JAMEY: Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. This is Episode 147 of Greater Than Code. I am one of your panelists, Jamey Hampton. And I'm here with Jacob Stoebel. 

JACOB: Hi. And I'm here with my friend, John Sawers. 

JOHN: Thanks, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Jennifer Tu. Jennifer, after a dozen or so years working in operations, development, and engineering management, she co-founded Cohere, a tiny consultancy. She focuses on coaching people looking for change in their workplace, from individual contributors through executives, and gets to mix this work with writing code. Welcome to the show, Jennifer. 

JENNIFER: Thanks for having me. 

JOHN: I think you know the first question we're going to ask you, Jennifer. So, let's start with that. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

JENNIFER: It was really hard picking one superpower to share, so I'll share this one, which is one of my superpowers is walking up to any process with people. So, think about code review processes or your build process, and immediately seeing any kind of inefficiencies that can be taken out. And where I got this? I had to think really hard about that one and I realized I got this from my mom. I didn’t know until a couple of years ago that before she was raising kids full time, she spent a few years being a software programmer in the 80's. And I think that must be where she developed inefficiency detection and that was something that she passed on to me.

JOHN: That’s really cool that it came from a family connection that you observed evidently in your youth rather than having to develop intentionally or you probably did some intentional development later on in your career. But it's cool that it started so young.

JENNIFER: Yeah. I think just whenever we were doing something, going someplace, any time that there was something for people who were trying to accomplish something together, she would point out, "Oh, we could do it this way. And then this would be more efficient." And that was just something that was always going in the background. Sometimes, it's annoying like we'll go on a family vacation and she'll be like, "All right, if we do A, B, C, and then D, then we'll have a perfect day." And that’s a little bit much for me. But it was seeing that, that made me realize, "Oh, that’s where all the good parts that I appreciate come from too." 

JOHN: That's great that you can take into account the positives and negatives of that mindset, like see where it goes too far as well as where it really serves you. 

JAMEY: I agree. I think that’s really healthy and cool.

JENNIFER: I wish I could take the negative as easily as I'm describing it. I'm definitely much more impatient as it's happening. 

JACOB: As a coach, you probably have to, like what questions do you have to ask in order to get to that perspective? What do you have to know about your clients in terms of what they're trying to optimize for or what their problems are? What questions do you have to ask?

JENNIFER: Usually, I start by asking them what they want to change. For me, I focus on people who want [inaudible] about change. So, if you're pretty happy with where you are, then I would be a terrible coach for you because I'm very much, "Hey, you're happy. Why bother changing yourselves?" So, the first question I ask is what kind of change are you looking for? And then we kind of go from there. 

JACOB: Yeah, sure. Can you give an example without sharing too many details that I'm sure you're not able to share? 

JENNIFER: One situation that gets brought to me pretty regularly is engineering leaders who want to change their organization because of growth especially as someone leaves that dozen or so engineers situation and it goes more to a 30 or 50 person organization, you can't keep repeating the same thing that you’ve been doing. You can't say, "Oh, I'll manage one more person." And so, one of the things that I work with is leaders who want to stop managing everyone in the organization and introduce a new layer of management. And usually when that happens, what we do is I ask about the change they're looking for. They describe this kind of a situation. And then I start digging into what they want to accomplish and what they want to keep the same and what they want to make different and what they hold to be really important that they don’t want to let go of. And some of those things might be things they need to let go of like if someone wants to stay connected with all of the individuals, then that’s going to be something that you can't keep in the same way as you grow your organization. Staying connected might be possible, but staying connected in the same way isn’t. And I help them think about, "How all this will feel like as my organization changes and exist under where I want them to go and what do I want out of it?" 

JOHN: It seems like a really important change that some of the organizations go through. That’s like the first really big change in the organization. I guess you start with a small team that’s a couple of people and there isn’t even really much leadership or management going on. And then I guess the first sort of phase changes when you have an actual people manager managing the team of five or ten. And then there's that next big phase change that you're talking about right there when it really gets complicated and you have to do a lot of thought about how that new organization's going to look. 

JENNIFER: Yeah. And I feel like one thing that’s really important that can be easy to miss is you don’t want to look at other organizations out in the world and say, "I'll do what that person did," because those people, whatever that organization is, they have a different set of people and a different set of values and priorities that might not be ones that you share. And so, if you're someone who is super collaborative and wants to build up a lot of ownership in the people around you, then you don’t want to create any kind of a top-down structure. While you build up this intermediate management layer, you don’t want to be giving them [inaudible], you want to be pulling them in, getting their advice and using them because that’s the kind of person you are and that’s the kind of people that you have in your organization. So, it really depends on who you are, what you want to build, and who the people are that you're going to build that with.

JOHN: Would you say that this is an important time to also consider and reconsider the culture of the company that you're building? 

JENNIFER: I think it's a really good time to re-affirm the culture that you want and what parts of your culture are going to stay the same, because change is always scary. The only thing that can sometimes make change a little bit less scary is if you feel like you have control over the situation. And so that’s why when you have any kind of re-organization, the person who's creating the re-organization is going to have a lot less anxiety than any of the people who are experiencing that re-organization. And that’s not to say that it's going to be an anxiety-free situation for that person. It just means they're going to feel a lot less fear about the change because they have the most influence over it. When you're looking at a re-org, that’s definitely a good time to look at what you want to keep the same. And then to be explicit and tell people, "Hey, don’t worry. This is going to be the same in these specific ways. Things are going to change, that’s going to feel kind of different and might feel a little bit weird, but these are the things that are going to stay the same and that you can expect to stay the same as we grow." 

Jean Hsu wrote a really good article about how to navigate re-orgs and what kind of mistakes not to make in your first re-org. I really wish I had read that before the first time I did a re-org because I kind of made all of the mistakes that she outlined.

JOHN: I like the way you're talking about that because I also see an opportunity for -- because you have to communicate the change, at that same time, you have to communicate the values explicitly to the team. You have to make them visible to everyone rather than having it [inaudible] the culture or everyone sort of assumes how things will work. You have to say these are the things that are going to change. These are the things that we value to keep and not keep. And I really like that time you're given that opportunity because I think that’s always nice to be able to make that into a public not implied, un-overt expression of the values rather than leaving them implicit. 

JENNIFER: Yeah, because if you leave them as implicit, people might be wondering, "Is this really the same organization I joined? Is there a place for me?" And they don’t really know for sure what's going on. 

JAMEY: I think that you’ve been giving a lot of examples of people being thoughtful about this kind of process which I think is great. But I wonder if you have any advice, what would you do if the problem is that people at an organization aren’t being as thoughtful about this process as they could be? I guess the question is how could you encourage someone who's not already being thoughtful like, "I want to do this in a way that’s really the best for everyone," to encourage them that this is really important, it's going to freak people out, you should really be coming at this from a more empathetic way? What would you do in that situation?

JENNIFER: That depends a lot on my relationship with that person. If they're one of my coaching clients, then I'll probably ask them questions about what are your fears around this re-org? What do you anticipate happening? What kind of fears or objections do you expect to see? Are there any people that you're worried about? And to start to ask questions to shift their focus away from the logistics of the re-org to the people involved. And then based off of that, start talking about ways to ameliorate that and make it easier and more comfortable for everyone involved. But that would be if I have a coaching client relationship with them. Are there instances that you're thinking of where you're wondering what someone ought to do, like a peer manager or someone reporting to a manager or some other situations?

JAMEY: I suppose I was wondering if you have advice like a lot of us have been through this kind of situations at companies or organizations that we've been a part of, maybe not in upper management. I know I've seen situations where there's unrests about it among the whole team. And I wonder if you would have any advice. I know this isn’t quite the same angle that you normally come at it from, but I wonder if you have any advice for what a team could do to express to their leadership like, "Hey, we really are worried about this. We wish you would be more thoughtful. Maybe we wish you would consult with someone like Jennifer." [Chuckles] How would you approach that?

JENNIFER: I'm going to repeat some advice I got early in my career which made zero sense to me then, but hopefully it will make sense to someone who's listening. And that’s when you are interacting with your manager, you want to always be asking, "How can I best support you? How can I make you look good? How can I make you accomplish what you want to accomplish?" And so, especially when you're in a re-org, that’s a really stressful situation because your work life is on the line and that means all of the relationships that you’ve been building up in that workplace, there's a possibility they're going to end because you are going to have to leave. So, that’s a very stressful situation because these work relationships are kind of weird in that you don’t necessarily know or expect for them to continue. And it's almost like people die when they leave or that people die when you leave them. So, the first thing is to really acknowledge to yourself that that is where you are and that that’s a fear that you have. And then take that fear and set it to the side. Don’t try and ignore it but set it to the side for a moment and start thinking about what your manager is doing and why. Think about what's the action that my manager just took? What are they proposing? Why is it that they are doing this? And then if you have a relationship with that manager or that leader where you can ask them about things, ask them in a way where it's clear you're not just reacting about your feelings about the re-org because you don’t want them to brush you off and be like, "Ugh, engineers are always so scared of change. This is so annoying. They're just like children." You don’t want them to have that kind of reaction. And so, you want to ask questions like, "I'm curious about what you're hoping our department will be able to do as a result of this re-org? What kind of projects or initiatives will we be able to open up [inaudible] of this re-org?" And try to understand why they’ve put together that re-org. 

Once you’ve done that, hopefully you'll be able to learn about why they put together that re-org and then you do one of two things. One is if you really like what you’ve heard and you want to do the work for them, you can start doing the work of calming other people's fears by sharing what you’ve learned with them. The other thing that you can do, and again this is based off of your relationship with that engineering leader, is say something along the lines of, "Wow, I feel so much better about this re-org. I'm very excited for what we can do. I wish that there was some way that we could take this conversation and share it with all of the rest of the department because I know they would feel so much better and be just as excited as me if they knew all of this." 

JACOB: Have you ever had encountered a situation where it's a small team or a small company that’s getting re-organized in order to scale up and some of the people that had been there for a while start saying, "Oh, you are articulating these values. I didn’t think that those were the values that belong to this company. I thought they were something else." 

JENNIFER: Yeah, sometimes those happen. And it's not a bad thing, but it can be a very uncomfortable thing. And this isn’t something original to me. I've heard lots of people say it. Sometimes the team that got you to where you are isn’t the team that can get you to where you need to be. And it can feel bad, it can feel disrespectful, it can feel just wrong to say, "Well, you got us here. You can't get us there. Goodbye." I don’t really have anything I can say to that beyond if you're the leader of that organization, you have to weigh two things. One is what is it that you're trying to accomplish with this business. You started this business for a reason or you joined this business for a reason. What is it that you're trying to accomplish? What is that you can't do because of where you are right now? And then the other is the people who you are working with. There's a difference between working with someone and really enjoying it, and working with someone and being able to accomplish your goals for the business. These are kind of the two things that you need to weigh and be able to move beyond. Because if you're working with someone because you really enjoy working with them, why are you doing a business together? Why not work on open source or do volunteer projects together? It's a whole [inaudible] to be in business together. At some point, you have to figure out how are we going to make it so that we can bring home the paychecks and get the results that we're looking for?

JOHN: It sounds like you start each of your coaching encounters with asking a series of questions because you need to know what the situation is so that you can approach it. But I think you’ve also talked about questions as a form of communication and as a way like they themselves can be analyzed to extract all sorts of useful information. Do you want to talk about that some more? 

JENNIFER: This is something that I've been learning about recently over the last couple of years. And by learning, I mean, messing up and figuring out how to mess up differently the next time. One thing I've realized is that when we ask questions, we’re not just finding answers. We're also telling the person who we're asking a question to, something about ourselves or about them. If you think about when someone asked you, let's say you’ve just pushed up a pull request and you got a ton of questions from the same person. What does that say to you about how that person feels about your pull request and your code? Does it feel like they're saying, "Oh my God, I'm so excited about your code, I can't wait to learn more about it." Or does it feel like they're saying, "Your code is bad and you should feel bad." 

JAMEY: I feel like it would depend on the tone of the question. 

JENNIFER: Well, it's a pull request, right? So, there is no tone. All you got is a bunch of questions. Wait, wait. Here's a good question. What can give you tone in the questions in a pull request?

JAMEY: I think you can definitely have tone in the questions in a pull request. Like sometimes I'll ask, if I'm asking a bunch of questions, I'll clarify like, "I'm just trying to understand this because I want to understand it." And I'll write that right in there. 

JENNIFER: Yes, exactly. I love that. Saying what your status and how you're feeling towards the other person and the work that they're showing you is a way to ask better questions and to communicate about it in the questions. And so, starting off things by saying, "I like where you're going and I'm curious about…" Or, "I'm a little confused about this section, can you help me understand?" These are all ways to communicate. Tone, I like what you're saying, and give the other person context about where you are and where they are in your standing and why they should feel comfortable and willing to engage with you. 

JOHN: I was thinking about this in the context of email, actually, in some of my discussion in a book club about a book called Say What You Mean about mindfulness and meditation and nonviolent communication. One of the points in there is being very explicit about, like you were saying, why you're asking and what you're asking. Like in an email example, often I would lay out a paragraph worth of explanation for some information I want or something I want someone to do. And then would not leave out the explicit like, "And I would like you to do this for me," part at the end because it felt like almost too demanding. But through your analysis, I realized that I was just making it harder for them because then they had to interpret what it was I wanted out of the email rather than just reading the last line and saying yes or no. And it's the same sort of thing where, what you're talking about in the pull request where you're sort of stating why you're asking the question, like what the context is around gathering that information. And I like that. 

JENNIFER: I recently started a podcast called Storytime with Managers. And I basically spend 20 minutes asking whoever my guest is a bunch of questions about some area of expertise that they have that would help engineering managers. And one piece of feedback I got from my guest was she really likes the fact that I would say, "I like this," to something that she said and follow that with a question. And I realized that this is a habit that I picked up from [Michael] Rogers because he'll say things like 'I like this' or 'I hear you'. And then he'll continue the conversation. So, it's this tiny bit of affirmation of 'I'm with you and I hear what you're saying and I appreciate what you are saying'. One thing that makes that work is to not say 'I like this' and then say the opposite of 'I like this' or 'I hear you' and then say something that sounds like 'but I hate what you're saying'. So, that is one important thing to do is to not try and mix your messages of saying if I say 'I hear you' then I can say whatever else I want to hear or say whatever else I want to say. 

JOHN: Again as part of that recent book stuff I was doing, one of the points in there was that you can use, like you were saying, you can use questions to communicate the fact that you’ve heard what the other person was saying. That in itself is a way of keeping the conversation going, affirming to the other person that you're hearing what they are because you can ask deepening questions that prove to them that you are listening. 

JENNIFER: Yeah. 

JACOB: I think there's a big difference between saying why did you do it this way and -- I guess it has to do with if you don’t speak your intention, it's going to be assumed the worst possible way if you're not giving your reasons. So, if you say, "Why did you do this?" The default assumption is defend why you did it this way because it's wrong, because I see it as wrong. I think what I'm hearing you say is you should be intentional about why you would like to know where your question is coming from. 

JENNIFER: One piece of advice I've heard is to replace the question of why with what. And I think that’s a really good first step but you can't stop there because at one point I got a pull request back and I didn’t get why questions, but I got a lot of 'what were you thinking about' questions. And the effect on me was still the same, of feeling like, "Oh, this person hates my pull request, doesn’t trust me as a developer, and now I need to write out paragraphs to explain why my work should be allowed to be a part of the primary branch." And so, I would say take one step further. Yes, switch from why to what. And also share a little bit about how you're feeling or how you feel towards the other person at the same time. "I like where you're going with this. I want to do something similar. What brought you to this point?"

JOHN: Yeah, that’s a really good guard rail because what were you thinking in conversation can be, "[in an excited tone] Oh cool, what were you thinking about when you wrote that?" And it could be, "[in a sarcastic tone] What were you thinking?" And unless you defend against that in text, it's going to be assumed to be the negative one.

JACOB: I did a talk about feedback and questions. In a nutshell, when you're reviewing a PR, it seems to me that your first job is you need to understand as best as possible everything you can about where the author was coming from before you can really be empowered to give opinions. So, it's kind of like you have to communicate like, "It's my primary job to understand literally what you are thinking when you did it this way or that way." And to communicate to the author that, "It's your pull request. You know the best about it and what I'm trying to do is be as enlightened about it as you are."

JENNIFER: Exactly, because you don’t know the context or the pressures that they're under. Maybe what they’ve been told by their management or by product is that this is something minor that needs to be done very quickly so that way the really important work can start happening. And without that context, you don’t know why someone is making the decisions that they're making. 

JOHN: Not only having empathy for the person who wrote it, but almost having empathy for the code itself. Like understanding why it ended up in that state and why it looks like what it looks like. And I like that this applies in code reviews because that’s a real-time feedback. But also when you're in a project that's "legacy" where you're looking at code somebody wrote however many years ago, and you think, "Boy, this is terrible code." It's the same thought process to think, "Oh wait, what constraints were they under when they wrote this?" Understanding that context would probably explain exactly why it looks like the way it looks. 

JENNIFER: This is reminding me of what we were talking about earlier about people because sometimes you have people who got you to where you are but can't get you to where you need to be. And code is the same way because code was written by people. So, the code that got you to where you are now might not be the code that can get you to where you need to be in exactly the same way as the people who got you there. 

JAMEY: And I also think that deleting old code is a skill because I used to be really emotional about it like, "But I wrote this code." And now I love to delete code. I think that was something that I had to really think about, like getting rid of that attachment and kind of adopting a new mindset about like, it's not forever, my code isn’t who I am. And if it was, I don’t want it to be because I'm learning more and my new code is better than my old code. But it took time. I actually almost got [inaudible] for plagiarism when I was in college because I refused to delete my own old code. "No, I wrote both of those." And they're like, "Then why didn’t you take it out of your project?" I'm like, "I don’t know, because I was sad about it." 

JENNIFER: Because they hadn’t taught you revision control. They should have learned better. 

[Laughter]

JENNIFER: I feel like in addition to the feelings you might have about deleting your own code, there's also the feelings of the people who wrote the code who aren’t you. And if they're not around, then it's a little bit easier to look and say, "Oh, something was happening here that I can't see but they were definitely outside influences I can't see that led to this." And it’s easier that one when there's no one around because then you can just practice it by yourself and practicing that and getting into that mentality. It gets a little bit harder when someone is there because one of the most common reactions is to feel a lot of shame about the code. And so, people will kind of mumble and say, "Ah, it's really bad code," and they’ll start telling you about how awful it is and how glad they are that you're taking it out. And that can be tricky to know how to navigate. So when you run into situations like that, do take the time to stop the other person and say, "Hey, your code got us in this business to where it is today. It's not getting us to where we need to be tomorrow. But we wouldn’t be here today if it hadn’t been for that code that you wrote. Is it code you're proud of? Is it code that you liked? Is it code you want to keep? That doesn’t matter. It's the code that you needed to write at that time to get us to where we are today. So, thank you for doing that." And that’s not something that comes easily. That’s not something that is going to roll right off your tongue the first time you try to say it. So, don’t worry about it and just keep practicing it because you're going to have plenty of opportunity to do code, so you're going to have plenty of opportunity to learn how to say that.

JOHN: I like that a lot. It's almost like a Marie Kondo sort of thing. You think it for what it did for you before releasing it. 

JAMEY: This resonates a lot with me because I was the first engineer at my company. So, there's a lot of old code in our code base from when the product was new. I wasn’t the first engineer but I was the longest one still there. And there's a lot of old code that people would come to me and be like, "What's up with this?" Usually not in a mean way. Sometimes I can be like, "Oh, here's all the stuff that was going on in our company back then." And sometimes I would be like, "I don’t know. There were two of us and we were rushed. I had been a programmer for two years and now I've been a programmer for six years. Yeah, my code was bad then." I do feel defensive about them. I've had people come to me and I know they're coming from a place of caring to be like, "Hey, I wanted to point this out. Here's a better way you could have done this." And they want to teach me something but it's difficult for me because I'm like, "Yeah, great. You're teaching three years ago me something that I know now." [Chuckles] And it's frustrating. But it's also hard because I know they're not trying to be condescending to me. They're trying to have a caring conversation about all of us as engineers trying to do better at our craft. It's a difficult line sometimes. 

JENNIFER: Can I ask how you respond to that?

JAMEY: I don’t know. I have gotten defensive in the past. I try not to get defensive. But I have pointed out mistakes that I've made three years ago that just happen to still be in our code base aren’t reflective of my skill as an engineer and I hope you can recognize that. 

JENNIFER: That’s a good way to respond. 

JAMEY: I want to learn things. And I don’t want people to stop teaching me things. And so, I don’t want to be like, "Don’t teach me that because I already know it," because even if I feel like that about some things, I don’t want to turn people off of teaching me other things because I do want to have that kind of relationship with people. But I try not to get defensive when it's like, "I know that already." 

JENNIFER: I was just noticing how much you have to navigate both the embarrassment and the shame and also the frustration all at once in this continuous way because you're still there.

JAMEY: I also think and I talked about this with my co-workers, I wonder if I would pose it to you and get your opinion on it. Because teaching someone too much things that they already know can be condescending. But then on the other hand, assuming that people know things and they don’t is also frustrating and can be condescending because then it's hard. Where are you going to draw the line in 'I'm not sure if you know this or not'. Either I can explain to something you already know condescendingly or make you feel bad when I assume you know it and you don’t. How do you make your decision on that?

JENNIFER: First I want to say I like the way that you're responding. I feel like that’s a very admirable way. And I'm carefully filing it away for if someday I'm ever in the same situation. In terms of what your colleagues could change, I think if there is one thing that you might be able to ask them to consider, and you would need to bring this up in some kind of reflective context, possibly not even a weekly retro but more like a quarterly offsite retro kind of a level, would be reminding people, "Hey, I started working here as someone with two years of experience and I now have six years of experience. In this code base, you're going to see a very, very wide range of what Jamey's code development has been." And ask people, "When you want to share something with me, can you please check the date of when it was done. And if it was more than a year ago, please bear that in mind."

JAMEY: That’s a great point.

JOHN: It reminds me a little bit of your business partner, Betsy Haibel, in her talk on pairing has a phrase called non-consensual teaching which I think sort of applies here. And I think you could probably head off some of these things by simply asking the question before you launch into explaining what the improvement is. Say, "This was really weird. Do you want to talk a little bit about how this might be improved?" Versus saying, "Oh, and we can use the lonely operator here because it's so much better than blah, blah, blah." And so that might be a way to head some of that off. Although I don’t know that I'm particularly adapted to playing that question before launching into a next [inaudible].

JAMEY: I think it's a personal preference thing too because as much as I just told the story, I would actually personally prefer being taught something I already know where I can just be like, "Oh, I knew that, so don’t worry." Than like someone glossing over something that I don’t know because then I have to be like, "Wait, stop, stop, stop. Go back. I don’t know about that." And that’s more difficult for me but I'm sure that there are other people that feel about it the opposite way. [Laughs]

JACOB: Is it a matter of, I don’t know, asking. Would it be helpful to tell you about this or that pattern and then if they say no then you just move on? Since John said non-consensual teaching, is it just a matter of asking like, "Hey, would you like to know about what an observable is? Or do you know that by now and we can just move on and assume that…"

JAMEY: Definitely. 

JENNIFER: When we ask a question like, "Do you want to know about the observable pattern," it's making an assumption that the other person doesn’t know about the observable pattern. And I wonder if there's a way to ask that in a not long-winded way that could show that you think the other person does have that knowledge or that maybe they had it but they were under some pressures or some context you can't see to not apply it or things like that. 

JOHN: Yeah, that would certainly be a better approach, harder but better. 

JENNIFER: Can we workshop this for a minute because I don’t have a really obvious thing to say and I feel like the four of us working together could figure this out. 

JACOB: Sure. 

JOHN: I guess one way to approach it would be for example, "Hey, I was looking at this code. We have to make some changes to this module because XYZ. And I was thinking of using the observer pattern to handle this situation. What do you think?" I mean, that still sort of applies -- they still have to assert ignorance if they don’t know what that is or how to use it. But at least, maybe slightly softer landing. 

JAMEY: I had people ask me, "Do you know about X." I feel like that’s kind of neutral because it's not really assuming either way. I could see someone being like, "Of course, I know about it." I think it's pretty easy in general if you do know and be like, "Oh yeah, I do." Or like, "Oh, actually no. I was hoping you would ask."

JACOB: It's also not great if you just go ahead and assume that everyone knows exactly as much as you do because then no one can [inaudible].

JENNIFER: Great. And maybe they know about the observer pattern but they also know about the different pattern that you're not familiar with and that’s the one they applied and you just don’t recognize it. 

JAMEY: I suppose that can also [inaudible], "Do you know about the observer pattern?" And I can be like, "Yeah, do you know about this other pattern?" 

JENNIFER: [Laughs]

JAMEY: That came out a little bit more hostile than I hoped to when I said it, but I don’t necessarily think it has to be hostile. 

JENNIFER: I thought it came out delightfully snarky. 

[Laughter]

JENNIFER: Here's one thing I noticed which is when you turn the question back around, it kind of showed the weaknesses of the original question. There's something about that sentence structure that doesn’t fit quite right and that’s why it feels a little snarky or a little hostile when you ask it back. One thing I wonder is if you might be able to approach it by saying [inaudible], "Hey, we need to make these changes in this part of the code base to do XYZ." What I would add might be something like, "One thing I was thinking while I was looking here is this might be a good place to use the observer pattern. What do you think of that?" 

JOHN: Yeah, that’s good. That’s a much clearer invitation to explain why it wasn’t used or say 'yes, that’s a great idea' or 'what is the observer pattern'. 

JENNIFER: And this might be a personal preference thing, so I'm curious what you think. I feel like it's not so bad to say, "I don’t know. What's the observer pattern?" Or, "I don’t know. Can you remind me what the observer pattern is?" And I'm wondering what you think if that would feel like a validating thing to say or if it would feel intimidating to say so. 

JACOB: Validating for whom?

JENNIFER: For the person who says, "I don’t know what that is." 

JAMEY: I think this is hard to judge too because I think it depends a lot on my previous interactions with that person. I think that if someone has been happy to teach me about things in the past and hasn’t been judgmental, I mean, I like to ask questions. I'm often the person that will ask, "Wait, stop. I don’t know what that is." Partially because I feel like if I don’t know, there's probably other people that don’t know and are going to be glad that I asked and listen to the explanation for me. So if someone has been open enough before, I think it would be very easy in that situation to be like, "Oh, I'm not sure. Can you tell me about it?" But with other people, even if the wording is the same, it might be more difficult. 

JENNIFER: That’s true. One of the things I think about sometimes is the way that I receive and accept questions definitely changes based off of both my personal history with that person or if I don’t have a personal history with that person, my perception of where we are relative to each other around privilege. And so, if someone with a lot more privilege to me is going to ask me a question with no context, then that’s going to feel very different than if someone I know and who they know has less privilege than me ask the same question. Not that privilege is something that you can measure and quantify and compare, but that it is something where you can have a differential and that does exist. 

JOHN: One quick note I wanted to throw in related to especially looking at code and trying to understand it and decide to rewrite it. We were talking about how much fun it is to delete code, but I also wanted to call out a particular thing that certainly afflicted me early in my career as a developer which is I don’t understand this code, therefore it's bad code, therefore we should delete and rewrite the code myself because I understand the code that I have written. And so now at this point, I try and guard against that instinct, "I don’t get this. It must be bad code."But I just want to sort of call out that little exception to the 'how much fun it is to delete code' discussion.

JACOB: To add to the thing I was thinking earlier, was I am almost in the opposite perspective as Jamey which is that I am a relatively new employee with a company that’s been around for a while and a lot of people had been around for a while that are still there, and we have a product that’s been around for a while. And one thing that I always feel in conflict about is to what extent am I allowed to change things and to what extent [inaudible] set up already? To what extent is it okay to [inaudible] writing something? Yeah, it's such a key thing to navigate. 

JENNIFER: Yeah, especially since part of the reason that you're there is to bring in this fresh new perspective and shake things up because that’s how organizations grow is by bringing in new ideas, new perspectives, and then using that to become a more diverse organization. But you don’t want to do it in such a way that you create stop energy because people are resisting that change. 

JOHN: Part of the problem with changing communication styles like this is that it involves, like you were saying earlier, a whole bunch of time you have to spend being bad at it before you're good at it. And that can really feel bad and it's hard to get through that phase before you get to that unconscious competence phase of learning. So, do you want to talk a little bit more about what that process looks like and if there are ways that we can navigate that to improve the feeling of it?

JENNIFER: Yeah. A couple of years ago, I was learning to do something new and I felt really embarrassed about something which was I wasn’t enjoying learning. And I felt like everyone else around me was talking about how they loved learning, they loved learning and they loved growing and I felt like I was the only person who was feeling like, "I don’t like learning." And that felt like some kind of secret shame that I had to not admit. And then when I finally did admit it, the feedback that I got from people around me was, "Of course you don’t. No one does," which was a really big surprise to me because everyone was saying, "I love learning." And one thing that I was able to learn from that is we like learning when we're in that -- what did you call it? Something competent stage? 

JOHN: One conscious competence? Or even conscious competence, yeah. 

JENNIFER: Yeah. But when we've reached a modestly competent point where we're able to learn quickly, the effort we put in gets us very quick rewards. But there's a failing stage or a period in which we feel like we're failing, that doesn’t feel good. We feel like we're drowning and that we're never going to learn how to swim. And that’s a really, really uncomfortable feeling because you know you're not succeeding and it doesn’t feel good. 

JACOB: Is it sort of feeling like you're learning in public and you're sort of being tested as you learn it for the first time and you are worried about -- because that’s how I feel. It's always really difficult for me when I am learning something for the first time and it's in front of other people and they can see not only how little I know about the topic, but I'm being tested in my ability to be a learner. 

JENNIFER: I think that could be part of it. I think there's also -- have you heard of fixed versus growth mindset?

JACOB: Hmm.

JENNIFER: So, fixed mindset means that you kind of feel like whatever you are, you are and you can't change. So, you might think, "I'm good at math but I'm bad at sports." And then that means you never tried to do sports because you're bad at it and if you struggle with math, then your entire identity might be called into question. And then growth mindset is thinking, "This is something I can learn." And so, you might say something like, "I don’t know too much about sports but I'm going to try." And so for me, I'm someone who comes a lot more from a fixed mindset and learning to adopt a growth mindset is something that has been process for me over the last few years. That means for me when I struggle with growth and I struggle with the feelings of learning doesn’t feel good because I'm not getting it right away, that’s all my old fixed mindset speaking up and saying, "You're trying to learn this thing but it's not something you're good at, so you can't." And so for me, because of that, what I need to do when I have that situation -- for me personally, what I do I turn to people outside of me who are good at growth mindset who have experienced thinking in growth mindset and get their feedback and their perspectives on where I am and what state I'm in. And hearing them say things like, "You're learning and it doesn’t feel good because you are exploring and you're going to get there because of XYZ," helps me be able to shift into a mindset in which I can say, "This is uncomfortable because I am acting in a very incompetent way and I want to be competent and I'm going to get there." 

JAMEY: I've said this quote on the show before but I think about it literally all the time. It's from Adventure Time. Jake says, "Sucking is the first step to being sorta good at something." 

[Laughter]

JENNIFER: Oh, that’s really good. 

JAMEY: And I feel that all the time when I suck at things. I'm like, "Don’t worry, somebody I'll be sorta good." And if I'm lucky, maybe someday I'll be really good. [Laughs]

JENNIFER: I really like how modern comics and TV shows are teaching things like this. 

JACOB: I took a dance class in college and pretty much everyone was not a dancer. Everyone was sort of a beginner. Something our teacher said is like, "If you're like feeling the most frustrated with X or you're struggling the most in the class, that is like the indication that by the end of this class, you're going to be the best at it and you're going to teach everyone else about it." And the reason she said that was that your frustration is an indication that you are not willing to give this up. You have some [inaudible] into it and you are going to continue to pull on it until you're able to bite it off and really understand. When you said that, Jamey, that’s [inaudible].

JENNIFER: That’s a really good teacher. 

JOHN: Yeah.

JAMEY: Yeah, right. 

JACOB: I think it's somewhat recognizing the fact that you are bothered that you can't learn something speaks well to you that you want to master it. 

JOHN: That’s actually a really great reframe. I mean, simply saying that this is uncomfortable to you because you care and because you want to get better. That reflects back on the character of you as yourself and makes into a positive thing which can probably carry you through some of those moments of like, "Oh my God, what the hell am I doing here?" 

JAMEY: This reminds me of kind of the trope of when someone is really worried that they're not being thoughtful to other people or whatever, and usually the people that are worried about if they're being thoughtful aren’t the same people that are being really unthoughtful because those people don’t worry about it. [Laughs]

This has been a really awesome conversation, but unfortunately, all of our episodes eventually have to end. And we like to end our episodes by letting everyone go back and bring up something as a reflection. Maybe something that really spoke to them, maybe something that they want to keep thinking about, maybe a call to action that they got from our conversation today. 

JOHN: I think something that’s really sticking with me is this talk about questions and what they reveal about the question asker. They're not only communicating like I would like to know information or I would like action to happen, but also what's my current state? Am I agitated or calm or curious? And also, what are my goals? What exactly am I trying to get out of what it is I'm asking? And thinking more thoroughly about what questions are being asked of me, I think will be a useful way of just learning more about people and the people I'm talking to and what their needs are. So, that’s something I'm going to chew on for a while. 

JACOB: I don’t really have any for this, but something that is striking me as probably a really big challenge for a hiring manager that cares about growth mindset and isn’t in a growth mindset is just how hard that would be to measure particularly for someone you don’t know very well you're interviewing because if you really subscribe to the fixed mindset, I think you would be relatively easy to measure like how much do you know right now. But asking to what degree are you committed to being a continuous learner, that would be a lot more difficult. And trying to hire for that while I think is you want to have teams of people that are really committed to a growth mindset. I have no idea how that would be properly measured. 

JAMEY: I guess for my reflection, I'm thinking about the conversation about re-organization at the beginning. It really resonated with me because I'm at a company that’s kind of in that growth time. It has been challenging. And one thing that Jennifer said was about the people who have the most control over the situation are also the people that are going to have the least anxiety which I guess stuck out to me because when she said it, it sounded so obvious but I hadn’t really thought quite that way before. And so, I think there's other angles of that that I kind of wanted to chew on, like how can I reduce my own anxiety by feeling like I have more control. Or how can I communicate to the people that do have control over things like, "Hey, maybe you don’t realize the level of anxiety that other people have." And I think that’s a really great way to frame that conversation where I can see like a conversation being really productive rather than frustrating by starting out with that. That’s cool and I'm going to keep thinking about it. 

JENNIFER: One thing that I noticed was when we took that time to workshop how we might ask a better question, it reminded me that learning to ask better questions isn’t something that you can do easily in a vacuum. And if you're struggling with how do I say this better, the best thing to do is to ask other people for help and to pick a time like a retro or a quarterly offsite to say, "How can we do this better together?" And then taking the time to figure that out together. 

JOHN: Yeah, I love that. 

JAMEY: Jennifer, it' so wonderful having you on the show. I'm so excited that you came on. 

JENNIFER: Thanks so much for having me. This was fun.