, but it was about trust and constructive feedback and we ended up changing the wording of it to we trust each other to do our work with excellence purposefully so that kind of like, is someone doing a good job at their job could fall under one of our values in a more direct way, but still focusing on, it's not just are you doing a good job at your job? It's like if I have something that I need to get done, do I feel like I can give it to you and trust you that you will get it done. And I don't have to micromanage and like I don't want to be micromanaged. And so it was kind of like an interesting, we have to write a value to cover this thing that we think is important that's not currently covered. How do we do that? And that was kind of coming at it from a different angle. But I think that if you have a team and an environment and a community where you have made the space to talk about this stuff, then when disagreements about the values come up in that way, you've already made a space where that's an okay thing to discuss. So, I agree with you, Ariel. If someone's just telling you these are the values, then it can be much more of a burden to integrate them into your work, whereas if there's open discussion about the values, you can say, "Okay, there are these things that I'm expected to integrate in my work," but I agree with them or at least feel like I can say something in a case where I don't necessarily perfectly agree with them.

JOHN: Yeah. I love how obvious it is, how important the wording of the value is from the two examples that you gave today. They both are, for me, I felt like they were big improvements, but they also point to how important the language is when you write these things down and that they're not just a list of seven words that you think are important, respect, blah, blah, empathy. You could write these words down, but phrasing it in that way of like we create an environment blah, blah, blah, like that is such an important distinction.

ARIEL: I've seen a lot of in terms of how values are phrased. There's different approaches. There's the approach of you just have a word and then you have some kind of definition of the word or you have a short phrase. There's a lot of different ways of expressing them. I've seen one company where they had again a word or a short phrase, I forget which, but then they had like a few concrete examples like examples of how you might express this value, breaking it down a little bit more. There's so many ways to express values and I don't think that there's a correct one necessarily, but it definitely has to be done with thought about how we want to use these values and how specific do we want to get because you don't want to be saying exactly what each individual one means to the point of like, well now I can't apply these broadly. Because that's supposed to be a fundamental core principle there that has to be applicable. But at the same time, you do want to give people a sense of what it means in terms of my day to day. How should that change how I'm acting?

JACOB: I have two thoughts. What would happen, do you think, if values were -- well they were grassroots, they came from the bottom up, which we've talked, we've shared examples already like that where a team gets together and comes up with values. But also that a value had to be reflective of actual team behavior before it could be codified. It seems to me that one of the issues is writing it down will hopefully make it so. And I wonder if you flip that and you said if something's important, go and do it on a small scale and then it can sort of bubble up to the institutional level and then we'll codify it. And now when it gets codified, everyone needs to sort of work that into their framework of how they behave.

JOHN: But whether they're aspirational or not is an important part of the definition.

ARIEL: This actually reflects a lot of my experience right now in terms of the discussions that we're having in our team about what should Cloudinary's values be. And we got, I don't know, 70 or so values that came from within the company from different people. And we had to figure out how do we group them and how do we analyze them and understand them and look for the big patterns and the things that really matter here. And it was very clear that some of them are, these are things that we do and some of them are things that we hope to do. And there were some where we said, "We think this is the thing that we do. Are we fooling ourselves?" And that was actually one of the more interesting parts of the discussion where we were trying to sort of bring examples of like, "Do we live this value? Do we not live this value? Can we really claim it's part of our core DNA when we don't live this way right now." And it was a really cool discussion I think because it sort of forced to be a little bit honest with ourselves. And I think it revealed certainly to me certain things about my own organization where I thought things were great and then suddenly it's like, "Oh well, maybe it's not as great as I thought." And I don't want to say negative things about my company, not just because I work there but because it actually is an awesome place. But everyone has issues and that's fine. And the point is that I think about them and working on them. But it was really interesting to hear some of the feedback from people from different teams in different parts of the company, different countries actually and hear what their feedback was and how they perceived how much we do or don't put the value on. And I think that's actually a really valuable input into the discussion of what the value should be.

JOHN: Yeah, that's fantastic. I think as you were saying, if you can build the process of creating the values in such a way much like it sounds like what you did Jamey as well, that you can bring up the voices of the people who probably are on the margins, who don't have the institutional power. Increase their ability to say, "This is not something that I've experienced at this company." That's an incredibly powerful venue for effecting change and for again, bringing awareness of a problem that's pushed away to the edges that most of the people in power aren't aware of and allowing that to start be one of the catalyst for change. That's really just blowing my mind right now.

ARIEL: I think another input into the question of aspirational values and what is the value might be a really great blog post that I read from Rich Armstrong about basically the Fog Creek values. Their goal is actually radically different from most values that I've heard. The goal is less about defining who we are and what we strive for and all that. It's more about basically answering questions that you might encounter on a daily basis. One of their values is we don't want your money if you're not amazingly happy. Which if someone, let's say you have a customer service representative who's dealing with a customer and they have to decide, should I give them a free month or not, it's very obvious what the answer is. We don't want your money if you're not amazingly happy. So that gives them basically the freedom to give in to the customer a little more than they might naturally do. There is another one that everyone is available to everyone, which basically means that if you're debating, should I ask somebody a question or not? Well now, the values literally give you permission to go ahead and ask the person that question even if they're right at the top of the food chain because everyone is available to everyone. And if they make themselves not available, well now they're violating a core value. So they're really aimed at, I don't know frankly if this is how things work before they used the values or not, but the goal was to basically define behavior and help people basically answer questions on a day to day basis as to how should I go about doing my work.

JOHN: Timing wise, we are just over an hour now. So this could be a good time to move into reflections unless there were other topics that we wanted to get in first.

ARIEL: There is a question that I'm curious if you wanted to talk about this. But again the question what stage should a company put its values into writing? To me, that's actually a really interesting question and it's something that I've debated with other people about as to when is the right time, how established should the company be. I think when companies put their values into writing too late, they kind of err on the side of doing it too late. And that can have, I think, catastrophic consequences on the culture it develops because basically the trigger to put together values is usually something like, we see that certain values and the rank and file are sometimes, or maybe even higher ups are not necessarily living those values. And now we should put into writing as kind of trying to plug the dam, basically, trying to prevent these sort of breaches of conduct and make sure that things are passed on but that's not necessarily the right time to do it. Maybe it's better to do it a little bit earlier. So, I can say that I personally perceive kind of a spectrum of there's a time when the company's definitely too small. John, as you said earlier, you don't want to define the values where there's just so few people that we all kind of understand each other and we probably want each other to act. But there does come a point where it becomes a little more ambiguous. And I think there is really a point where you should still do it, but it's kind of too late. And to me, I think the time that it's too late is around we have Dunbar's number. So Dunbar's number is I think 150, give or take. It's basically the number of meaningful relationships that a person can have. And so when a company basically reaches that point, that's when you usually start to feel like, "Oh, I don't really know everybody anymore and I can't really maintain relationships with everybody in the company anymore." And that's kind of a critical moment where channels of communications start to break down. A lot of startups actually fail typically at that point because they fail to transition in terms of their communication patterns to deal with larger organization. So to me, that's kind of like the last possible time that you can do it and have it be effective. But again, maybe there's time that's earlier that it would still be even healthier to do so.

JAMEY: What you just said, instead of having an answer, it made me think of a question and the question is like, "What do you do if you're past that point?" I feel like you kind of said it's better to do it maybe than not do it, but too late is kind of harsh. What would be your advice if you're like, "Oh, we're past this point," but we want to try and implement something.

ARIEL: With my limited experience and my limited perspective, I think the best thing I can say is better late than never, but expect more bumps in the road in terms of adoption of the values. You might push a little bit harder. Again, as we've discussed, there's a point where it's pushing too much, but I think you might have to do a lot more in order to get people to really remember the values, to pick up the values, to live the values. There are some things that you can do. My previous company had like an award to give out monthly or bi-monthly staff meetings where basically they would say you can nominate somebody for living one of the values [inaudible] which value that they were living and something extraordinary that they did that really exemplify one of those values. And they would get like a monetary award and certificate and stuff. That's one way to do it. Just looking for [inaudible], I think that the bigger problem is not the adoption because the adoption strategies probably more or less the same, whatever the size of the company. It's about looking for ways to get a team without sort of forcing people's hands too much. Making sure your values are flexible, stuff like that, that we've already kind of gone over. But what might happen until those values are really properly propagated and adopted is a little bit more dangerous. There is a point where you really can't rely on culture to spread by itself. And if you take a much more active role, it [inaudible] culture and it's just going to be a lot harder. You're going to have to invest a lot more. And the best advice is before you hit that point, again, maybe too late is too strong a statement, but it's going to be a whole lot harder if you wait too long. This is absolutely an example of decision time saves time.

JAMEY: That makes sense to me.

ARIEL: Anybody else have experiences on that in terms of [inaudible] stage question? That would be maybe enlightened.

JAMEY: We're a 30-person company and it's like by far the biggest company I've ever worked at. So working in a company with more than 30 and that's including our sales team and everything. So working at a company with more than 10 engineers is just a huge gap in my experience.

ARIEL: So in your size companies, because again, I think the smallest company I worked at certainly in tech is kind of 120 or above. So what do you feel about the size that you've hit that this was a time that we really needed to get the values in place?

JAMEY: My experience is that we did around 12 people was the first time we did a core value set. And like I mentioned, it has evolved since then but I think it was really great. We're in kind of an awkward teenage phase of being a startup right now. And I think we'll see. I see people get frustrated and I get frustrated. But of course, we're having these kind of scaling issues because this is the time in the life of a startup when these scaling issues happen. And going into this kind of awkward teenage phase already having something that we've had good feelings about was kind of comforting because we have had culture change because again of course, you do from going from two engineers to a 15-person product team. And so it's been kind of comforting as someone living through that to be like, there are changes at my company but we're not doing them without putting any thought into it. It's comforting that people are thinking about and worried about these things. We've changed the core values as I've mentioned. I think it was for the better, but it was great that we had something to base them on and just knowing that I think the worst thing that you can do to your culture is just ignore it and see what happens. And so, even at times when it's been difficult, I'm glad that we're not just ignoring it and seeing what happens. So that has been a positive for me at our size.

JOHN: I started at my company when we were 30 and now we're over 500 and only have done the values in the last year, year and a half or so. And I think that was probably too late. I think I haven't noticed a lot of problems with the rollout or anything like that. But again, I think a couple of years ago, we could have done a lot with that and we didn't.

ARIEL: Do you think that the culture that your company developed in the meantime has been negatively affected in certain ways by not having those values already set out?

JOHN: Possibly. It's hard to know really, because my team is somewhat isolated being the engineering department and hasn't grown. I mean, we've grown from five to 20 and the rest of the company has just exploded in size. So I don't know how it's rolled out in other areas. It's hard to predict whether that would have been helpful or not earlier on, although something closely related to values or diversity and inclusion, and it was last year that we started our major diversity inclusion efforts, which is definitely way too late to start those efforts. That's very clear cut. It should have been there from the beginning.

ARIEL: It sounds like the lesson is if you don't state your values, you might forget them sometimes.

JOHN: Yeah. This discussion reminds me a little bit of when we had April Wensel on the show in episode 94 and she talked about having personal values and doing weekly retrospectives on how you've lived up to those values. I thought those were really interesting ideas, not only from just having a value so explicitly defined for yourself. Most people, it's just sort of their internal and they just operate, but actually writing them down and saying, "This is what you're going to adhere to." But then also increasing the feedback loop of saying the situation. "Yes, it was great. I was right on what I wanted to be doing there. This one not so much," and keeping that feedback in, I think makes adhering to the values that you really want to espouse is a really interesting idea. So I just wanted to throw that out.

ARIEL: That's really interesting to me because I'm thinking about what I mentioned earlier where the process of creating the values, there's been some introspection as to are these really the values that we're living. And there's no reason that that has to stop once you have the values set in stone and on your career page and print it on a big poster in your office. That can happen on a very consistent basis. I've seen values used as kind of the framework in which to judge employee performance. I think that might go a little too far sometimes because the values you want for a community are not necessarily the same as the values you want for any individual. But I like the idea of having regular moments of thinking about are we living up to our values and these values will still reflect who we are. That could be something that you build into if your company has [inaudible] or that's something that could be part of that. If not, then something to bring up if they're again doing some kind of regular big meeting. And if not, then maybe on the individual team level to have regular points every couple of months maybe where you bring that up as just a topic of conversation. It can be more regular than that, but there should be some kind of regular moment in time where you're pausing and thinking about that.

JOHN: So now's the time on the show when we do reflections, which are each of us talking about the things from this conversation that really struck with us or things that blew our minds or the ideas that we're going to take with us into the rest of our day or week or life. I can get started with that. I think the really great idea for me from this discussion has been using the process of establishing and/or revising values as a way of pulling in the experience of the marginalized people, however they're marginalized in the company, into the discussion to allow them to really feedback the actual behavior of the company as a group into itself so that it has an accurate idea of what's going on, what values are being demonstrated, which ones aren't being demonstrated and in what way. So that again, feedback is one of those key biological activities that helps an organism stay healthy. So, I think using that as an opportunity. And like you said, Ariel, just now, doing that at a regular basis rather than say every decade when you decide you need new values, is probably pretty important. And also using, like thinking about the language of them very specifically, as Jamey was saying, so that they target, like thinking about who they affect, whether it's group behaviors or people with no power or people with power or thinking about all those dynamics in the phrasing of the goal I think is important. So these are all things that I'm going to be thinking about quite a bit in the future.

JAMEY: My thought was similar to that. I think you mentioned it a little bit, but very specifically what was said about thinking about who your values put pressure on. Because I think about this kind of thing on a more general level, quite a lot like the fallacy of personal responsibility, which I could talk about for a million years, but I won't in my reflection. But I guess it was just surprising to me that I hadn't really thought about it in that kind of very explicit way about values and what people do we want to feel like they need to change something or adapt in some way or set some sort of model of behavior and who are we putting that burden of responsibility on, and is that fair, I think is something that I wasn't thinking about explicitly when I was helping to write our values. I think that I'm hopeful that we did a relatively good job with it anyway, but I wish that it was something that I was being more intentional about at the time. And it's something that I would like to be more intentional about going forward.

JACOB: I've been thinking about a balance between whether values should be aspirational and they're put in place so they can shape and change company behavior, or should they be a reflection of things that people in the company are already doing. They have already internalized. And yeah, I sort of go back and forth about which they should be, to what extent, what's the right balance. I'm thinking about how that can be a dynamics where you can set values that create a specific culture that can then be conducive to other values coming forth. So it's just opening my eyes how complex that system can be.

ARIEL: I'm allowed to have two reflections, right? One reflection actually is in response to Jacob's reflection, which is cool. I think that what you're saying now sort of made me realize that the questions that we asked are interrelated, in terms of what's the right stage to put values into writing and should values be aspirational or just reflective of what the company is, I think that that actually really is impacted one by the other. So if you have a company that's really well established that has tons of people and it's really hard to move the rudder at that point, an aspirational value might not be that effective. Whereas if you have a small, more dynamic organization that's able to pivot much more easily and that's able to change things without impacting tons of people and encountering as much resistance, it might be a lot easier and more effective to have those aspirational values. So maybe that is also a factor that should kind of really impact both questions of how much should values be aspirational and when should we do them. Do we want to have more aspirational values or do we want just kind of reflect the values because it's really hard to have aspirational values when your organization is just huge. Maybe for a smaller team. But in the organization, you could have those aspirational values but it's really, really hard to have deep and fundamental change within a giant organization. That's kind of one thing to sort of piecing things together that we spoke about.

The other thing that I found really interesting to contemplate and I'm going to have to think about more is, so I came to this conversation thinking a lot about how do you give teeth to values? How do you make sure that your values actually mean something to the organization? [Inaudible] up on a poster or on a website and then forget about, but there really is a point of giving too much teeth to the values. And it's probably made worse when the values are really set in stone and not open to discussion and revision. So there's probably a balance to be found in terms of how much weight should values carry. And again, I think it's easier to give them more weight if they're also at the same time open for discussion and open for revision, because that gives you the opportunity to respond to the weight of value by saying, "Maybe let's reconsider the value. I'm going to appeal to the board of values," whatever you want to call it. But if I can change it, then maybe it's not as much of a pressure situation when the values seem to be restricting me too much.

JOHN: All right. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Ariel. This was actually an amazing discussion.

ARIEL: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this and I've learned a lot along the way.