REIN: Welcome to Episode 209 of Greater Than Code. I'm your co-host Rein Henrichs. And I'm here with my friend, Laurie. LAURIE: Hi, Rein. Thanks so much. I'm here with John who's going to introduce our guest for this very exciting 209th episode. JOHN: Thanks, Laurie. Our guest today Mia de Búrca, an Irish software engineer and circus performer. From a young age, she has had an ongoing love affair with language. She accidentally fell into coding by taking an undergraduate in computational linguistics in order to cheat her way into a language degree without having to write any essays on culture. She went on to complete a master’s in French translation, with a dissertation on the effect of machine translation on the words ‘This’ and ‘That’ (it wasn’t as boring as it sounds) she promises us. Now firmly under the spell of software, Mia works as a full stack web developer at 99designs, a global creative platform based in Melbourne, Australia. Her focus is on creating empathetic and empowering workplaces and crafting software solutions that deliver real value to users. When she’s not coding up a storm or circus-ing her heart out, Mia can be found monkeying around with her 16-month-old sleep thief/daughter. Welcome to the show, Mia. MIA: Hi, folks. How's everybody doing today? Lovely to get a chance to talk to you. JOHN: We'll start off with the first question we always ask our guests, which is what is your superpower, and how did you acquire it? MIA: So I'd have a think about this one, but I've decided that my superpower is adaptability, which is my fancy way of winging it. And I would say that I acquired this ability from an almost pathological inability to follow instructions. JOHN: When did you first notice that capability kicking in for you? MIA: I would say my partner notices my inability to follow instructions in recipes where I'll be like, "Oh, I'm just going to cook this thing for dinner." And if he has to take away, he's like, "Well, what step are you at?" And I'm like, "Well, sort of three and seven at the same time." But I also stopped doing any of it, and we didn't have any of the ingredients in the first place. But it does come in handy I think because when there aren't instructions available, you can sort of make them up as you go along. Or if, as I said, there isn't a certain thing on the list, you can just substitute something else in and get it working anyway. LAURIE: That implies a skill of cooking that I personally do not possess. MIA: I don't know about that. I sort of aim for nutritious enough to live on but nothing fancy whatsoever, I promise. REIN: So to what do you attribute your skill at being adaptable? MIA: I don't know really. It's just something that I've always enjoyed getting into awkward, difficult new situations. When I was a little bit younger, I used to spend every summer just up and leaving Ireland and going to France, try to find a job, spend the whole summer working so that I could learn the language a little bit. And yeah, you really just have to learn on your feet and figure things out as you go don't even necessarily know the language fully; you just figure it out. JOHN: That's certainly is a way to build that skill in real-time if you're not planning that much, you're just sort of throwing yourself in a tough situation and saying, "All right, let's figure it out." MIA: Yeah, absolutely. And I probably would have done that to a small degree with my undergrad. Like you mentioned when you were introducing me, I had no intention of learning programming at any point whatsoever. I started an undergraduate in French translation, and it was all these group projects, and presentations, and essays on culture, and politics, and history. And I was like, no, I don't want this. I just want to learn how to speak French better. And so I dropped out and after bumming around in France for a while, my mom was like, "Well, you should probably maybe consider doing some sort of formal education now. If you leave it for too long, you might not want to do it anymore." And she said, "I found this one where it's French and linguistics and, I don't know, some computer stuff. But you were good at math in school so maybe that would be good." And I was like, "All right, okay, I'll give it a go." And I rocked up on my first day with my windows laptop and everyone else was there going wild. And I'm like, oh no, what have I done? Yeah, just stick with it, grow with it, and see how it all pans out. But yeah, I came into it with zero computer knowledge whatsoever. LAURIE: I think we often underestimate how much computer knowledge we actually have when it's not sort of the typical thing that a lot of people in those classes would have. So I'm curious if you can look back and kind of recognize any skills that you may have had that came in handy in that class that you didn't expect to. I think that sort of speaks to the fact that career changers or people with different backgrounds can come in and actually realize that they have a lot of applicable skills they might not recognize. MIA: Yeah, absolutely. In hindsight, I don't think I was as out of my depth as I felt at the time. I definitely made a lot of assumptions about the type of person that was in that room and not really fitting into that model having a lot of language background. And hopefully, I don't fudge my words throughout this entire episode and make a [Inaudible] of myself. But I do think I have the ability to, I suppose, parse information. I had research skills from my previous degree that I could go and fly through things in the library. And yeah, certainly I think maybe sometimes I look back and I think, oh, actually I don't know that that information was delivered in a way that made it comprehensible. So I would sit there and say, "I'm not smart enough to do this. I don't understand what anybody is telling me." But perhaps really the information wasn't that complex, and I was just making assumptions. REIN: So I noticed that your bio says without having to write any essays on culture. So do you consider yourself a one field anthropologist just like linguistics but skip the other three? MIA: Oh gosh. Well, I mean, I didn't quite 100% get away with no essays in university. We almost had to write two dissertations when we were finishing our undergraduate, one was like a project in the computer science area and then in linguistics thing as well. And my linguistics thing was basically coding anyway because I used MATLAB I think to do some speech synthesis. And gosh, it's been a little while, so you'll have to forgive me. But it was to do with speech prosody and projecting speech patterns. And the aim was to assist perhaps non-verbal people in recognizing that. REIN: I'm more curious about your relationship to the more cultural aspects of anthropology, cultural anthropology I guess. Why not writing or studying culture? MIA: I suppose I didn't enjoy the objectiveness of the aspects of writing those essays. So I found that once I was writing exams on math, well, there is an answer and you just have to get there whereas when I was being quizzed on areas like culture and politics, I didn't enjoy as much having to back up my opinions or find common ground in that way. I like a right and wrong answer. I like seeing things more straightforward. But I do find that there were some areas in linguistics that were quite interesting. In sociolinguistics, child language acquisition is fascinating particularly at the moment having become a parent recently. And linguistic relativism was something that was quite interesting to me at the time. If you're not familiar, it's this idea that the language that we speak somehow influences the way that we engage around us whether that's determining our ability to engage with the world could be the [inaudible] concept or weakly just colors it in some way. I thought that was really fascinating. REIN: That's the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. MIA: Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. That's right, yeah. Interesting stuff. But I shy away from bringing it up sometimes because I feel like it gives yet another opportunity for people to create this otherness around yourself and other cultures or yourself and other languages. REIN: So there's Whorf, for example, likes to talk about there are cultures where they don't have the concept of left and right, just north and south, things like that. MIA: Yeah, absolutely. But I suppose it doesn't mean that they can't relate to us in their own way. And it doesn't mean that we can't find common ground and understand one another. REIN: Yeah, it's interesting because it's also sort of been the folk theories of this. They have extrapolated so far from what was in the actual original work to say if you don't have a word for something, you can't think of that thing, things like that. MIA: Yeah, absolutely. And that's not really something we need in our world. LAURIE: I might backtrack just a little bit. You mentioned that this has become even more interesting to you since you've recently become a parent and you have a 16-month-old. In tech, that in and of itself is a specialty scale. So I would love to hear about how that has changed your work in the industry if it has at all. MIA: For starters, when I came back to work, it was only part-time. So that has immediately been a big change for me condensing productivity down into just two days. It's been an adjustment trying to get the same satisfaction of shipping code and having a positive impact. I'm pretty grateful for my workplace for A, allowing me to come back part-time and B, really helping me out in managing my time or teasing together with the expectations of a part-time worker are. I also got promoted just a few months after coming back part-time. So I'm very pleased with that as well. And I think I'm pretty grateful to them for finding ways to recognize their parent workers or their part-time workers, people who are carers. Yeah. REIN: I know we all want to talk about tech Parenthood and I do too. But I have one more question about this dead horse which is when you switched to software development, did you find it to be as objective and truth-based as you were hoping? MIA: Certainly at least in university. The problems that you're dealing with are more like, reverse this string. And you're like, oh, there's such a beautiful comfort in such a simple problem. Of course, there's going to be a million ways of solving that in a million different languages. But at a very minimum, yes, that aspect of it was definitely what I was looking for. REIN: I'm imagining anything like you got into the industry and you said, "Oh look, culture and politics again." MIA: [Laughs] Yes, absolutely. And finding a balance between requirements, and time pressure, and a variety of other things. There is certainly no one beautiful absolute truth anymore to cling onto. Absolutely not. But at least the foundation remains the same. And when you need to have that comforting you're just like maybe I'll just go through and refactor a thing, and that's a yes to a yes again. And you get all your nice, beautiful green passing tests. REIN: Is it sort of reassuring to go back to a computer that has very well logically defined right and wrong answers? MIA: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. REIN: Okay. That's it. I'm done now. JOHN: If we're going to pivot back to parenthood and work styles, I'm really curious about the part-time work aspect of it. Because I know that navigating can get tricky because I think there's not a lot of great examples of how that's supposed to work in the industry. But it also strikes me as one of those things that's really critical for bringing people back into the workplace after they've had children, rather than having to wait multiple years till they've got finally enough free time to actually have a full-time job again. So I'm curious to hear you talk about that more. MIA: Well, for starters, I'd like to say that I do find myself quite privileged to have had the choice to return to work when it suited me as opposed to that being dictated either by zero parental leave in the country or perhaps by the prohibitive costs of childcare that are in some countries. So definitely, I feel very grateful that I could come back at a time that it worked for me. There was some precedent in my company already with part-time both in the managerial roles and also we had maybe one or two -- I think one engineer returned after maternity leave. Sorry, I am based in Australia at the moment. And I think we have 12 weeks of obligatory paid maternity leave and perhaps two weeks, but I might get that wrong and I'm not sure. REIN: What civilized countries do. MIA: Yeah. I'm not actually a citizen of Australia as well. So there was a little bit of -- I'm not even sure if I've reached the same entitlements as other people, but I was just quite lucky that the company that I worked for supported me in that way. And they were the ones who offered me the maternity leave. I think perhaps maybe you get the opportunity to have a year of leave with your job protected, but not necessarily paid leave. Maybe that's the government response. And then paternity leave is a different question. And I won't go down that rabbit hole but certainly would have preferred to have a little bit more equality on that front. But yeah, to your question on returning to work, I think that my workplace did a really great job in putting the [Inaudible] as to what I needed to make that transition a little bit smoother. We had a scheme in place called keep-in-touch days, and it meant that on some days that suited me, I could pop into the office for a couple of hours to see what projects were ongoing and maybe touch a computer for the first time in a little while so that when I did come back on a more permanent basis, it wasn't this terrifying where my whole dev environment is screwed up, and I don't know the current projects in the company are and goodness knows if we're even using React anymore because I've been gone for nine months and that kind of thing. I think that was one of the things that concerned me when I had some time off. It's like oh goodness, tech moves so quickly, and will I even know how to do anything anymore? But I did fit in when I came back. It's like, well, things move quickly, but it's maybe just problem-solving always. So maybe we adopted a new library, but that's just a little bit of documentation reading. CHRISTINA: I guess as a mother as well my experience has been that depending on the size of the company, the expectation remains the same. So you're expected to contribute at maximum productivity. And there is no negotiating that. Coming back from maternity leave and trying to ramp up again, I feel for me was super difficult. And I've done it three times. But I also see the same for other individuals and especially when it's a very large tech company, it's not as simple. I feel that mothers are almost dimmed in a way for having children. And so you're not put on the same projects or you're kind of set up to fail. Even if this hasn't been your experience, have you seen that as well across maybe friends or acquaintances? And maybe even your experience at a different company. What have you seen? MIA: For starters, it wasn't quite my experience and that's part of the reason that I wanted to come and chat with you all is to really highlight how we can do this in a really good way so partly those keeping in touch days that meant that I wasn't out of the loop. I should mention that those weren't compulsory, that was voluntary. And I suppose part of what made my transition back to work really good for me was the degree to which management put the ball in my court and let me dictate the terms of coming back and how much I wanted to be involved while I was away. We have some social activities and we have tech book clubs. And if I wanted to dial in, or I wanted to pop into the office, that was fine. So that meant that I was at least in the loop and in touch with the people that I worked with. And it was a little bit less isolating as well, which can be a problem for parents or carers who are staying at home. And then when I did get back, there was a lot of one-on-one meetings, a lot of support to try and tease out what it is that I wanted from the experience because it's an individual thing. You might come back and say, "I'm going to hit the ground running. I am gunning for a manager position. I want to run the world." And you might say, "I'm really pleased to be back. I'm happy to just plow through, get my work done, and I don't have particular aspirations for growth at this exact point in time." So my manager would have asked me "Do you want to take on certain sets of responsibilities or not?" And I was like, "Yeah, let's go." And we tried to find ways that we could break down work and give me responsibilities in that way. But yeah, it's certainly difficult. And I know that there is definitely a stigma and some discrimination that still goes on in the world against mothers who are returning to work. And I've read studies in the past that indicate that actually, working mothers get an awful lot more done in the time that they are there whether it's because they have better time management skills or because they're trying to prove a point. I felt that when I was back and it was nothing to do with my company's expectations of me but more of my own where I was adamant that I was going to show no-no, I'm still just as hard a worker and I can definitely do this. So for example -- So our work was really great and they had a breastfeeding pumping room set up for me and some of the other employees who were still pumping and that was fantastic. The only room in the office with a lock and little fridge, and that was great. And that was at my discretion to drop out of a meeting or leave anytime that I needed to. But instead, I was like no, no. I'm never going to leave the meetings. I'm going to show I'm just as hard a worker as I've ever been. And I put it off and put it off to the point of actually making myself a little sick one day. So that's just an example of how your own mental model and your own perceptions of what's expected of you can really negatively influence the work that you can get done and your day in general. That was very foolish of me. CHRISTINA: It sounds like that's like this unrealistic kind of pressure and expectation, that now we have to work harder and smarter to prove that we're able to juggle that as well in addition to being mothers, that we haven't changed being techies. We've inherited another superpower, which is multitasking and raising a human. LAURIE: It's interesting though that the motherhood aspect of it almost highlights something in my mind that's true for all developers, which is the idea that you're solving a Rubik's cube in your head every time you're writing code conceivably. And we're not really wired to do that for 8 hours a day, or 10 hours a day, or sometimes 6 hours a day. And so every time you think someone's a full-time employee, how many hours of that day is them on Twitter, or walking around, or trying to rewire their head to be focused enough to do what is a very challenging focus oriented task? And how much with moms coming back to the workforce is them just saying, "Okay, I'm probably getting the same amount of work done as someone else. I'm just doing it in four hours because four hours is what I have." And the expectations being different for moms is where we're kind of recognizing -- I'm not a parent. And so for me, I think the expectations are off maybe even a little bit for people who are full-time employees that they can't get that much work done in a day, and they're just sort of sitting there and wasting let's say 50% of their time or 80% of their time or whatever it is at a given day because the job is hard and you can't do so much hard, focus work. And maybe there's something about what you both were saying about better time management skills and all of that that actually makes you just as effective with less time and ruthless prioritization. CHRISTINA: I agree. MIA: I think that's absolutely so true. Yeah, 100%. Before even being a parent, I used to work four days a week. And even that felt like, gosh, was I just wasting eight hours previously? Because I would almost always get just as much done, and it would be slightly more invigorating as well. I don't know if everyone agrees, but I quite like working to deadlines as well. I think it's nice to have something that you can reach for and something that marks that you've accomplished something in a timeframe. And yes, absolutely working two days, working four days more often than not I think I am just as productive. Yeah. LAURIE: I got to say listening to the kind of two sides of the story and noticing that there's definitely a geographic difference is a little bit heartbreaking. Women in the U.S. know this to be true. We don't necessarily get the same protections and all of that, but I haven't heard a lot of success stories. I've heard stories a lot more like Christina is talking about. And so recognizing that there are these different patterns and wondering whether or not they are the type of patterns that larger companies or even companies of any size will adapt or if it's just easier for them to say, "Okay, so we're going to hire men and women who don't plan on having kids." And that's sobering and upsetting, and frustrating, and all sorts of things. And I wonder Christina if you've heard or seen any examples where you feel like people have done it well even if you haven't necessarily gotten to be the mom in that scenario? CHRISTINA: I have not. I've actually seen people just kind of leave the workforce because they couldn't handle the constant juggling or just move into entrepreneurship and self-employment and/or consulting. I know for me I juggle both, but it's only because I have the support of my husband. Because he's here, I'm able to focus on work. If that were not the case, then it would be super hard as well for me with three kids. What I did experience is years ago, when I had my last child -- When on maternity leave, I had my three months because in the U.S., obviously they give us three months, most employers. And then you have some really great employers that will give you up to five or six months, paid. At the time I only had three months. And when I came back, I was pretty much almost demoted. So I wasn't told, "You're being demoted." I was told, "Well, there's been a change of plans, and we're going to put this other guy that knows nothing about technology over you because it just makes sense." And that happened, coincidentally, the week that I got back. So I have not seen any success stories, unfortunately, but I'm looking. I'm still looking. I haven't lost hope. JOHN: I can give one, not from my own perspective but describing the journey of the woman who's currently my boss. She started out as a product support engineer just before I joined the company. And in that time, she's had two children and is now the associate vice president of product engineering and has been able to take her maternity leave and come back and continue on. I don't feel like it's impeded her path. She may have had internal experiences with that that were not necessarily positive. But at least, in the end, it seems like she's done okay with it. I think so much of it depends on the company culture and how they want to treat that to make sure that coming back is a positive experience and keeps you engaged. CHRISTINA: I agree. That's a good point. I think it really does depend on the company culture, you're right, and how they support returning folks. At Microsoft, I know we call them returnees. And they have supportive programs for folks that were coming back. So that does matter. It makes a difference. MIA: Yeah. I definitely agree that that culture aspect is very important to the visibility of parents in the workplace. A lot of my immediate managers had very recently become parents themselves. So I didn't really feel like this was an aspect of my life that I had to hide when I was at work. If you've had a really awful morning of zero sleep and you show up to work, I shouldn't have to pretend that I'm going to be as effective and maybe I won't be the person who's doing that perhaps tricky production, little bit of wrangling. Maybe I'll just pair with somebody today and that's going to be my contribution. And I didn't feel like this was something that I would have to just pretend that it's not happening. Yeah. There's definitely lots of parents in our workplace, and that's really great. LAURIE: Something I've been thinking about lately related to this topic because I see a lot of friends sort of decide whether they're going to go the parent and the workplace path, or not be a parent, or basically making that decision. The tenure that we have in this industry is not particularly long. Some people have been at their companies for six years but you very frequently see kind of the every two-year turnover sort of thing. And that's how you get your raise and that's how you get your promotion. And how does that factor in with a pregnancy, and with maternity leave benefits and how long you have to be at a company, and whether you can switch when you are pregnant, or whether you have to worry about job searching when you're coming back from maternity leave? I mean, that's a piece of the puzzle that I think is maybe not talked about very much but absolutely affects people's ability to progress and grow when we're not great necessarily about promoting within companies. And there is a lot of job-hopping that goes along in order to progress in your career. CHRISTINA: And that's such a great point. I don't have the answers, but you're right. I think we don't talk about that. And it becomes super challenging, the juggling. I know for many years I refused to tell anyone that I had children, at all. I didn't talk about it because I knew that it would almost be held against me. And I just got tired of holding it in. But yeah, I don't know. It definitely has an impact. MIA: I think that's awful. I think it's really just such a shame because in tech we're trying to achieve more diversity. We're trying to introduce different opinions, different stances on things, and how that benefits our product and how that benefits our workplace. And being a parent, being a carer, all of these bring different perspectives to this table. The company that I work for is involved with design for small to medium businesses. And a lot of those are often stay-at-home parents who are trying to get a business off the ground. You're perhaps juggling a few different things. So I see a design come across the table that is a UI that's inaccessible on a mobile device. I know I'm going to be holding a child on one hand and trying to make an important purchase decision on another hand. Then I'm going to have that to share whereas another person might overlook that. So we're really doing a disservice to our businesses if we're obliging our employees to not bring their full identity to the table. JOHN: Yeah, I think that's particularly important now that we're all working from home because some people don't have a dedicated office and then they're going to be out in space and their children are going to be around. And if it's not okay to see that parenting happening, it's going to be a really difficult experience for someone like -- Half the meetings I have with my -- a child climbing along the couch behind her. And she's got to calm them down. And that's just what life is like. And I think our team is very acculturated around that. That's just what life is for some of the people on our team. And that's okay. But yeah, it's still such a challenge to feel like you would have to hide that while you're in the middle of it in your house. MIA: Yeah. I can only imagine just that mental overhead of constantly trying to pretend that there's not other things going on in your life as opposed to having that supported and understood as well. LAURIE: I almost feel like the current state of the world with the remote work and the pandemic and all of that has somewhat -- It's hurt in a lot of ways because obviously, you don't get the day-care support, the family support, the school and all of that. But it's literally putting those things within the view of your co-workers. It is forcing them to recognize that this is something that is physically in your space when previously it was mentally in your space. And out of sight out of mind is a real thing. And so for me, I see a co-worker, and they seem to be having a perfectly fine day, but they forgot this one thing that I told them. And ordinarily, they forgot something I told them. No big deal. I might not recognize that they're stressed about the fact that their kid's home sick today. But when I see it on a screen, I can sort of make those connections a little bit better and recognize that -- An example, we're buying a house right now and that's been really stressful. And there are entire hours of the day where we're waiting for news to see if something's going to go through. And I'm just a shell of a human and super not useful because there is something else occupying my mental space. And parents have that in spades and they have it always, and they have it more than the average person. That's not to say that other people don't have ill parents or whatnot. But parents have it 100% of the time and being able to see it and having it in a Zoom background or hearing it, the chaos through headphones or whatever it is, I think that's kind of helpful. I think it adds perspective for everybody else because parents have gotten so good at hiding those things and coming into work every day and pretending there's nothing going on, and that's not true and it's not reality. And they can still be productive and have those things going on, but it's useful for us to be empathetic and sympathetic to that. MIA: There's a lovely quote, which I'm probably going to butcher because I don't fully remember it but it's about becoming a parent. And it's along the lines of becoming a parent is to decide to forever walk with your heart on the outside of you. I don't think that's exactly how it goes, but it's so true. And the slight invisible burden of being a parent and sometimes they have the burden of being a woman in the workplace, which is hidden from other people. There's a lot of things that are going through your mind at all times, whether it's how are my colleagues judging me or perceiving me? How was I perceived in that last meeting that I went to? Or what's the future going to hold for me? And these are things that you're thinking about constantly. LAURIE: It's hilarious because I was actually telling my husband about that quote the other day because I was talking about our dog. I was like when we got our dog -- I'd never had a dog before. All of a sudden I think about her 100% of the time. I'm on vacation, I worry if she's happy. She's at day-care, I worry if she's happy. She's downstairs, I worry if she's happy. MIA: Pet parenting is a real thing. Yeah. LAURIE: And humans 10 times, 5 billion times, infinity times more than that. And so it's the idea that you care for something else and you have to worry about something else. It's a constant mental background noise. MIA: Even as we're talking now, I know that my partner is taking care of her. She's upstairs. She's in great hands, but I've got one ear out. What if she falls? REIN: I guess I would just mention that this lack of care on the part of your employer shows up in other places. And so when you see this, you'll see other signs as well. And for folks like me who don't have children or who maybe don't think that they are the target of this particular insensitivity, I guess what I would say is that maybe it's gender bias and you happen to be the right gender or it's racial bias and you happen to be the white race. Sorry. I misspoke. JOHN: [Laughs] LAURIE: Or did you? Oh, my goodness. [Laughs] REIN: The problem is that not giving a shit about people doesn't confine itself to specific categories. If you don't give a shit about people based on their gender, it probably doesn't stop there. CHRISTINA: I was going to say that really speaks to the whole concept of psychological safety. And I feel that a lot of folks or at least I've seen in the past couple of months as well it's been emphasized that a lot of folks are in fear or operating in fear and because of that, it's been extra difficult. And to your point earlier, I forget who said it, but yeah, as a parent, your cognitive load is I don't know how we don't all just collapse. It's super stressful. But I think it's important to compartmentalize. That's at least how I can stay up, and awake, and productive. And so I don't allow my kids to come on camera while I'm working on a phone call or on a conference call. I have a separate room or a separate space and they know, even my six-year-old, that I'm on a call. And mommy's on a call so do not come around that area for that 30 minutes or one hour because that's just how we have to do it. But yeah, it's challenging. And I didn't feel in my prior role that I -- I didn't feel that psychological safety. So I didn't feel that I could do those things because it would come back to haunt me. So I had to really switch, sometimes cold switch. JOHN: And there's definitely an aspect there to how okay it is for your children to be visible. It's the same hierarchy as any other power hierarchy in the culture we have. A man can probably be handling and child, no problem, a white woman probably not as much a problem. But as you go down the list of intersections into more and more marginalized identities, it's more and more risky to display any of those things that could possibly be problematic or held against you like you were saying, Christina. CHRISTINA: Yeah, it's scary. LAURIE: I have this weird sort of explanation of psychological safety as it relates to privilege in this industry specifically. Like, you're going to a takeout restaurant or whatever, and it's a you pick whatever meal you like. You pick two out of -- They give you five options. And depending on what level of privilege you have, you get to pick more. Because if you want psychological safety and you're a woman, and you're a person of color, and you're a parent, and you have a disability, you get psychological safety, or you get a good paycheck, or you get a remote job, you don't get all three. MIA: Exactly. LAURIE: But the number of places that you have an opportunity to find psychological safety are smaller. And therefore, the other factors that you get to consider, that you get to care about, that you get to use to progress your career and your financial self-worth and all of these other things they change. You're much more limited. And so it's been very disappointing and enlightening as I've kind of grown in this industry to recognize that yeah, there are people who can make a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of money. I would be giving up psychological safety to have the same job they do. And I'm a white woman, right? I'm a white woman without children. I am able-bodied. I am all of these things. But it differs the number of opportunities you have in order to find a place that you can have that psychological safety and still have all those other opportunities differ. And I think that's why the two-year job-hopping thing also pops into my head when we have this conversation because as the number of places you can work that are safe for you to work dwindle, the number of places you can hop and the number of places you can hop that are going to have the paternity leave or who aren't going to have a you needed to be here a year in order to take advantage of the maternity leave or have part-time options for when you come back, all of these things. The list of companies that offer those things get smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And so you end up being quite limited and you probably are in a situation like Christina found herself where your option is to go to work and pretend like you're not in a psychologically unsafe environment. MIA: Yeah, that's a really fantastic analogy and really fascinating. I certainly find myself quite privileged to have had this supportive workplace that is allowing me to work more flexibly where visibility of parents means that I feel quite safe going there. And this is an investment that they have actively made into their employees, which means that when I do come to work, I am gunning to go; I'm so happy to be there. And I can see myself staying longer than this two-year turnaround not just because certainly leaving would be a challenge because finding jobs is tricky but because they have made it such that I feel so happy there that I'm loyal to this company. That's the investment that they're making to all of their employees, not just the parents, by offering flexibility and a safe and supportive work environment. REIN: Laurie, to your earlier point about psychological safety differing from person to person, I think that's a really good one. And it reminds me that the conversation about psychological safety has shifted to be about whether an organization is psychologically safe. But the original definition of psychological safety is the freedom to take interpersonal risks. And that's a personal freedom. So psychological safety is actually about a person in a context. It's not about the context itself because each person has a different -- it's actually literally the privilege of taking risks. So psychological safety is a privilege that people have and different people have different access to it. So I think that's extremely right. CHRISTINA: Those are risks, right? I can take all the risks I want but then I have to be okay with the outcome, with the repercussions. I can take the risks but then I may not have a job. I may not get that promotion. You know what I mean? I may not be put on the good projects that make me visible. It's deeply intertwined I guess maybe. LAURIE: It is. I'm reminded of a company I was aware of a while back that had drastically below market rate. They would hire entry-level software developers right out of school and not promote them and sort of do this we're a big family mentality; it's okay. And a couple of things there were particularly psychologically unsafe. One is they got away with paying below market rate because a lot of their employees were on H-1B visas. And so their opportunity to move, and their flexibility, and the consequences of not having that job were much more severe. The other piece of that puzzle that rings in my head consistently is that was an environment in which compensation was based on personal circumstance. So new fathers would see promotions and raises and men getting married would see promotions and raises. And I was employed there as a young, single woman and did not obviously receive that treatment. And I remember thinking back and recognizing that it was entirely based around who had the flexibility to leave. And there were so many people who were not well-off there and were not in a good, safe situation. But they knew that. And they could continue to take advantage of that because there was considerable consequences and not a lot of other opportunities for those same employees. I mean, it's heartbreaking. It's a terrible, terrible situation, and it's an environment that you never want to find yourself in. But I think that is a very, very extreme example of something that happens in a lot of places where you say, "Well if you're not happy, you can leave." But the very people who are most disadvantaged are the people who are the least likely to have the opportunity to leave. REIN: There's one more thing that was implied by what Laurie said that I just want to make super explicit because I think it's really important for people who are trying to grow in empathy, and compassion and their understanding of the situation of other people especially based on intersectional alliance like John was talking about, which is that just because I feel psychologically safe that does not mean my co-workers do. CHRISTINA: 1000% LAURIE: Plus one, plus two, plus 20. I think the thing we've heard most often especially in light of a lot of the conversations that have been happening recently especially on racial lines in the United States is "But we're better than other places." And that is a terrible bar, and you are setting it because you feel comfortable. You have no idea if you're actually better because if you were let's say a black woman, have you been a black woman and living in the United States, and a black woman living in the UK, and a black woman living in Nigeria, and a black woman living in China? No, you haven't. So you literally have no idea. You know that as a white man, you are better off in the United States than you would be in some other country based on your perception of geography and privilege and all of that. But you don't actually know. And so that same thing applies to companies a lot in this industry. They're like, "Well, we're better because we did this one thing." And that's not the bar. The bar is not I feel like we have talked about this more than other places talk about it or I feel as if we have had more empathy or made more space for these people than other places have. That doesn't create psychological safety. And if you are defending your company on those grounds, then more often than not, you're not listening to the co-workers who do not feel empowered there. And you are drowning out their voices with your own saying, "But it's better. See, don't you see? It's too hard to make it great but be happy here because it's better." But you're making that judgment call and value call for them. CHRISTINA: I always wonder why people do that. Why don't people just accept? If I say, "This is my experience." Why do folks challenge that experience? They're like, "Well, that's not my experience." And it's like, okay. MIA: Because it makes them uncomfortable. Uncomfortable to accept and understand that you're doing well and perhaps that's at the expense of other people and living in that comfort zone is not helping anybody. LAURIE: And it's also a value judgment of the other person, right? If they acknowledge the fact that a woman of color in their company is being treated terribly and as a result, maybe the company isn't as great as they thought, and they have the privilege to leave if they recognize that, then they're recognizing that they're complicit and that's a really uncomfortable place to be. It's not great to sit here and say, "Yeah, I am giving my time and my skill set to a company that does bad things or doesn't value others when I don't have to make this choice because it's comfortable for me." And that's not to say that everyone can leave a job and everyone can just walk away and say, "Oh, I'll go get money elsewhere." That's not what it's saying. But it is harder to have that level of introspection and self-awareness and say, "Yeah, this isn't necessarily a great place. And I have to accept that and accept my part in it." It's a lot easier to say, "No, no, no. It's just misunderstood. They had a rough go of it, but really, we're the good guys." We're the good guys? The binary there of good and bad has been instilled in us when really it's many, many, many shades of gray, and we're all somewhere in that spectrum. But in our heads, it's you're either good or you're bad. And if you recognize that you're bad, then you're part of the problem. And you have to do a lot of cognitive dissonance around staying in a job. And there's a lot of emotion that comes to the surface for that. So it's easier to just justify it. CHRISTINA: That's a great point. I never thought of it that way. I'm just like, why don't they believe us when we talk about these things? And by us, I mean all of us, intersectional or not. Why do they challenge when we say that this is our experience? But yeah, that makes perfect sense. JOHN: I think there's an old saying that you'll never win in getting someone to understand something whose salary depends on them not understanding it. CHRISTINA: That's a good one, wow. [Laughs] REIN: Their self-identity is even harder. LAURIE: And that's the thing we probably could mention is how often in this industry do we see people whose self-identity is based around what they do and where they work? CHRISTINA: 99.999%? LAURIE: Yes, because when you are told that you are special and smart, and more valuable than a large majority of people in other fields and other companies, and then you're playing this sort of rat race of, can I get into the biggest name where I'll have the most prestige and the largest paycheck and then be able to get any other job? Because there's that sort of if Google's on your resume, you can go somewhere else fallacy. If all of those things are true, then yeah, you're going to feel really good about yourself when all of those checkboxes are marked check. You know what I'm trying to say. But yeah, so self-identity being tied to the developers are gods mentality is both uncomfortable and accurate. MIA: Just to your point on identity -- Hopefully, I'm not hijacking in two wrong directions, but singing back to being a parent and returning to work, I felt that it was quite tricky to accept this dual identity of being a parent and also being a person who super loves their job because there's a little bit of stigma associated with being a mother returning to work. And that's bizarre even in this day and age that we still have this slight underlying shouldn't you be at home with your kids mentality? Or who's minding them? Are they okay in day-care? Are they thriving? Don't you miss them all day when you're at work? And personally, in the months that I was away from work, I sometimes struggled a little bit with not being at my job not having that satisfaction, being a little bit isolated. And when I decided that I did want to go back, it was very difficult to grapple with those conflicting emotions. Am I doing the right thing and going back to work, or am I doing harm by my child? Which is very unrealistic in reality. But that's a little thought that ticks over in your mind. And I really wanted to mention that because I think it's so important for anyone else who might be struggling with that decision to do what feels right to you. I remember talking to a friend of mine when I was like, "I'm on my way to work, and I feel really bad because I just dropped her off at day-care and she was crying. Why am I doing this to her? And why am I doing this to myself? Because this is difficult to do, spending my time in this way." And the way she pitched it to me was that in doing the thing that feels right to me, I'm being a better role model to her by suggesting that she can pursue whatever career options she wants or stay at home if that suits her. And by living life in a way that fills my own cup, I can be a better parent to her because I'm satisfied, and I'm happy. And just generally doing right by yourself does right by your children by extension. Does that make sense? JOHN: Yeah. LAURIE: It definitely does. I'm reminded of -- This is a pop culture reference so I apologize. Parks and Recreation has this episode in its later seasons called the Pie-Mary episode. And Leslie Knope stands up there and gives a speech "Where are my kids?" "They're with parents." "Don't you miss them?" "Well, sure. And sometimes I don't." MIA: My goodness. Sometimes I don't. Yes. LAURIE: The freedom to say, "Of course I miss my kids but also sometimes I really enjoy being at work and not dealing with a toddler who doesn't like what socks don't match today or whatever it is." I don't think we talk about that. It's always you miss your kids or you wish you were home. You're only working to get a paycheck. Not to stereotype, but I don't know that men get that same pressure, the idea that they would rather be home than be at work. There's always an assumption that of course, they would rather be at work and not have to deal with the temper tantrums. And for women, it's quite the opposite. Of course, they would rather be at home. And they're only at work because they have to be to pay the mortgage or because, I don't know, that's sort of all, it comes down to: You're here to get a paycheck; you're not here for any other reason. And maybe that's where some of the stereotype and pushback comes in that they're not pulling their full weight because they don't actually want to do the job and development is all about passion and really caring about it and spending all your time doing it and just wanting to solve the problem. And you don't want to do that. You want to be with your kid. MIA: Yeah. It's not a binary choice between I love my kid or I love my job; I'm a good parent or I'm a bad parent. I'm trying to demonstrate you can be a better parent by being good to yourself. And you can be a better employee by bringing your whole self into work and in a way that makes you feel fulfilled and satisfied. LAURIE: This all sounds hard. MIA: It is hard. It is hard. But I think the hard part for me was grappling with the guilt. And now that I found a way to come to terms with it which is being a positive role model and showing that you can -- just modeling the behavior that you want for your kids, that you want them to be able to forge their own path and not have their choices dictated to them. That makes me feel a lot more satisfied and comfortable and of course, having this privilege of a workplace that's incredibly supportive definitely doesn't hurt either. JOHN: I think that point has a really interesting aspect to this, which is so many of these ideas about what a mother actually wants and versus the job and all of the stuff we've been talking about. All of that stuff is internalized. That's built-in, and it's almost subconscious thoughts we're having about ourselves or what I understand you to be having about yourself, not necessarily verbal things that people are verbalizing to you. "Wouldn't you rather be at home?" And that makes it doubly hard to challenge those things because they just seem to be like the water you're swimming in. It's just what it's like. And so if someone actually said it to you, you could come back at them and say, "Where did you get that idea?" I love these things both but having it be inside yourself, you have to do all that extra emotional labor to realize it's there, and to overcome it, and to figure out how to navigate. Your friend sounds like they gave you some pretty good advice about the value of having a job that you really like so that you could fight back against that internalized representation of yourself. MIA: In a very small way, this morning, I picked up laundry detergent to do the laundry. And on the bottle, there was a picture of a little toddler running around and a dad behind them. And I thought I shouldn't even notice the fact that that wasn't a mom on the washing up liquid. That is one small way in which we're telling women all the time you're the one who does the laundry. And it's not an ad saying like, "Oh, moms, isn't it so great you get to stay at home and do the washing, and aren't you so delighted?" But it's just that tiny little insidious image that is running through the back of your mind at all times. You're absolutely right. LAURIE: I think this is where the term microaggression comes from, which is why everyone thinks it sounds so silly because it's like, oh, but when a thousand times a day every commercial you see is the mom doing the laundry and the dad coming home from work, no matter what age you are, that's going to start putting in your head what role you're supposed to take. And that's why it's death by a thousand cuts rather than -- It's not egregious that one commercial did it; it's egregious that every commercial did it. REIN: This grossness also shows up to a certain extent in the academic research on return to work. So most of the research on return to work -- So I'm a huge nerd. So there's a Springer textbook called the Handbook of Return to Work so I have that. And it's an 800-page book and the word pregnancy appears once. And the word parental appears once. But it gets worse because when specifically parental leave is studied, you get papers. How does parental leave affect return to work and fertility? It turns out depending on how long the parental leave is that woman might be more likely to have more babies. LAURIE: I'm shaking my head. People can't see it, but I'm shaking my head. MIA: The very brief research I did, the tiny bit of Googling on returning to work before coming to talk you, the auto-correct was like, returning to work harmful effects on children. I was like, why is that where this is going? What is this about? And after a very brief I'm out of scrolling, what I actually saw was results that showed things like daughters of mothers who've returned to the workplace are in times more likely to have a more high paying job or job satisfaction being in a leadership role. It's such a thought that there was zero effect on sons of mothers that have returned to work because that model is assumed seemed to be already there, the father. CHRISTINA: That seems wrong. LAURIE: I don't mean to keep comparing children to pets. I really don't. But I think it's interesting that when you first bring home a puppy, there's actually a whole thing you're supposed to do about getting out of the house multiple times a day going for even if it's a walk around the block for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, removing yourself from the environment so that there isn't this attachment and so you don't create separation anxiety. And it's so interesting that we don't say this about children because there's the expectation that mom is home all day and if you leave them, they're going to be upset. And I'm sure we could look up the research, and there would be some research about the fact that there are well-adjusted children who do better with the fact that they get used to their parents being gone in small increments of time and they're not around them all the time. And then when they go to kindergarten, they don't cry on the first day. I don't know. I'm making this up. I've not done the academic research here. But it's interesting to me that we have so many of these hypotheses that seem to be based around the idea that distance between parents and children is bad and then they go out to prove that or say it was inconclusive rather than the other way around. And some of that has to be historical. And the idea that this wasn't the model and now that it could be we're looking at how the change in the model causes harm without retroactively saying, "Well, maybe historically, we've done this wrong and that's caused issues in and of itself. We just never bothered to study them because that's the way it was done." MIA: I mean so much of how parenting is currently done at least in Western countries is not really how we would have historically have done things. I mean even this idea that you're a mom and you're at home alone with your kid all day. Where's the tribe? Where's all your community that would have come and supported you and cared for you? And children wouldn't have been a single person's responsibility. They would have been exposed to and very comfortably happy playing with all kinds of people all the time. LAURIE: And this is when we get into the whole everyone goes to cities for the good jobs and remote work is a good thing because you can stay in your original community where you have a support system. And this is a whole other rant for a whole other time. But there is something to be said. I had this conversation with someone awhile back when they were talking about geographic-based pay, and remote work, and all that sort of stuff. But the idea that not everyone has the luxury of staying where they have family and not everyone has the luxury of leaving their family and that that has to do with social safety nets. And then there's a level of psychological safety that becomes more precarious when you have less of a social safety net, which can come from a lot of different places and a lot of different people. JOHN: Mia, were there any other topics that you wanted to make sure we got into today? MIA: Yeah, absolutely. Like I mentioned earlier, I returned to work, and then not too long afterward, I was promoted to senior engineer, which I was delighted with. And after a little while of letting that sink in, I suddenly found myself kind of with this tiny seed of doubt of wondering were the two things maybe related in the sense that perhaps someone is trying to suggest don't worry, we definitely support our female employees returning to work because I'm also the first -- It's a smallish company, but I was the first woman to be promoted to a senior position. And so even though this is not a genuine doubt that I have about the company where I work, I know that they are recognizing my skills as an engineer, I do wonder sometimes what the perception of that might look like on paper. So if I were to look for another job somewhere else, you're looking at a CV of a person who just gets rapidly promoted and also, they're a woman. And I suppose some of these doubts were introduced just in general with the concept of diversity hiring or diversity promotions where when I was previously looking for jobs, I have actually even said like, "Oh, well, you'd make a great diversity hire. So here's a couple of companies that would be interested in you." JOHN: Wow. MIA: Yeah. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on just this slight contrast in beliefs about yourself. I don't suffer from imposter syndrome, and I'm glad about that. I know that I work quite hard, and I have the skills to do the job that's in front of me. But what are other people's perceptions of me? Was I hired because I was a woman? Was I promoted before someone else? Is there a merit-based promotion, or is this just a diversity or a quota? JOHN: I mean, I think from one perspective, like that situation describes yet more of that cognitive load that people on the lower scales of privilege just have to keep in the back of their mind at all times of just navigating the situation. You can't just walk in and be like, "Yeah, of course, they promoted me to senior engineer." End of sentence. Whereas you and probably a lot of others have that thought, how is everyone going to take this? And are they going to start treating me weirdly? Are they going to talk behind my back? All that other stuff that now you've got to think about for no reason. Not for no reason, but I wish it was not a real thing. MIA: Yeah, absolutely. So there would have been an email that went out to congratulate me and I kind of sat there and I was like oh, is someone going to take this badly? Are they going to think why her and not me? CHRISTINA: Someone told me that I think four years ago and they were like, "Oh yeah, you got this job at this big tech company. You were totally a diversity hire." I'm like “What? Why would you say that? You don't know anything about the company.” She is saying that because I am a woman of color and not because I'm a woman of color that's technical and that knows what I'm doing but just because I'm a woman of color. So I pretty much got offended. It's not that it's a bad thing. It's just for me, I just feel like I've worked too hard in my career to just be labeled as "You were just a diversity hire." I was not rude to her, but I was really insulted that that was the way she viewed me. LAURIE: I would have been furious. CHRISTINA: Yeah, I was furious. But I was like, you know what? Universe, forgive her because she knows not what she's talking about at this moment. I'm just like, whatever. I'm just like no, actually I was not a diversity hire. And I did have to go through a very intense interview process. So sorry, but no, thanks. MIA: It undermines all the hard work that you have put into getting to the position that you're in right now. LAURIE: I think this is one of those moments where we recognize that most people in the universe do not recognize how absurd the tech interview process is. I was explaining this to my family member a couple of months ago. And I was like, "Yeah, there's seven rounds. And you have to code as if you were in grad school in front of people on a whiteboard or on a virtual screen for two of those rounds. And it takes two to three months. And then it still takes three weeks after you apply." And they're like, "What is this nonsense?" So I was like, "Most jobs in tech, not all of them." MIA: Someone shared with me recently that was like if we asked doctors to interview for jobs the way we asked software engineers, and it's like, "Can you cite some obscure fact from a medical textbook, you haven't touched in about seven years? And now, off you go with a scalpel, and we'll just sit here and watch. Is that all right?" CHRISTINA: Did you see that video? It was so funny. Oh my god. LAURIE: And then people skewered her. People got mad at her because they were like, "Doctors have to do this, and this, and this, and this, and this." And she's like "I used doctors because I had a white coat. Will you stop?" MIA: It was a joke, come on. LAURIE: I think the same is true of someone who had a -- It was a tweet or a video earlier today. And I can't even remember it, but it was something to the effect of isn't it interesting that the best way to prove that you know what you're doing in your job is to do a million things that have nothing to do with your job during your free time? That is not at all how it was phrased. But it was basically talking about how so often you're judged on all of these things that you do in your free time and that's a ridiculous thing. REIN: Okay. So you write code on a whiteboard. And are the questions related to the work that you would do there? No, absolutely not. LAURIE: I had a tweet that went viral. I will say was "Another day goes by without inserting a node into a linked list. This is not what my CS degree prepared me for." [Laughter] REIN: I have had to implement exactly zero bubble sorts while working here. And this is false advertising. LAURIE: I'm supposed to use this thing called libraries. They don't like it when I decide to roll my own of this function that's existed in some really secure performant way in a million different packages forever. They don't really appreciate it when I decide to write it myself. I'm not really sure why. CHRISTINA: Somebody answered that, you know, whiteboarding exercise how would you do X? And she said, "To be honest, I'd probably just look on Stack Overflow, but that's probably not the answer that you wanted from me right now." And I'm like, "Well, Bravo, because that's what any of us would have done. But do you mind maybe stepping through it with us anyway?" JOHN: So I think it's probably time to start moving into reflections. MIA: I really enjoyed Laurie's analogy about psychological safety and privilege, the takeaway options. I thought that was a really great way of framing. I think I'll keep that in my back pocket for thinking about this topic in future. JOHN: Yeah, it is a powerful way to think about that, and especially what you added to it, Rein, talking about just because I'm psychologically safe as a white man on this team does not mean that everybody else is. And so I can't just assume that it's all good because I'm cool with it. I think that's something that I'll have to keep in mind as well. LAURIE: I was really grateful for the dichotomy between Christina's and Mia's experiences as moms coming back to the workforce after having a child or in Christina's case, multiple. I think it says a lot about the fact that there is no one story or no one scenario. And maybe we have hope if we've heard all of these kinds of horror stories or uncomfortable, sad situations that there are models that can work and can be effective. And if companies have more awareness of them, maybe there's an opportunity to adopt some of those processes and make it better. CHRISTINA: Well, I really loved that Mia got promoted. It reminds me that it is possible to remain optimistic that hopefully, it will get better for moms, especially in the United States. Maybe United States should look at other countries and follow their leads. And that it's a complicated and very complex topic and issue. We just need to keep talking about it. REIN: I share Mia's reflection on what Laurie was saying about psychological safety. But I was also just thinking about the interview questions that Laurie was talking about. And one thing that Gerald Weinberg said that I think is relevant here is if you can't understand where someone's questions are coming from, they're probably coming from an agenda that they don't want you to know about. And so when I think about oh, you were a diversity hire or a lot of these situations maybe they just have an agenda, which is perhaps to feel better about themselves by putting you down that you don't understand. I think talking back to comfort and guilt before a lot of that is -- And I have to believe that they didn't earn it because that means that maybe I didn't earn it. CHRISTINA: That's deep. Thanks for sharing that great perspective. JOHN: All right. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for being on the show, Mia. MIA: Thanks so much for chatting with me.