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JACOB: Welcome to Episode 149 of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel. I'm here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Hey, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Jesse James. Jesse is a lover of dogs, cats, and trees. You'll find him living in the Pacific Northwest of the US with me and also his dog, Maddy and cat Poppy. We don't live together. We just live in the same city. Currently, Jesse is working as a senior software engineer at Conversa Health, a health and care management software startup in Portland, Oregon. Hi, Jesse.

JESSE: Hi.

REIN: Welcome to Greater Than Code.

JESSE: Thank you for having me. It's a little surreal to be here, but I'm glad I am.

REIN: We're happy to have you. So we're going to ask you the question that you knew was coming. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

JESSE: You know, Coraline asked me this in person, I think it was at RailsConf this year. And my answer was different then than it is now. So I'll give the current one. My current superpower, I will say that my origin story has changed is, I would say empathy. And as far as how I got that, by not being very empathetic for a large portion of my life, and then finally getting to a point where I was just like, "Oh wait, that's a horrible way to be a person and to exist in the world." And kind of having some people point that out to me very directly.

REIN: This is something I'm really interested in. How does empathy work for you? Is it something you like sort of perceive passively or is it, you do have to put effort into being empathetic, is I think the question I'm asking.

JESSE: I would say at this point having tried to be more empathetic intentionally for the last few years and going through therapy and counseling, a large part of it is more passive and just kind of happens now. It's just that practice skills become a habit. But there are times, especially we all face difficult people where it's like you have to take a step back and remind yourself like, "No, no, no, this is a person too. They deserve just as much empathy." At those points, you do have to kind of turn it on and be like, "No, I'm going to intentionally not treat you like I was an asshole."

REIN: So you said take a step back. Can you be as concrete as possible about what ways you remind yourself to be empathetic?

JESSE: A lot of it stems from just -- I mean, taking a step back is kind of a vague, overly used term. So I definitely get that. It's just taking a break from the conversation or even just in my own head being like, "Okay, I feel something about this interaction that isn't great," or this person. Or trying to identify those moments, I'm like, "Oh, one of these assholes again," or something to that effect. And then being like, "Why am I thinking that? Is it the way they're speaking?" Well, people have different ways of speaking. Maybe it's a cultural difference. Maybe it's an issue of somebody who hasn't been confronted about a social cue or something like that. So there's always trying to just re-examine the -- well yeah, this is my experience. I can remember a time when I probably said the same thing or a similar thing and people gave me the benefit of the doubt. And so I need to do the same, and then just kind of try to imagine where they are coming from and what may have led to that.

REIN: So there are certain sort of mental behaviors that trigger you to be sort of aware that, "Hey, maybe I'm not being as empathetic as I need to be in this situation." So there's some self-talk that you notice going on in your head maybe. Or is that sort of how it works?

JESSE: To an extent, yeah. Actually up to a large extent. I also have severe adult ADHD and PTSD and so sometimes I can jump to snap judgments like, "Oh, this is an uncomfortable conversation. I don't like this." And that's usually something I've learned to cue in on. Like, "Okay, why don't I like this? What is it? Is it on me? Did I not take my meds today or am I busy, distracted?" And sometimes I feel, no, it's just they said something that made me upset for a reason and just kind of trying to as quickly as I can process through that. Like, was it just I took it the wrong way. Maybe they meant something else or maybe it was something kind of inappropriate but it may not seem like that to them. So just trying to not just assume the worst intent, kind of that trope level. Assume positive intent, which is easier said than done and sometimes isn't the best effort, but just kind of trying to replay it like, "All right, I'm not going to assume that what you said was meant in a bad way until you've given me clear indication that you didn't mean it in like a hurtful or derogatory way."

JACOB: Would you say that your experience of being a neuro-diverse person has been an asset in terms of being an empathetic person?

JESSE: It has helped since I got treatment for it. In my case, it was un-diagnosed until last year. And so, I'm 37. And so for the last 35 years, I would say it was really difficult to be empathetic especially when my own thought patterns would circumvent that and I would be short and I would be trying to get out of conversations or something would trigger my PTSD and I would just get too worked up to be able to be an empathetic person to the extent that I should have been. So since getting treatment for that and actively working on those kind of skills, it's been a lot better and it's enabled me to slow down on being more present just when I talk to people. And once you kind of slow down and you're present, you're actually hearing perhaps the meaning behind things or even just giving yourself a second to kind of diffuse those mental time bombs in your own head of like, "I didn't like that. Why didn't I like that? I don't care." Being able to slow down now and not have everything so jumbled has given me the space and time and emotional entity just to be like, "Hey, it's not all about me and how I took something." Somebody else may not have meant it that way and I need to be present for where they're at emotionally. Like, "What are they stressed out and upset?" I've been that way. I have to give them a little space for that sometimes.

JACOB: It almost sounds like your process of gaining treatment for yourself, it almost sounds like it was a process of finding empathy for yourself and that enabled you to find empathy for others. Am I off base about that?

JESSE: No, no, no. I mean, I definitely think it's very true. The whole empathy for self is still an ongoing issue that I face. There's a little bit of body dysmorphia as well that plays into that. And then some just childhood kind of emotional trauma/neglect stuff that plays into it. But being able to take a second and be like, "Hey, I'm not perfect. I'm not supposed to be." Oh, that means everybody else is not perfect and they're not supposed to be. And so just really trying to remember that in every interaction I have. And like I said, sometimes it's easier said than done. Some people make it clear that even given that benefit of the doubt, they're still going to be kind of mean and nasty and sometimes you have to deal with that directly or avoidantly.

REIN: So Jesse, you gave a talk recently about company culture. Two talks?

JESSE: Two talks on the same day, which I cannot recommend.

REIN: I see. What was the other one about?

JESSE: The other one was titled, I suck at titling things, Be the "Bootstrap", with bootstrap in quotation marks because I hate that term, using privilege to the benefit of others, which in practice turned out to be how to make white dudes in the audience really angry at you.

REIN: That sounds right. That sounds correct. Let's maybe start with the first one and then talk about the second one or other things. Those sound really interesting. So what is culture?

JESSE: Culture. There's a variety of definitions in every flavor of bias towards it and whatnot. But essentially it's just the atmosphere, habits, norms, processes, and just mental space that a group occupies. It could be the sports team , it could be at work, it could be at home. You have a culture within your home, even if it's just you. That's just how you are. So no one's immune to it. There's no start or stop. It's just you have a culture unto yourself, like when you talk to yourself and interact with just yourself when you're alone.

REIN: So you hear a lot -- I think it's becoming less common now, which is a good thing. But you hear a lot of companies talking about cultural fit, which I've always felt was an oxymoron. Maybe, what's the sort of elevator pitch for your talk?

JESSE: Basically just that the idea of a culture fit ignores the fact that culture is like an organic thing. It lives, it breathes. It never truly dies. It just gets really, really bad.

REIN: That is also a culture, right?

JESSE: That is very true. So the pitch of the talk is just trying to reframe the conversation around culture away from culture fit or culture is a zero sum game where adding some certain mix of people or backgrounds will all of a sudden make things good or even things out. And that culture is something you work on like, "Oh hey, we're going to work on culture the next sprint or the next quarter and improve it." And it's like, no. If you ignore it, like anything else that you ignore that's living, it will change and it will die off and it will adapt to the fact that you ignored it.

REIN: We had an anthropologist on here a while back and he gave a definition of culture that I really liked but I'm probably going to butcher it. But it was essentially that culture is a group that grows together. So like, bacteria form a culture. I like the idea that culture isn't a static thing. It's something that a group of people form together and like you said, in an organic way. I think organic is exactly the right word for it. It's also not something that can be forced or sort of top down hierarchically organized.

JESSE: I agree. Like anything else that's living, if you try to force it to do a certain thing, you can force it in that direction, but the result is, I'm going to say, unnatural. It doesn't develop the way it should have or could have. And you may be limiting the growth or positive influence of it by trying to so directly influence it.

REIN: Yeah. It's interesting that people talk about how do we build a culture or how do we make the culture we want? But culture is descriptive, right? Culture is sort of like a trailing indicator. It's all of the stuff that happens with this group of people. That's culture. How do you affect culture? Stephen Jay Gould talks about the problem of reification, which is where you take this abstract thing and then you need it to be concrete so that you can address it. Intelligence is an example of a failure of reification. Human brains are incredibly complex and we've tried to reduce them to this one number called IQ. So in my mind, the same thing happens when we talk about culture in this sort of reductive way where we just say we need to improve our culture. We need to find a culture fit. It's a category error to me.

JESSE: I hate boiling it down to like such simple terms but no one ever looks at a dog and says, "Oh, we need to make dog better." What do you mean? What's wrong with the dog? What behaviors are you seeing that you don't like? That's the thing. You aren't making culture better. You want to change some sort of behavior. You have to address the actual problem and the cause and identify what that is and be able to point at a thing and say, "Hey, this is the thing that we don't like, here's why we don't like it and here's why we think it's happening." Just saying, "Oh, the culture is bad or it's good." What does that mean to you and what might that mean to somebody else?

JACOB: I can see how this can be hard for software developers because it's tempting to believe that culture is like a system that I can put a hand on in any place where I think it's deficient and change it. But just like you said, it's the sum of all its parts, which are all humans and there's feedback in both directions. So individuals feeding into a whole and the whole changing the individuals and you just can't engineer it like that.

JESSE: Exactly. I think there are things you can do on that kind of systems and repeatable effort type things. Boil the concrete stuff down through a process and just convention in your office or wherever your location is. But even that's still one small sliver of it that you can control, kind of the Petri dish thing. You might add some different kind of food or different environment or heat, but that just sets the stage for something growing or not growing. It doesn't actually change the growth. You can help or hinder but you won't know until you apply time across that.

REIN: Yeah, culture is conditioned by a lot of things like values but it's not caused by any one thing.

JESSE: And like you were saying, the whole like, "Oh, we're going to create a better culture," or, "We're going to make culture." No. From the first day, let's say a startup, you're a single CEO running your own company by yourself. All right, you have a culture. You're never going to need to create culture from there. Every time you add somebody, you're just adding a new variable to the mix. It's not going to start new with somebody else. It's like, "All right, we already have to adapt and start growing." Or maybe it's growing in the bad way, "All right, this is kind of cancerous but we're not going to address it right now because there's just two of us and it's fine." Then you start adding more people to it. All of a sudden that grows and it can turn things bad really, really quick. And bad is a very relative term.

[Laughter]

REIN: Culture isn't good or bad. Culture just is the descriptor for the relationships that exist between people and environments. Good and bad, that's a moral judgment that we place on particular configurations.

JESSE: Exactly. And I think that's also very true - it's a good thing and it's also a very bad thing because we can be in situations where everybody's a straight white guy working together. It may feel to us like a really good culture until we try to add somebody who's from underrepresented group and all of a sudden they're like, "Hey, this is a really toxic culture." And you're just like, "What do you mean? It's been fine for me." You haven't ever had that mix and to figure like, "Oh, shit. Yeah, I've been benefiting from this and it's been super great for me, but I never had to take another perspective." I do think that's also been kind of tying back to the ADHD and PTSD thing, being neuro-diverse and then having the PTSD to deal with. Having started treating it and being able to recognize those parts of myself now and how different work situations affect me differently than some of my colleagues. It's like, "Oh crap, I could easily see how before, I would just ignore these things because they didn't bother me." I can see it in my colleagues, they don't always quite realize why I do some things a little bit differently or I take more frequent breaks and think about things or kind of calm back down, so I'm not always amped up. And I see how that looks from the other side now and just how [inaudible] it can be. And by no means is it anywhere close to an underrepresented group like women or minorities in tech especially. But even that small sliver plus just looking into it and experience and research, I'm like, "Okay, it's a problem and we have to be the ones to fix it," or at least lead the charge because by and large, we listen to ourselves.

REIN: If you can't target culture directly because it's not a real concrete tangible thing that doesn't have handles that you can turn, what do you do to affect culture?

JESSE: I think what I've found to be at least somewhat effective is at least on a small scale, working within a team or a small group to identify, "Hey, what values are important to us?" Because that's usually kind of the additions you can start making. It's like, what's important to us? What things do we idealize as virtues to attain and then what are we currently doing and where on that spectrum are things right now? And then saying like, "If these things are important to us, how do we more espouse these virtues or these values?" And then you're going through and like, "Okay, so does everybody agree that these are good values?"Because once you get buy in on that and like, "Hey, we all agree that these things are important," you can start finding ways to implement those values and to start living them and then reminding each other that these things are important. Granted, this still takes a lot of like introspection and retrospection to know are these actually good values, and you're making it wrong. You probably will get it wrong because we're human and you're basing the values on the current culture and makeup of your small group. And so, it has to be a living thing where you realize, "Hey, we may have made mistakes. We're going to do our best." And every time something new comes in or someone new joins the team, we're going to reevaluate this at least to some extent.

REIN: The way I think about values in terms of culture, there's sort of two ways. One is that they bound the space that your culture can grow in. So let's say your value is be white, for example, which is at least implicitly one that is quite common, or be male. That bounds this space to a very narrow space that doesn't really explore the full possibility of [inaudible]. But it bounds the space that your culture can grow into.

JESSE: Definitely.

REIN: The other way is that values are sort of like a trellis in that they guide the ways that your culture can grow.

JESSE: I definitely agree. Kind of going back to, you could get it wrong. I mean, a trellis could be a good thing if the plant you're trying to grow needs the structure and support to get there. You probably don't need a trellis for a tree, something that is just naturally strong. So if you have a good diverse group of people and everybody feels comfortable and safe, that tree can go strong. It doesn't really need that trellis to kind of guide it. It might help to have some structure here and there, but it doesn't really need it. But if you're in a culture where it's very predominantly like one ethnic group or one background, like it's not a super, I don't want to say it's not strong, it's weak because it could be strong for that group. And that's kind of the hard part is where you draw that line of value is going to be useful and value's not going to be useful. And there are several companies that have taken great steps at this. No one's ever gotten it right because if they did, they'd be making lots of money off that framework somehow because that's what we do. But just be prepared to get it wrong. Unfortunately, getting it wrong tends to have long lasting negative consequences for the most part. So it's an ongoing process and there's no easy answer. That's why in my talk, I extensively marketed like, "Oh hey, there's some steps." But for most part, it's actually just starting the conversation because with anything, you have to talk about it more and this has to be a thing that we can talk about without it developing into, "Well, the culture is fine because we're all white guys. We look the same." But we're not going to say that. We're just going to say that it works for us and you have to work within that scope. So just at least starting the conversation that that might not be a good paradigm. And pointing out like, "Hey, there are flaws in that and you need to be more open and adaptable." Things of that nature.

JACOB: I've heard some agricultural metaphors about culture. Like, we set the conditions for the soil and culture is what grows, but we can only set the conditions. And this idea of a trellis, it's like this is the thing that culture grows on. We can give it a more rigid framework for it to grow on, but we can't tell it to grow on it. And sometimes in agriculture, we do directly manipulate the plant. If I'm planting a tomato, I might tie it to a stick and sort of teach it, "Hey, you're going to grow in this way and you're not going to go over there. You're not going to go over there, go this way." And then eventually, it'll sort of be autonomous or it'll be on the right track, and you can sort of not worry about that anymore. When you begin growing lettuce in the early spring, you have to sort of snip off some of the leaves to sort of let it come in stronger. Do you think that there's an analogy to that in a workplace where at the beginning you have to be more forceful or more direct? I mean, I'm thinking about like every workplace has somebody that's going to be a naysayer about stuff like this, right? They're going to be like, "I've been here longer than anyone else in this room. I've seen things like this before. They never worked," so to speak, at least as far as their concerns. "And I'll be here after this has gone." Is there anything to be done about that person?

JESSE: A lot of that is going to be hard because that's like going back and be more agricultural type analogies, that's the other plant nearby. It's a shared garden bed and that person is there too. And so they're taking up nutrients and resources and they provide value. Let's say that's a cucumber plant. I don't know plants that well, so we're just going to work with it. And it's like, "Hey, things are fine, whatever. I don't need trellis or anything like that. So why should you need one? I'm just going to grow on the ground and it's fine." Well, that's great. That works for that cucumber plant. It may not work for the tomatoes or the corn or whatever. It's trying to get that person to realize that, "Hey, that works for you. This might work for you." And this new change is difficult because you don't see the need for it, but it supports the greater group. There are times when you basically have to say, "Hey, you've got a great business value. But as far as where we need the team to be in grow, we need tomatoes more than we need cucumbers right now. We need people who can work together and handle that and make this a really good environment to work. I'd rather have a few sprints where you have to back off the number of things we accomplish rather than have someone who's going to consistently bring down the team overall because they don't want to work together." That's a hard decision to make and it's not always easy to manage that because I've worked in places where that person is also kind of the go-to person for the exec team or somebody higher up who's like, "Hey, we're not getting rid of them because they're the person who can do everything." And they can be really hard to manage through that. And so, it takes a lot of buy-in and you're going to get it wrong because we all do. I know at a previous company years ago, I was that person just like, "The culture here is fine," because I was a straight white male working there and it seemed fine for me. So all of a sudden having to do more things that I didn't find value in because I didn't see a problem. I was for a number of years like, "Oh, codes of conduct. Really? We don't need that. Nothing bad is happening." Well, nothing bad was happening to me. And so, I didn't see it. I wasn't looking for it. And so it's really hard to get outside of that. It doesn't affect me and I don't need it so we don't need it.

REIN: So this is the fundamental contradiction of egalitarianism. To continue the metaphor, "I don't need a trellis so you don't get a trellis." That's equal.

JESSE: Or the, "I didn't have access to one, so you shouldn't either."

REIN: Right. This is why Marx was an anti-egalitarian. What Marx said was that everyone should be able to develop to their fullest potential, which means if I don't need a trellis, cool. If you would need a trellis, let's get you a trellis.

JESSE: Exactly. And you always get the business arguments for, it'd be easier for all of us if we didn't have to set up a trellis system for that because that costs extra money and might slow things down like, yeah. But all right, so do you want to have it easier right now or do you want to set something up for future greater success? With the understanding that maybe it won't lead to greater success. This is where I get into the moral argument, like it can't always be about money. This is where my more now anti-capitalism side comes out. I'm just like, "That's great, but we're all people. I believe work should not be the full focus of your life even though it is where I spent half of my time. It's a place I come to be with diverse thinking, diverse background and people and work on something that we all find mutually interesting and beneficial to somebody.

REIN: And it turns out that the teams that do this are more productive and I also absolutely hate that that is ultimately the argument that sells this.

JESSE: Exactly. But then it goes back to the whole thing that it still requires time. And then if things are already not a great situation as far as the group and culture, it can take a longer time to turn things around to where more people feel comfortable and safe in the environment so that productivity can come out of it. And that's hard to put a number to or a timeframe to tell management, "Hey, I'm going to need X amount of months or weeks or years to turn this around." And it may not turn around on that time. And so we don't know until we try it. As a business person, that's a really hard thing to sign off on because you're like, "You want to just do a thing and then you can't tell me when I can look at it and see if there's a positive change." Like, "Yup, sorry. That's all I got for you."

REIN: It's not a product. It's not something that you package up and say, "We're done now. We did a culture." It's an ongoing process. And I would hope that teams that have bought into agile methodologies for software would buy into what are effectively agile methodologies for culture. What we're talking about here is a process of continuous improvement.

JACOB: It was like agile, you're agile.

JESSE: So true. It becomes hard to measure because it's very qualitative measurement depending on your perspective within the group and within the org. Where I work now at Conversa Health, the engineering culture was really, really good, as far as the diverse group inside felt. But that culture wasn't outside of the engineering team and so they didn't have a view into the black box of how we were operating. So there were a lot of assumptions made on both sides within the team and from outside the team of what was going on or why it was going on. So that led to a little bit of bad communication and bad blood between the org and the engineering team and ended up kind of pulling the culture down a little bit as far as safety and communication were concerned just because it breeds the otherness like, "Oh, you become the other team within the org," so the overall culture of your entire organization starts heading a non-safe, non-comfortable way and you don't notice until it's too late because your own little tribe inside is doing so well. But all of a sudden when that change comes in from outside, you're like, "Wait, wait, wait. What happened out here? Why is this so different?" And then it just bleeds over and both things suffer for it.

REIN: Yeah. It's interesting that large capitalist businesses, many of them organize internally in a form that's closer to feudalism.

JESSE: Everybody swears their fiefdom to their perspective Director or VP or business unit owner.

REIN: And then they compete for resources often directly amongst each other by stealing or taking resources from each other. It's a very interesting regression.

JACOB: It is a matter of survival, it would seem. It's a matter of 'I need to do my best to organize, to make things work in my immediate area'. And when you're working in a capitalist system where we're intentionally hands off the controls and letting bad actors do what they may, that's what happens.

JESSE: Yeah. And I think that's true. Any group of humans that grows to a certain size where you can't mentally and visually keep an eye on those around you, it becomes like, "Okay, we're a larger group so I'm going to trust that the other group is acting in their best interest and also ours." And then it starts to require someone higher up who has that kind of oversight to maintain that kind of positive intent across all the different tribes. And as soon as that person becomes a bad actor or even just neutral, that's where it all falls apart. And then we devolve right back into, "I got to look out for my people first and then I'll worry about what you get." And then the whole squeaky wheel, like whoever can complain a lot the most effectively or plead their case to their feudal Lord gets the resources and the attention and that just ruins it for everybody.

REIN: The flip side is that the teams that I've worked with that are the most successful have always organized themselves along more syndicalist ways of working together. So they share different responsibilities and even job titles. I've seen teams where product manager isn't a person, it's a role that someone does this week and someone does next week.

JESSE: Yeah. And I think that kind of shared responsibility and shared accountability to an extent will help build that sense of togetherness like, "Hey, part of the group, all of us are important to this." I think organizations where I've seen where engineers take a turn on helping with support. The support team kind of helps foster that. Like, "Hey, we're not that different." Your people, this is the difficulties you go through and how hard this is. I hate to say camaraderie through shared misery, but it's definitely true. Having a support person come on the engineering team, even though they're not doing a lot of tickets, just seeing the work and what it takes and the meetings, that helps.

REIN: A thing that I've seen over and over again is if you actually make it so that these people think it's possible to show care for each other, that solidarity grows. Solidarity is something you have to actively fight against. And a lot of organizations do that.

JESSE: Oh, yeah. You'll see it with the, "Okay, we're going to have an engineering offsite." And it's like, "All right, well how many engineering and marketing team together off-sites have you had?" How many times do you mix except for like maybe at a company holiday party where everybody still just kind of goes in? You'll have a few people who crossed the lines or for the most part everybody just gathers together in their working units and that's about it. You'll see more cross over like sales and marketing and things like that. People who have to work more closely together, but you can always usually tell where the engineers, the support folks and even the remote folks where they go to hang out because there's been this culture established of, "Yeah, we're all one company," except for we're all fighting for those resources. We're all trying to compete to get attention and do our part. So it's hard.

REIN: There are interesting ways that you can sort of take the temperature of a team or a culture. Like for example, suggest that your team include a support lead in its next planning meeting and see what happens.

JESSE: Yeah. And I think those types of things can work really well. They can also work against that. I've been in situations where like, "Sales and engineering team need to talk more and know what each other's doing. That way we can be more empathetic towards each other," except it wasn't very controlled. So the sales team came in and like, "We're selling this, we're talking to these customers about these use cases." And the engineering team is like, "Why are you telling them about this and that product and why are you selling it like this? That's not quite true." And there were no guide rails of like, "Sales, here's probably how you should talk to the engineers. Don't say these sorts of things that seem fine to you but may offend them." And on the engineering side like, "Hey, don't sit there and don't say nasty things about sales just because they dress in suits," or whatever. It can be really good, but it needs to be kind of guided and controlled to a certain extent. Until you foster that better working relationship, then it can be more organic, more free-form.

REIN: It's really interesting to me that no one that I've ever heard of is hiring facilitators. It's hiring people whose job is to build bridges between different parts of the organization. And if you look at what you just said, how do you get sales to communicate effectively with engineering and vice versa. How do you resolve these conflicts where both parties are well meaning but don't know how to speak to each other. That's the job of a facilitator, and that's an incredibly difficult job. And no one even recognizes that that's a thing to hire for or that that's a role that's valuable.

JESSE: That's so true. So many times, we'll get lucky and somebody on the team has that ability or somebody in small team management has that and so they kind of do that role and they tend to be really good managers. Someone who can communicate not only to their team and their management structure but also to other teams and can help diffuse some of those tense situations. That's invaluable. More than anything, I think the ability to communicate, empathize and have perspective is what's made people successful, make teams successful. And one, it's hard to hire for. And two, those people turn to burnout quickly because they ended up taking that role on in addition to their work. And so, they're doing too much.

REIN: There's also exactly zero training for this job.

JESSE: Oh, yeah.

REIN: No one says, "You're a product manager now, let's give you facilitator training so that you can work with other product managers to collaborate on things."

JESSE: That's true. I think there are some good trainings out there that can kind of lean a little towards that way and for people who are more inclined and pick up on it that they can follow on. But it's still mostly personally self-guided. Puppet here in Portland did the crucial conversations training. And I've heard great things about how that kind of edged towards that. A lot of people who I know, who work there, who had personal interest in that, they kind of did some follow-up trainings afterwards. It really helped kind of bridge that facilitator gap. And things seem to improve, but it's still like you said, it's very self-guided. It's not corporate sponsored usually unless you bring it to the company like, "Hey, I want to take this training and here's the benefit." And so, it's hit or miss.

JACOB: How would you recommend companies get started? Let's say it's a company that maybe it's not a toxic culture. Things are going okay, but they've never really had a conversation like this before. It's mostly just been people just sort of showing up and doing their work and no one's ever said the word culture. There's never been an all-hands meeting where they talked about that sort of thing. How do they start? Because it seems like there would be some inertia there.

JESSE: If you're saying this is for a company and we have some budget for this or something, just doing some research and asking folks basically, "What are some good organizations that have a third party training that can come in for just a small team?" "Here's some ways to get started," just because it's so hard to do especially if you're unsure of what your current culture is. When someone says a culture is toxic, the question you have to ask is, "Toxic to who and for who?" Because it can depend. Half the team can be, "Hey, this is fine." The other half can be silently hating life. So I think having an outside third party perspective come in is incredibly important. But I do believe you have to start with a small subset of your either team or your company because if you try to do the whole company thing, it's going to be an enterprise level third party service, which basically is going to reinforce a certain corporate culture that the executives will buy into, which may not benefit the company or your team. So I think starting small, I don't know any off the top of my head, but I know some folks who do. So, I'll try to get some resources to send to you all. But I think it's really important to start small and just find what works. And be ready to make mistakes, be ready to evaluate things. Put it through the test and if this feels fundamentally against our nature, be introspective and objective about that. Why does this feel so foreign to me? Is it because we're not doing it or because it's actually not great for the team?

JACOB: So, the grassroots approach. Teams sort of starting it on their own and whatever's successful should be allowed to sort of bubble up and scale them.

JESSE: To an extent. I think I would edge towards saying yes if it's successful but what's successful for your team might not work for other teams because that's the whole thing about it being organic and being essentially a different piece for every team is it might be where you do things slightly differently than the support team does or the marketing team does. And once you've had your local small team success, pitch that to somebody higher, "Hey, here's what we've done and this works for us. Maybe you should have this team go to that same consultant and see what they come up with." Because I think another issue I've had seen not work in the past is a great engineering culture and then you try to basically, "Hey, this has worked for us, let's apply it to the entire company." And then it blows up because that doesn't work for the rest of the company or it's trying to do too much at once. And so just trying to make it several small pockets and then growing towards the same direction with the idea that no one approach is probably going to work for everybody. So at the end, we're probably going to have to come together and decide, of all of these things we did, what are the key things across all the different orgs or teams that we can all say, "Yeah, we definitely believe in that thing. We want that to happen."

JACOB: Yeah. I think this was on an episode some time ago. But one of the takeaways from it was ask the questions that we asked. Don't use the same answers that we came up with. Start with a similar inquiry that led to a successful outcome for us but where that inquiry leads you may be different.

JESSE: Exactly. And then even being able to say I want to check in with you or we want to check in with you after, you've come up with your answers. And if you have new questions, let's compare what questions did you ask yourself that were super helpful that we didn't. And just kind of have that back and forth learning without either party being like, we have to do things your way or you have to do them our way. I just think that's what's missing is like, we'll start trying to develop culture or grow in a certain direction and then we just either say, "Well, you did it this way, so I'll do it that way." Or, "Well, this worked for us, so you should do this too." Every team has to have their own process, their own way of growing through it. Kind of going back to the whole plant thing, you can plant two tomato plants and tell them you want them to grow the exact same way, but it's just not going to happen that way. There are too many factors. They are two different plants. And you can kind of try to guide it, but at the end of the day, they are two different plants. They are going to grow their own way.

REIN: This is, I think, an instance of a pretty general problem, which is mistaking an algorithm for heuristic. Using Stafford Beer's definitions here: an algorithm is a rule for finding a known goal. A heuristic is a method of searching for an unknown goal. So for example, pathfinding, the things that we call pathfinding algorithms are actually pathfinding heuristics.

JESSE: Because we don't know the end goal, so we're basically just trying to find them.

REIN: Right. Let's take a different example. When people treat agile as an algorithm rather than a heuristic, it is 'apply these processes, apply these ways of working, apply these answers and you'll reach your goal'. What agile actually is, is it's a heuristic. It's 'this is a method of developing a way that your team can work together, but you don't know what that way is until you develop it together'.

JACOB: Then you provide some common pathways so you're not reinventing the wheel.

REIN: Imagine that you're on a mountain. The heuristic for getting to the top is take wherever you currently are and go up. It's a pretty good heuristic, but it has flaws. So the question of how you grow culture is a question about heuristics. What are the best heuristics? Or how can we improve our heuristics for how we work on our own culture? Because you don't know what the end goal of culture is. If you did, you'd just go do that thing and then you'd be done, right?

JESSE: Exactly. And it goes to the whole algorithm mentality of it. Like, "We want to be happier." "All right, who wants to be happier?" What does that happiness look like to this person or that person? And so, if you don't even know the goal you're shooting for, you're trying to shoot for some vague amorphous thing with the set process, you may hit it, you may not. You may not even be looking for the right thing. Like the whole heuristic goes, "All right, you're in the mountain. Keep going up," until you can't go up anymore. Well, that just means you got to a rock face and if you went sideways for a little bit, you climb another path up. Heuristic is 'I couldn't go up anymore. All right, well I can't'. I mean, that's spot on.

REIN: One of the interesting things here about -- so that's like the local maximum problem, right? You have a hill climbing algorithm and it finds the top of something, but it's not the top of the thing you wanted it to be. And one of the ways that you solve this sort of problem of locality is through increased variation. Don't just try to climb to the top of where you currently are. Pick 10 different places at random and climb to the top of all of them. And generally speaking, the only way to solve complexity is through variety. And human societies, human cultures are incredibly complex. The human brain is the most complex thing in the universe and now we're talking about a hundred of them all interconnected.

JESSE: [Inaudible] interconnected.

REIN: 	In various ways, which is where the relations are where it gets really interesting.

JESSE: Exactly. And I think going back to the mountain analogy, we sometimes forget that maybe we didn't take a step back. Instead of climbing to the top of the mountain, be like, "Why are we climbing to the top of the mountain? Are we trying to get up there for some reason or is it just the view?"

REIN: Why do we think this is the right mountain?

JESSE: Exactly. Several of the mountains here in Portland, in town, it's just like, "All right, Mount Tabor." Well, you're not really a mountain. If I'm trying to practice my rock climbing, Mount Tabor is really just kind of a gentle sloping hill to a park as opposed to Mount Hood, which is actually a mountain. Are we even looking at the right thing just because it's called this thing? Is that what we actually want?

REIN: To go back to Stafford Beer here, he talks about a heuristic can tell you how to search for a goal but it can't tell you what goal to search for. And what you need to do that is a meta heuristic. A heuristic at the higher level of how do you search for that goal?

JESSE: Yeah, it calls back into the whole once you get near something or you think your heuristic has delivered some sort of end data point, compare that to what you thought you wanted or what you were hoping to search for. Like, "Is this close?" If not, "All right, maybe that's the wrong heuristic. We could change this up," and figure out across a couple of, like you said, varieties and variations. "Let's try a few different things," and then kind of take the results and like, "Which of these processes got us closer to what we wanted?" And then kind of focus on that. I think where it can be difficult with culture is being so organic. Culture can rapidly shift to a negative spot really, really quickly. All it takes is one or two things to change and it could go negative or perceived in a negative way quickly. But then we've seen this, this happened, this thing happened. We're going to remove that thing. Like most organic things, it's not a, "All right, it's going to go back to the way it was before and we'll be great." No, it's going to take time and healing to go back to even close to where it was. It will never be the same anymore.

REIN: This analogy is going to be a little bit on the nose, but cultures are ecologies. Sometimes you introduce an outside predator into an ecology and it has consequences that you couldn't predict.

JESSE: Yeah. Like in the case of the islands where some not native predator comes in, wipes out the bird population. You can take the predator out, that bird population may or may not come back. There'll be evolutionary selections that have happened for other predators, so you've invariably modified it and that might in some ways flourish in different ways once you remove that unnatural predator. But it's changed. It's not ever going to go back to the exact same way it was before.

REIN: We touched on this a little bit before, but culture's evolved incredibly rapidly because cultures evolve through Lamarckian evolution where characteristics that are acquired by the present generation as they're alive are transmitted rather than just being mutations. Darwinian evolution takes millions of years. Lamarckian evolution is incredibly efficient and takes single years.

JESSE: This just kind of goes back to the [inaudible] and the term of baggage, but the things we bring with us from other companies, other organizations where things went really well or really poorly influences the things that we see and deal within our current companies. I've worked at some very, I perceived to be toxic places in my career and so when I come to this place, my perception of things that are happening in any new company, I take that into account. And so it's just like, "Oh, is this thing the same thing as that? Well, maybe this isn't a great culture and you start either having like, "I'm going to protect myself or protect my team from a thing." And there's all these different factors that aren't just a, "Hey, you're a certain person with this job experience and this technical ability so you're going to bring this to the team." There's so much more factors into it that you can't -- that's why it can never be a zero sum game. You're not just adding the fine quantities or taking the fine things away. It's all additive and it's all just slight nudges in certain directions that you may not even know what direction that is.

JACOB: Yeah. So, someone who has worked in a toxic workplace before is probably going to have some issues related to trust in the workplace. And it's occurring to me just now that a workplace that sort of has a value of 'you leave your feelings at home, the workplace is not a therapist office' isn't really going to work because like it or not, you're going to bring your insecurities and your trauma. We're human beings. The way we express ourselves is through feelings, we function through emotion. And it seems like at the root of all this is like if a workplace isn't going to be open to allowing people to own their feelings and their emotional history, you're not going to be able to have an honest dialogue about any of this stuff.

JESSE: A hundred percent, I agree. Trying to remove emotion just intensifies the problem because it's like, "Hey, don't think about this thing," or, "Don't talk about this thing." And so inside like, "Well, I wish I could," or, "How dare you tell me not to feel this. I do feel this."

REIN: Telling people to do impossible things isn't healthy.

JESSE: Another great one that's a little more concrete. Some people's like, "Oh, we'll show up rested and ready to work every single day." It's like, "I'm sorry, I'm not a robot. Some things are out of my control." And so then you start getting to this, "We're not automatons." We can't just say, "Hey, leave this entire side of your human condition at the door and just come in here and produce work units."

REIN: And to get all Marxian again, this is a form of alienation. This is alienation of the worker from their essence, from what it is to be human. If you can't bring your whole self to work and there is no absolute here, there's no workplace that's perfectly achieves this value. But the more of yourself that you can bring to work, the less alienated you feel along this dimension and the better it is to work there.

JESSE: The whole idea that we have to compartmentalize our lives. Like, "This is who I am at work, who I am at home, with friends," that's something that's so relatively new. Your work used to be your social community. You work with these people for years, and so that was your community. I think it reinforces several negative mental health patterns if we start saying, "No, you're a different person here." And especially, you're a different person who doesn't have emotions, who doesn't talk about things. We're fundamentally just removing the humanity from the human race and that's just incredibly damaging to everybody.

REIN: Yeah. And Jacob, like you were saying about working in a workplace where there wasn't trust and then moving to a new workplace, you form these survival rules. So for example, 'I can't be myself at work' as a survival rule is something you needed to get you through a period in your life.

JACOB: That's right.

REIN: Or I can't trust the people I work with as a survival rule. It's something you needed because in that period in your life, if you try to trust those people, it would hurt you. And when you take these survival rules that become very deeply ingrained in our consciousness, when you take these survival rules with you to a new environment where they're no longer adaptive, it causes a bunch of problems.

JESSE: And most companies and groups, especially if the person coming doesn't look or act like everybody else, they aren't set up to address these like, "Hey, we realize people are human. They're bringing things in and we know you might have issues trusting," so we're going to make sure we address that in a positive, supportive manner. That way we can build that trust. It becomes the, "Oh hey, you do assume positive intent and what happened in the past is in the past. It shouldn't affect you here." That's not how humans work. So to saying someone should forget trauma they've had before and just move on, that's not a thing. People don't do that. That's usually coming from people who have not experienced massive trauma or who aren't dealing with it themselves.

REIN: There's also this in Western Management Theory, this attempt to homogenize the workforce. And we know that that doesn't even work in factory situations, like the Toyota way is about doing the opposite and it was very successful. And so, if it doesn't work for building cars, the idea that that would work for developing softwares is ludicrous to me.

JESSE: You see it everywhere with how people handle lunch and learns, "Oh, lunch and learns. You need to go to those." What if I don't learn best that way and I feel really just kind of trapped? In my current company, we have a culture of the meeting is just not working for you. Like, "Hey, just quietly get up and leave." It doesn't apply to every team because obviously you probably don't want to get up in the middle of an all hands in front of the CEO. But for some of our engineering meetings, I support that we have lunch and learns and I will constantly maybe even give one or give ideas. I'll support people taking time off to go do those or conferences. But I will never make anybody and I'm always like, "All right, can we record that for somebody to watch later or do you have a transcript of your slides?" Trying to make it as open to anybody who might learn or participate in a different way. I kind of go the same way with remote things. The whole remote first cultures and whatnot. Like no, it takes extra care unless you are truly all remote, it's going to be an otherness and you need to adapt to that. Async communication after meetings benefits remote people, but also benefits the more introverted people who need time to think about things if you want to reach out afterwards to give you their comments.

REIN: One place where that's really changed for me personally is I used to be more or less a pair programming evangelist. And after talking to lots of people who basically say pair programming gives me anxiety attacks or I don't feel like I am comfortable programming with someone who's much more experienced than I am or vice versa. I just hear from a lot of people that pair programming doesn't work for them. And to dismiss all of those reactions as irrelevant or inaccurate or incorrect I think is dehumanizing.

JESSE: I've had people straight up telling me that I was a bad engineer because I didn't pair more. They would pair with me and make me drive, which just sets off all my alarm bells and I lose command of what little English language skill I have. I'm like, "I swear I've coded before. I've done this before." But if someone else is driving and I'm over the shoulder kind of giving ideas, I'm great at that portion. And so trying to find a workplace that pairing can mean something different has always been hard. I had a former VP who literally put that in my one year review like, "Oh, I really wish you would pair more." That went on my official record. But then I sat down with them to go over it and I'm like, "Hey, so we do pair and when I'm not driving, am I better at it?" He's like, "Oh yeah, you're amazing." And I'm like, "So can we just do that more as opposed to like you over my shoulder watching me code something because I don't do well in those situations." And just eventually trying to find a way to bridge those gaps and then bridge them for other people because there's other people I've met who if they're driving, it's great, but if they're over the shoulder, they lose interest, lose focus. And so, you have to be willing to meet people where they are. And that goes for meetings. That goes for pair programming.

REIN: So this is one reason that yearly and quarterly reviews are bogus. And also why stack ranking and all of these things that we use to try to evaluate performance are complete garbage.

JESSE: Oh, yeah.

REIN: And this goes back to what we're talking about before about intelligence, IQ is an attempt to stack rank people based on a contrived and artificial dimension that supposedly purportedly represents intelligence in some abstract way. But we know that human beings have all of these different cognitive capabilities and we know that people working at a job, senior engineers, there are all sorts of different capabilities they can have, and they may be stronger in some areas and less strong in other areas. But the attempt to put them in a single dimension and rank them is obviously garbage, I think. But also for your performance review where you were dinged on not pair programming well, what does that achieve? Why not do the thing you eventually did first? I think managers should be cultivating relationships with the people they proport to manage where the conversation you eventually had is the one that is the only one that happens. Quarterly and yearly performance reviews incentivize the opposite.

JESSE: I completely agree. We're in a timeframe where especially the more senior and lead levels managers are taking on more direct reports and not making any sort of personal connection. I have a military background as well. I was in the Marine Corps for four years and it was very much on such a small team side. You were supposed to know your team members. If someone came up to you and said, "Hey, why are they running late?" You should know like, "Oh, they've been fighting with their life or their partner. And so they had a rough time going out of the house." You were expected to know that much about your team because it was so vital that you all work together and knew about each other. It builds that kind of cohesion. I'm not saying it has to go to that level in a corporate workplace but just to know, like one of your employers like, "Oh, their cat just died, so they're really sad about that." Or, "They just had like a rough breakup." "Hey, there's some personal stuff going on there. And so, that's why." You should have more of a working relationship, but kind of like you should have some insight into who they are beyond their PR or velocity. There's so much more to a person that affects what they do and how they can do it. But just knowing that like, I know coming up that some of my direct reports have some intense personal stuff or medical stuff coming out, so I'm going to purposely dial down the velocity to expect , like being able to do that makes you a more effective leader and a more effective human being because then you can start showing that empathy of, it's more than just what I can see or what I can directly measure.

REIN: I try to be empathetic with managers. It is often difficult. But one of the things that homogenizing the workforce does is it makes the manager's job seem to be much easier. The thing that you're talking about managers doing is very difficult. It requires a huge amount of emotional intelligence, which while it's becoming a thing that managers are supposed to value is still not something that we trained for. We hardly even train engineering managers at all.

JESSE: Exactly. The skills that I've picked up in recent years have definitely come through my own therapy and counseling that I've had to go through for myself. Just being able to like, "Oh, okay." So the process to get me to open up and to find out more about me in a safe, effective manner that didn't violate any boundaries, how can I apply that to when I talk to people? And so that's been immensely helpful. But like you said, that wasn't any specific training that I got. It was just me slowing down enough to be receptive to like, "That was really effective, and I'm kind of hard to communicate with. Maybe I can use that somewhere else."

REIN: Yeah. It really worries me that we're putting managers in charge of, we're giving them responsibility for these incredibly complex systems. And with these efforts to increase diversity and inclusion, which I hope don't become completely buzzwords and still have meaning, those things are good and they also make the situation, make the system even more complex. And these ideas that we should be able to bring our whole selves to work while obviously great for us as workers, they make managers' jobs much harder. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, I'm saying that managers have to be able to step up to these new responsibilities and we're not even giving them the tools.

JACOB: It makes things more complicated.

JESSE: Oh yeah, entirely. And especially when you do find a good manager, it's sometimes hard to define what made them a good manager and very little I have seen is done to figure that out. And then if anybody does take a surface level stab at figuring out what it is, they do the same thing with culture. "Okay, we'll all apply that exact same process to somebody else and they should get the same result." Like, "No." You can send somebody all the trigger in the world and maybe they're just not good at it or maybe they just don't enjoy being the empathetic inclusive manager and that's fine. That's not their skill. There's going to be somebody who is and you need to nurture that and develop that and be willing to say like, "Hey, we might not be able to measure this right away or ever," but it's the right thing to do. We need this. I've had pushback on several companies about becoming a manager of a team. Like, "Oh no, there's enough management already," but there's usually not. There's things that are falling through, there's things that are falling behind and it's so hard to like, "No, you aren't losing a senior engineer. If you promote me to management." You're gaining somebody who can remove roadblocks and focus the team so they don't have to play the game of I have to look out for myself first because if everybody has to clear their own roadblocks and make their own headway, that's just mental and emotional energy that you're draining out of them. If they have somebody they trust who can communicate for them and to them, you feel safe in an environment, it's a lot easier to kind of get into the [inaudible], I hate the term flow state, but it's true. If I don't have to worry about watching my back, I can put more of my mental energy towards the thing that I'm doing and feel better about doing it.

REIN: There seems to be a lot of derision of management in engineering culture, which is interesting because our system is set up with an engineering to management pipeline that's completely broken. So the same people that don't respect managers today are going to be managers in five years, probably. And are they going to be better managers? It's unclear.

JESSE: All too often it's the, "All right, you've been this level, there's no more icy level you can go to. So, unless we want you to leave, you're going to be a manager, but we still need you to do the thing you were doing." So you're going to be distracted and not good at either thing at that point. Or, "We're just going to have somebody come in as a manager who thinks the same way we do about people or management." And so you just start perpetuating the idea [inaudible].

REIN: If you were trying to create a system in which managers failed, it would be hard to do better.

JESSE: The system where managers are planned to fail and their direct reports are going to be basically blocked from any real, emotional or personality growth, that's the perfect way to crush spirits and prevent people from being their best selves is to have somebody in charge of them who can't even grow themselves, much less their employees.

REIN: And there's a real human cost to this system.

JACOB: I wanted to go back to something you said before about how a manager's contribution can be really to focus on getting people stuck. I work on a pretty legacy code base at work a lot of the time. And if I was just sort of on my own every time there was some bizarre build failure, I don't know how much time I would waste when I could instead ask my manager who's been here for that entire time and has definitely seen it before, then you can just fix it in a fraction of the time. And gosh, if I didn't have that, that would just be a really disheartening situation to work in.

JESSE: Or even when the build breaks and they've only been there for a few months or they don't know the code base that well, just even being able to hand it off like, "Hey, this is broken. Do you want me to try to fix this or what?" And have them be like, "Actually no, just keep doing what you're doing. If you can do other things besides trying to make that build work right now, please do that. I'll go figure out how to handle this." And so even if they have to do the work, it frees you up mentally from having to like, "Crap, who do I go to? Can I go to that person?" Let them do the leg work, let them do that kind of interaction and it frees you up. If there's trust in your manager, it frees you up to like, "All right, they're going to handle that. I don't have to worry about it." And it's freeing too, as an employee, to be able to like, "I don't have to worry about that thing, this person is going to. If they can't fix it, they're going to make sure I have an answer as to why and what I can do to get around it for now."

JACOB: It's almost like my manager is my navigator through this socio-technical system that I am much less experienced in. Or they are the tour guide in the city, and I knew when they've lived here for their whole life.

JESSE: Exactly. It's incredibly necessary on the interpersonal side because it's really easy if you're doing a behavioral interview for somebody to like, "Tell us how you would handle the situation if there's bad communication between you and a peer." The answer you want to hear is like, "Oh well, I'll try to talk to them. If that continues to fail, then I'll ask my manager or their manager to kind of intervene." Yeah, that might work, but if you're super introverted or they are, or there's some other neuro-diversity thing involved or you just don't know them and there's something going on with your life or their life. I personally, sometimes it's okay just to go to your manager and like, "Hey, I don't know how to handle this situation. Can you give me some pointers or ideas?"

JACOB: Yeah. There's some research that is really suggested that when you ask people in an interview, those kinds of situational questions, like 'what would you do if...' The answer you get is not very useful because it's just like you said, it's rare that you can ask some kind of situational question like that. And usually the correct answer is it depends, just like you said. There are so many X factors that would need to be answered first before you can actually say what you would actually do. And then the second is that people are really good at saying, knowing what they should say, just like you said, but it's another question of what would they really do? And knowing that is, I don't know how to predict that.

JESSE: It's hard. I've done an interview before where the candidate was super technical, but there was kind of a sense of, no, there might be a personality difference. And so at one point they were like, "Oh yeah." When I talk to people who may not be on my team or might be different skill levels and technical aspects, I'll always check to make sure that we're on the same level and then adjusting what I'm talking about to meet their level. And that was incredibly telling and I was glad he said that or they said that because they had not done that in the interview whatsoever. I had been across two or three of their interviews and never once a day checked to make sure that things at the acronyms or terms they were saying that the interviewers understood. And they knew that the interviewers were across the company. And I was like, "Hey, that's great because you just told me you always do a thing and then you clearly did not do that at any point in this interview." And so it's like, "In a good, bad way you just kind of really [inaudible] me in. You know what to say." But when you're stressed out, that's not what you default to. Maybe what you know you should do and maybe a percent of the time you do it, but when things get stressful and things get heated, you go back to not doing that thing, which isn't like an automatic no, but it clues into a personality and how they operate.

REIN: This is about the time that we would normally do reflections and close out the podcast. Reflections are where we think about the conversation we just had and highlight anything that's particularly meaningful or important to us.

JACOB: A lot of this discussion made me look over to my bookshelf and I grabbed the book that I haven't looked at in a very long time, but it's called Community: The Structure of Belonging, and it's by Peter Block. The basic idea is it's kind of walking you through a process by which a community of some kind can come together and define who they are and what they want and how they're going to get it. I need to read it again, but it made really good points that community, as I think we've been talking about here, is something that isn't just going to be defined ahead of time. It's something that a group of people are going to come together and they're going to draw a boundary around themselves and say, "We are a community." And not that that boundary isn't porous, but it's the act of people coming together and they're going to be defining themselves and then that's how the whole process gets going. I highly recommend that book. That's going to be my reflection.

REIN: The most important aspect of any organization is the structure of the relationships between the people in that organization, including and especially power relationships. And one of, I think, the biggest failings in management culture and training in tech is that there is very little explicit focus on this aspect of the system. There's a lot of focus on developing individual talent and so on and growing talent. And even then, that's not as widespread as it should be. But complex systems are complex because they have complex interactions. And I think that people whose job it is to manage these systems need to know what it is about those systems that makes their job so difficult and need to be able to address these challenges with the tools that their difficulty requires. And I don't know where we're going to get that from. I think we need, honestly, a revolution in management training. We need to completely throw away the management by the numbers, top down command and control theory of management and replace it with a more systems theory oriented, holistic and empathetic theory of management. And I don't know how we get there in an incremental way because it really is a paradigm shift. But that's something that I will continue to think a lot about.

JESSE: I echo that whole heartedly. Kind of my reflection on this is just, you've both been great about pointing out that I personally should take a lot more effort and see what I can do to find these resources to be able to share them. I need to find some good third party places that handle like, "We'll come in and we'll identify some ways to help you start a value system that actually means something or be more inclusive," because we're the ones who have to carry the conversation because like it or not, most white males in tech, we kind of live in an echo chamber. We're listening to each other. And so until we make the conversation a norm, then it's not going to go anywhere. We can't expect those most affected by it to be the ones to lead the charge because they're the ones who already aren't being listened to. And so, kind of along those lines, I never want to pigeonhole or say that anyone because of their background is more suited or maybe better at something. But this is one of the reasons why I think more of engineering and tech management should be people from underrepresented groups because they're the ones who've had to deal with these things pretty much their entire lives. The whole being the other, being not having their safety and communication styles respected. We, as white men, are kind of starting to become aware of this. Like, "Oh yeah, I could see how that would be difficult." They've had to live it and we should let that experience influence how we lead, how we manage. I think right now the best way for that to happen is for them to occupy those roles and kind of be the example but that also puts excess emotional labor on them. So I can easily go the other way where that shouldn't be a forced thing. So it's still a very complicated thing, and I'm sure I'm getting most of it wrong.

JACOB: Nice.

REIN: Okay. Good talk.

JESSE: Thank you both very much. That was great.