AVDI: Hello, this is Episode 127 of Greater Than Code. And joining me today is my great friend, Janelle Klein. JANELLE: Thanks, Avdi. And I'm here with Rein Henrichs. REIN: And I'm here with my friend and one of the top five coolest people on this podcast today, Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: [Laughs] Thank you, Rein. Okay, okay. We have a really cool guest today. Amy Newell is Director of Engineering at Wistia. And she's been giving a talk about living and working with bipolar disorder. She has also eaten crickets in Mexico City. She has slept under the stars in the Sahara Desert. She mugged a mugger in Budapest. And she wrote a book. She's been to Paris six times and has also hiked to the Alps, lived on a sailboat. And she's a poet and a stupendous badass, and she has fabulous boots. Amy, welcome to the show. AMY: Thank you. Now, I'm going to have to say really interesting things to live up to that bio. REIN: Starting now. [Laughter] REIN: Now. Now. AMY: I'm really excited to be on the show and talk to you guys about anything you'd like to talk to me about - engineering management, mental health in tech, suffering. I like to talk about suffering in humans and at work. I'm also working on a talk about varieties of suffering in the workplace and how to navigate those or I can have a lot to say about boots, as well. [Laughter] JESSICA: So now, I'm really curious what your superpower is and whether it has anything to do with suffering. AVDI: Or boots. [Laughter] AMY: So yes, it actually does. I was thinking about this. I was walking to work today and I was like, "Oh, they're going to ask me about my superpower. What am I going to say?" I think this is the superpower that everybody actually has. Some people may have had less opportunity in their lives to practice it. I am really good at sustaining a kind of hope and faith in the face of what feels like no hope and no faith. I spend a lot of my time feeling depressed and one of the symptoms of depression is kind of a hopelessness, like pessimism about the future. I'm also just naturally a pessimistic person. I tried in the past to become an optimist. Like there's that book, Learned Optimism that Martin Seligman wrote and I'm like, "Sure, I can just like become..." No, it does not work that way. I have never become an optimist. I still think that things are pretty much hopeless, but I have faith somehow that if I just take the next step and then the next step after that and then the next step after that, that I will somehow keep going. But everybody can do that. I think we're called upon to do that when we're experiencing a lot of suffering and we can't see the future very well. And I just get to do that a lot. So, that's my superpower. AVDI: That's amazing. JESSICA: Yeah. Keeping hope in hopelessness. That's a really good one. AVDI: I feel like that for a lot of people when you are in suffering and hopelessness, people who are living in sort of hope and optimism tend to seem very inaccessible and just foreign. And it's good to have people in the world who model taking steps forward when they're not full of hope because that's a lot more accessible. JESSICA: Yeah, because like become an optimist, be happy, then you'll have hope. AMY: Yeah. I'm just not going to get there ever, but I still want to live a valuable life and I still want to help other people live valuable lives, no matter how pessimistic they feel about the future. I think there are a lot of things in the world to feel pessimistic about. I'm always a little baffled by that, that there are really optimistic people who are like, "Oh, we'll figure out global warming," and, "We'll figure out the rise of authoritarian governments," and, "We'll figure all this stuff out." I'm like, "I really have no hope for that but I'm still going to try anyway." REIN: I think that a lot of people, their hope comes from -- it's definitely true for me -- their hope comes from this feeling that things can be better. That if they wait long enough or if they do the right things, that the situation will change. Is that what you're talking about or is it something different for you? And especially, what if you don't have that feeling, how do you keep going in a situation where you don't feel like things can get better? AMY: OK, that's a really good question. I would say I'm in that position a lot not because there's anything at all wrong with my life. My life is fantastic on a lot of levels. It's just because of the way my mind works that it feels like things really won't get better. I think that there are a lot of reasons to keep going in the face of not feeling that things will necessarily get better, and that's because I have some hope. I think of ways that I've added value to the world already. And so, I want to continue to be able to add value to the world in whatever way I can. And I think about experiences that I've had in the past that were actually great and that I may be able to have this in the future. If you go to Paris and you go into a cafe and you ask for an espresso, you get a really great espresso made by someone who really cares about their profession in like 30 seconds and it costs one Euro, and then you get to use the bathroom in the cafe which otherwise you can't use. And the bars there, like cafe bars and they're really beautiful. And so I have this very powerful memory of the last time I was in Paris going in and getting an espresso. And that moment, I'm like I could have more of those moments in the future as long as I keep taking the next step forward. You don't have to go to Paris to get that moment. There are lots of those little moments along the way. And maybe it's like, I'm going to sound very gratitude journal here for a moment, but a day where I helped an engineer solve a problem and they are grateful that I was able to help unblock them on something. Or my kid doesn't slam the door. I have teenagers. There's a day where I have an actual conversation with a child and they don't just slam the door in my face. There's those like piling up of moments. There's the opportunity for more of those. JESSICA: So you have evidence from your past that life doesn't always suck and if you just keep going, there will be moments that don't stop. AMY: That is precisely it, that I am able to maintain like -- if you spend a lot of time in therapy, one of the sort of cognitive behavioral therapy techniques is, "All right, reality check." Or find evidence that goes against your belief that nothing will ever be good again. And so to reality check and say, "Well, here was a time where I thought nothing would ever be good again." And then I had good stuff since that time. So when I think about this presentation I'm doing about suffering in the workplace, that that's like helping people reality check, "Oh, I produced a bug that caused an outage and now nothing will ever be good again." I mean, we all do that. Think about a time in the past where that happened and things were OK after that. It was actually not the end of the world. JESSICA: My mantra for that kind of thing is for certain feelings, never and always -- I mean right now, it feels like never will it be good again. Right now, it's not good. AMY: Yeah. AVDI: You mentioned the talk that you've been giving on suffering in the workplace. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like what was the genesis of that talk? AMY: What was the genesis of that talk? I'm not sure I remember. I manage a lot of engineers and I talk to them a lot about what's going on in their day to day lives. And there's sort of these categories of things that come up that make people feel crappy at work. There's uncertainty especially in tech. There's often a lot of uncertainty, like, "Oh, there's a strategy change and I don't know what my job will look like," or, "We're on this big risky project and we don't know that it will be successful." And that causes a kind of pain that you have to kind of move through in order to continue to do your job productively. Failure, another kind of pain that people experience. And then sort of this feeling that I think gets talked about a lot in the tech community now kind of under, the idea of impostor syndrome or insufficiency or I'm the only one who is struggling and everyone else is smarter than me. And I kind of categorize those as something bad happened, something bad will happen, or I'm just bad. And to get productively through your work, you can't get rid of those kinds of suffering in the workplace. That's just inherent in taking risks and being creative and producing work with other people. That is a value in the world. So how do you kind of navigate that suffering to live with it and have it not affect your productivity to the extent that you're unable to move forward? How do you take that next step? So, that's what I've been thinking about with that. REIN: What are the different forms that this suffering takes and what might be some of the causes? AMY: Take insufficiency. Just the idea that you're not as smart as everyone else. "Oh, I don't understand React context. Everyone else around me understands how to use this and I'm behind and I will never catch up." I definitely don't understand React context because I don't use React. [Chuckles] This sort of rapid pace of learning that's expected in tech, I think causes a lot of anxiety in people about keeping up, about not being smart enough. I think as you age also, in software. I know a lot of people who are aging and were all like, "Oh, is my brain good enough to do this anymore?" Those are some examples of that kind of suffering. Failure, I think you're gonna fail if you're trying to do anything at all. I had this revelation sometime in December, I think, that I do a lot of hiring. So no matter how good your hiring process is and how carefully you vet people, it is inevitable that you will make some mistakes in hiring, and that you will have to correct those mistakes and that will feel like a failure. It causes pain like, "How could I have prevented this? What did I do wrong? Now, I have all this pain in front of me to try and right this wrong." So, other examples. I was talking to an engineer. He was talking about how he felt really bad about code that he's produced in the past that he would kind of occasionally hear other people bad mouthing as in like, "Oh yeah, that code base kind of sucks." All our code bases kind of suck after a few years. So thinking about just those daily kinds of pain that are just inherent in doing our work and how to move past them or just accept that you're going to feel that pain in the course of doing your work. REIN: What about feeling like the work you're doing doesn't matter? AMY: Yeah, you can be working on a project that you think matters in a culture that is not toxic and still feel these kinds of suffering that are just inherent in the work. But then there's this broader realm of suffering around work which is one variety is 'my work doesn't matter, I'm not doing anything that's adding value to the world'. Another whole set is 'I work in a toxic workplace and people are mean and that's causing me pain'. REIN: When you say inherent in the work, what does that mean? AMY: The baseline I go through is that suffering is inherent in being alive. This is not something I came up with myself. This is like a long established train of thought that this is just 'you can't get rid of it'. I also think that more specifically, it's inherent in the process of working with other people to creatively produce things in an atmosphere where you can't 100% control your outcomes or other people's behavior. So, I do not believe there are workplaces that you will never feel pain in. If you have a project that fails, feeling pain is one of the things that causes you to learn lessons about what not to do next time. Like, "Oh, that hurt. Next time, I don't want a branch that is long running for three months and then I release in a big bang release because that was super painful." There's this variety of talks that's like 13 things I learned that you should definitely not do. And we've all heard those 13 things and then gone right ahead to do them anyway, because it's very hard to internalize a lesson unless you yourself have felt the pain of having done that thing. I don't think you can actually get better experiences of the record of your failures and how much they hurt you. JESSICA: Amy, let me ask about something you said really early which was you talked about living valuable life. Your goal is to live a valuable life. [Inaudible], it doesn't have to be happy. AMY: Yes, it doesn't have to be a happy life. If my goal were to live a happy life, I would be kind of screwed. I think I spent a long time thinking that that should be my goal. I think it's very American to think that that is our goal. Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I have given up the notion that I will become a generally happy person. My set point of happiness is extremely low. For me, what helped me, and I think most people have a thing in their lives that they just kind of have to accept is not going to change and kind of figure out how to move on despite that or will at some point in their future. Age and have hip replacements or who knows? There will be something that you have to work around that's just not going to change. JESSICA: And you're gonna have to like it. AMY: Yeah, you just have to say, "OK, what do I care about doing anyway? What makes life worth living despite the fact that..." I have these very odd experiences where people would be like, "Are you having a good time?" And I'll be like, "Yes. Objectively, I see that this is a good time." [Laughter] JESSICA: I choose to define good time. AMY: Yeah. REIN: I can see how other people would think that this is a good time. [Laughter] AMY: I mean that. There are times that I look back on it and be like, "Oh, I'm glad I did that. That was objectively good." But that doesn't mean I was like feeling good during that time. [Chuckles] REIN: Sometimes, I think I'm supposed to be having fun but I'm not. So now, I feel worse because I feel like something's wrong with me. AMY: Right. So, how do you just accept that you cannot make yourself feel some other -- I mean, there are a few tricks you can use to kind of get yourself out of a headspace, like go for a walk or think of three things you're grateful about. And they might move your headspace a little bit. But you can't sort of sidestep or tell yourself not to feel a certain way. You can just kind of accept it and then not hold too tight, like not kind of grip it too tightly. JESSICA: Not spiral it. AMY: Yeah, exactly. JESSICA: "I'm not happy. I'm a terrible person, so I'm not happy." AMY: Yeah. And then eventually that changes. Our emotions are not fixed, even in the midst of a very powerful negative emotion. I do a lot of mindfulness. If you actually sit there and are curious about what the negative emotion feels like, it doesn't feel the same all the time. It actually moves. It changes. Sometimes, it'll be like, "Oh, my heart hurts." Or sometimes it's mostly like, "I screwed this up," and you're obsessing about the thought. So, it changes and eventually it lifts. But you can't force that. You can't force yourself to be happy if you're not feeling happy. REIN: There's really interesting things that humans can do where we're usually participants in our own mental lives but we can also be observers. We can also step out of it and go, "Oh, I'm feeling this way now. That's interesting." AMY: Yes. And I think that's really key to getting through any kind of suffering or just even mildly unpleasant experiences like waiting in line at the TSA. [Laughter] AMY: I hate it and it presents this obstacle for flying for me which I do anyway. But that's a little beside the point. That observing mind which is somehow like above and behind whatever. If you do any mindfulness training, people will talk about the waves on top of the ocean but you're the ocean. Or the clouds that are obscuring the sky but you're actually the sky. So to be able to get into the sky and see what's happening in your mind and understand that you don't have control over it but you aren't it. You aren't whatever is happening in your mind. AVDI: I feel like, as a society in general but especially in software, we're conditioned to jump very quickly to causes. Skipping over what I'm feeling, what the circumstances and going straight to 'you did this' or 'they did this to me', 'they hurt me', 'my [inaudible] just crashed and and that's terrible', and skip right on past 'I feel'. JESSICA: And observing and listening to yourself because sometimes I feel like nobody will ever understand me. And then I remember that I can understand me and I can be that observer and see how I feel and that helps sometimes. AMY: Yeah. I think that's very true that there is a comfort in being able to step back and just be like, "All right. This is the thing my mind is doing right now and I can just watch it." Avdi, what you said about the tendency to jump to cause, I think a reason in the workplace certainly that it is valuable to get good at stepping back and seeing how you feel and just watching how you feel is what we do with pain if we don't take that moment to step back is that some of us will turn it outward. You did something to me, find someone else to blame and that comes out in anger and all kinds of toxic behavior in the workplace. Or a lot of us will turn it inward and then that's just, "Well, I'm a screw up. I can't do this. I hate myself." And neither of those are sort of skillful ways to relate to the pain. If you give yourself a little while to just feel the pain like, "Awww!" There was an outage and I see these ways that I could have prevented it and I didn't, and that hurts. And just allow yourself to feel the hurt without having to do something then you're much less likely to lash out at other people or to lash out at yourself for both the original thing that whatever is causing the pain and for yourself for feeling so bad about it which I think is very easy to just be like, "I shouldn't feel this bad about this." JESSICA: In other words to dissolve [inaudible]. AMY: Yeah, basically. JANELLE: It's been really interesting listening to this because I'm like the eternal optimist unreachable idealist that lives in that little bubble of my own reality. But it's very different from the coping mechanisms that you're talking about and the types of suffering when you live in that place are different types of suffering too. And I'm thinking about the types of things I do when I'm helping teams as well are different. And one of the things I've been thinking about in the context of teams is when we're anchored in a place of suffering and trying to find relief from our suffering, it disables our ability to get into a mindset of innovation. And that I think when we're in a place of suffering and seeking relief from that, it's like we're in a negative and trying to get back to zero. And all of our brain power is focused on threat detection and these other kinds of processing what's going on around us, how do I get out of this place of pain. I live in this world of unicorns and rainbows and dreams and I pull people into this dream bubble of creativity and happiness. And so, I have this crazy level of high that I can reach and magnet people into this super high creative excited state of like 'let's make music together', 'let's create together', 'let's build dreams together'. And it's a very different sort of place that I find like if I can shift people into that mode, that they also shift to a place where they find value that they can contribute. They feel special in being able to contribute. And that sometimes relieving, not suffering, can be providing a creative outlet for something to do with it. I think about my own happiness and things that I've learned that make me happy. And it's not that I don't experience a lot of pain in my life but I find that I find relief from suffering through understanding it, letting it flow through me, being able to find clarity of expression becomes a way to sort of release it. And so, like poetry, art, music, those kinds of things create the satisfaction of finding clarity in the expression on the other side of suffering. And then you can kind of let it flow through you. And once you expressed it clearly, it's kind of a way to let it go so that I can move back into happy Dreamland. But I mean, I very much like live in that unreal high. I can hit levels of high that most people can't, and I turn into big little seven-year old. AMY: I would like in to your happy unicorn Dreamland. Let me in there. I think the thing expressing the suffering is a really important part of being able to move through it. And I think that's one of the things that -- and speaking about sort of specifically mental health but also all kinds of invisible disabilities and all kinds of things that might be in people's lives that are just really hard. One of the things that I talk about is how this kind of stigma or a lot of toxicity in cultures about not being able to speak about those things in the workplace, it's counterproductive to sort of getting work done. There's this false idea that you can leave that stuff out of the workplace. You come in as some kind of blank slate where all your messy crap is elsewhere. JESSICA: But then a lot of the pain is directly co-related. AMY: Yes, that too. So you've got all kinds of pain both outside that you're bringing in and pain that's caused in your workplace. And the less you are able to express that clearly, the less productive you become. The whole idea that we shouldn't speak openly about the ways that we feel pain, I think, because it'll be a downer or because it's not appropriate. It's not professional. It's not good for people, number one. It's also not good for business. The more employees have to cover what they're feeling, that takes energy. It's just utterly lost productivity. So I feel very strongly that that kind of workplace is actually less productive than a workplace where someone can come in and be like, "Wow, I feel a lot of shame because of X." Because the second they even are able to name that, they have, as you were saying Janelle, they've released their ability to move past it a little bit. JANELLE: And then the whole team will learn from it. AMY: Yes. And people will feel less alone as well because then other people will say, "Oh, I also have that feeling." AVDI: You are in a position where you actually get some influence over like what your developer culture. And I'm curious what sort of things do you recommend to make a workplace safer for people to work through like recognize their suffering and work through it rather than stuffing it down. AMY: I think one of the things as a leader is just really being able and taking the time to listen to developers with care and empathy, "What's going on for you?" "Hey, I know this just happened. Do you want to talk about how you feel about that?" So that people can express and move on after expressing. The other thing that I think is really important is just being able to model as a leader. I don't have it all together. I'm feeling various kinds of pain. I think there's like a balance that I don't always get right. Where as a leader, it's not appropriate for me to dump my pain on people who are reporting to me. I dump my pain upward on my boss, or outward to my therapist or my friends or all the other resources that I have. For example, I'm taking three days off specifically to take care of my mental health. I'm not going around telling everybody. I'm not like grim detailing, the grim details of my mental health. But I've told everybody, "Hey, I'm going to be out for these three days for mental health reasons." So, I talk openly about my therapist and that is a way of creating a culture in which people feel comfortable talking about their own struggles because they see that people in positions of leadership are able to do that and willing to do that. JANELLE: I feel like it's important to be human, to be someone that has feelings too, to be someone that has gone through challenges that makes mistakes. That when we try and raise ourselves to a standard that is not human anymore and hide those things to the extent that, Oh well, I don't have these things," [inaudible] screwed up production. I'm thinking about, like when I wrote my book, I spent a lot of time telling stories about all the different things that I screwed up. And to me, that was a way to lead, to create an open door of conversations of 'it's OK to be yourself and all of your shapes and colors'. We all have all these things. And if we try and put a lid on that and mask and push down all of our emotions and feelings and stuff, as you said, it's like this constant drain of energy. It's like lost productivity to hold that in. And I find that a lot of people just want to be seen if they're in pain and suffering. Being invisible in that just makes it worse. And just having someone to recognize and empathize with where you're at, that you feel like is on your side makes all the difference in the world. AMY: Yeah, I think that's huge. Just people want to be seen for who they really are and what's really going on with them. When I think about to the extent that there is this kind of culture of toxic masculinity in tech, that goes so wildly against what's actually needed to do that in your workplace. It's how productive are you? Who's the smartest? Who's the most productive? Who's got the most commits? All the messy stuff in life. Maybe you have someone at home who's dealing with all of that stuff for you. So you just get to come and just push through, then that's the culture we have to move because it goes exactly against people getting to be seen in the workplace for where they're really at. I think that when we don't recognize people where they're really at, not only does that feel terrible to them but you're making decisions in the absence of really looking at reality. Say you have a team of four engineers and somebody just had a baby and somebody has a sick parent and somebody has a mental health thing, and being like 'if you are not dealing with the realities that people have lives', then you're going to make poor business decisions because you're not looking at the team you really have to work with at that time. People may try to meet those demands despite what's actually going on for them, but that's where you get sort of disaffected, burned out, demotivated people and then that makes your whole problem as a business worse. REIN: We've sort of been talking about things managers can do to help alleviate some of the suffering at work. And you might ask, "Why should managers do it?" And I think it's because they have a responsibility because they have the authority and the ability. So they are the people who should do it. But I want to tie this back to when you said earlier that there are forms of suffering that are inherent in the work itself. What that implies to me is that if we don't do anything, people will suffer in these ways. And so, I think we have a responsibility to try to be proactive to find ways to be active in alleviating that suffering. We've been talking a lot about what I'd like to call 'bringing your whole self to work' because if you have to leave parts of yourself at home, you feel alienated from parts of yourself. And we talked earlier about being connected to the work that you do and its impact on others, on the company, on the users. So that's being alienated from the product of your work. And there is also this idea of not feeling connected to other people that you work with. Janelle, you were talking earlier about bringing people into a place where they feel like they can create together. And then there's another one that we maybe haven't talked about as much which is the suffering that comes from not feeling like you have control over the way that you work, in the way that we work versus feeling that -- the cliche is cogs in the machine, that we're tools are instruments, we're not treated as people, were not given the ability to make decisions and to be creative. And so, these sufferings that are inherent in the work, I think that's exactly right. I guess my question is if it's true that we need to be proactive in trying to solve these problems, what are the things we ought to do? How can we sort of find ways to ameliorate each of these things? Maybe so to give an example of feeling disconnected from the product of your work. Maybe an answer there is be more open and explicit in honoring and appreciating the work that people do. Find ways within your team, within your process, within your culture whether it's demos, whatever it is, some concrete things that you do that appreciate the work of other people. What are concrete things that we can do that are like these that can address these sufferings? AMY: Okay, let me think about that. I do think appreciating other people and not just leadership appreciating, but co-workers really expressing appreciation for one another. I also think in a really healthy workplace culture, co-workers are jumping in to assist one another to kind of alleviate suffering. I'm thinking of an example where someone made a mistake. It was a mistake that caused some security stuff, and that person kind of froze at that point. And a co-worker immediately jumped in and was like, "I got it." I saw what was happening. And I was like, "Hey dude, it's gonna be fine. I know this feels bad to you. I've done this. I've had these things happen and I know how crappy you might be feeling right now, but I just want to assure you that this is gonna be fine." And so, I think that combination of having a co-worker jump in and just be like, "I gotcha. I know you're in a bad spot right now." And then having people from various angles also reassure. You can't get rid of it entirely but it alleviates that pain and makes people feel kind of held in it. I don't know that that was specifically answering your question or not. So maybe feedback on, if that was what you were... REIN: It was a big question. AMY: Yeah. REIN: Maybe we could try to attack it in parts and/or talk about other things. This idea that we can't bring our whole selves to work, that we can't really be ourselves at work, that there are parts of us that we have to block or lock off or leave at home. I think you're right that the way to solve these problems is through people helping each other. I think you hit the core of it right there. JESSICA: Rein, can I mention that it isn't easy to say bring your whole self to work when you are a white person who fits in just fine with programmers because maybe we bring as much as we want to work because we don't all fit in perfectly with all parts of ourselves. And that's okay, too. AMY: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I think most people would look at me and how I am in my workplace and say, "Wow, Amy brings maybe more of herself than we need to see." But I actually don't bring every single aspect of myself into the workplace. There are some areas of my life that I prefer to keep private, with a few exceptions. But yes. And particularly around the issue of mental illness. I am open about my bipolar disorder and I have been for years now and that is a choice that I made but it is not a choice without consequences. There is a stigma and there is a possibility that either in the past or in the future, I have or will be turned down for jobs just because someone saw something on my Twitter feed that was like, "Oh wow!" JANELLE: [Crosstalk] these jobs anyway, do you? AMY: No, I don't. But I am also in a position where if I'm out of work for three months, I can absorb that. I am in a position of privilege. And people who are like, "Why didn't she speak up about the sexual harassment?" Well, because it's really risky to do that. I think we have to accept that everybody needs to assess their own risk tolerance in terms of the consequences of bringing certain aspects of themselves to the workplace. And that we, who are in positions of privilege, have to make it as safe as possible for other people to bring as much of their selves to work as they want by making a little bit more space. I make more space for people who aren't directors of engineering to be like, "Oh yeah, I got to go to my therapist too." So yeah, making space for people with less privilege to have that, to get that as much as they can. REIN: I think I need to be super clear here that when I say bringing your whole self to work. If you're not doing that, then that's not your fault. You're not doing it because you're responding in some way that you think is adaptive to the challenges or the problems you see at work. JESSICA: There's also no 'should' about that. You're not failing if not bringing your whole self to work because you choose to express [inaudible]. REIN: What I mean is that you should be able to in that, the environment and work that's created at work should allow you to feel the safety and the comfort to do that. And if it doesn't, that's the fault of the people who create that environment. That's the fault of the people with power. AMY: And as a person with relative power, certainly in my organization, it's incumbent upon me to model that and make more space for others. And I take that very seriously. That's a thing I must do to live a life that I find valuable to be alive in. REIN: If we see that someone isn't doing that, what we should say is, "Oh, I acknowledge that you're not and it's OK that you're not for you. What can we do to make it so that you can?" AMY: Yeah. I have to say I had a conversation with someone, a guy engineer, a very good engineer, who had a job offer in front of him and I was like, "How are they on diversity and inclusion?" And he's like, "I don't know. It's a bunch of white guys." And I was like, "Dude, you're in a position of power and you can go wherever you want to go. And could you please step up?" It's not that I would do that [inaudible] to just like any person, but it does really bug me when I see people who do have relative power in the marketplace not taking that seriously. REIN: And all these societal problems occur at work. And maybe they occur especially at work because work is where we're forced to interact with people who otherwise we might choose not to. You can build your own social group of friends in a way that is constructive and supportive and you can't necessarily do that at work because you don't have control over who you work with. AMY: Yeah. A lot of engineers have some control over who they work with because if you're in a tight market, then -- I spend a lot of time hiring. So if you're in a tight market, you actually can say, "No. This culture is unacceptable to me. I'm leaving." REIN: [Crosstalk] really blunt tools. It's like 'quit and find a new job'. AMY: Yes. REIN: It's a pretty blunt instrument for picking who you work with. AMY: Yeah, vote with your feet. And not everybody, certainly by no means, do all engineers have that blunt instrument. One of the things that I think a lot about is the power differential in any organization between engineers who do have that ability to vote with their feet and all of the other people in the organization who maybe don't have the same kind of job opportunities and job market that engineers have. The kinds of tensions that can create between an engineering department and other departments that there's more competition for getting the jobs. So they have less and they're paid less, they just have less market power. And really again as engineers thinking about, like from our positions of privilege, how do we expand outward from just engineering has a good culture to the whole company has a good culture and we're respecting the valuable work that everyone is doing. JANELLE: What kind of things have you done to take some of the aspects of the engineering culture and the privilege to be able to influence that and bring those ideas and culture into other parts of the organization? AMY: It's a disparity that has started to bother me more and more in my years in engineering or even within engineering. You see it in terms of the layers of like if you're a kernel hacker versus if work on WordPress sites, like the disparity in salaries and respect and autonomy that is provided to these various different kinds of engineers. I'm trying to think what have I done and thinking obviously not enough. So when I think about what is the value I next have to provide in the world... JANELLE: Wait, wait, wait. What is enough? What do you mean not enough? Because it hasn't magically changed the entire world? AMY: [Laughs] Yes. I will [inaudible] magically change the entire world. I never feel I've done enough to advance gender equality in tech either. JANELLE: Also, it's not your fault. AMY: But as a woman in leadership, I feel... JANELLE: As a woman in leadership, you're advancing it, period. AMY: Fair enough. But I feel this increased burden. And maybe that's just a psychological thing that I should just let go of. JANELLE: I feel like that sense of burden though is also what helps you to see these disparities that a lot of folks are blind too. You're talking about just this differential in status between the kernel hacker and the WordPress engineer and there's differences in salaries and things. But there's social ranking systems that are in people's heads that are unspoken that affect how we treat one another, how we see one another. And being able to see those things and also see the influence that we have in the engineering world because of market power, as you said. You've got options, you've got choices. And so, engineers have a phenomenal amount of influence to impact the social world. And by you kind of carrying this burden and seeing those things and raising visibility of those things to others, I feel like you just providing a lens helping other people to see those disparities is a first step in shifting behavior dynamics. [Inaudible] and I was talking to a WordPress developer and had like a picture in my head of 'oh, you're not a real developer because you hack WordPress'. And if I recognize that in myself, that feeling, then maybe I could do something different then of going out of my way to look for cool things or doing special skills they have and respond with kindness and appreciation and just respond differently just by recognizing those dynamics. Because all the undercurrent unspoken stuff, like there is this sense of suffering that comes from reacting to how you feel you're seen in the world. Like I walk into a room and I have a perception of how well these other people see me. And I've got all these mirrors in my head that are reflections of myself. And before anyone says anything, just all those unspoken inputs, all my past history of times people said things to me, I'm reacting to that. I'm reacting to that burden. I'm shutting myself down in response to how I believe people see me, whether it's real or not. And some of that is very real. Some of that, like social ranking things of cultural dynamics of how we're treated, of what's acceptable, of ways to be, we respond to just out of human nature. You're in a particular cultural group that you want to fit into and you get a read on what the expected social norms are, what's OK in terms of a way to be, and you respond to it. You shut parts of yourself down and you don't talk about the things that aren't OK to talk about. And it's the people that step outside the already established norms that set in change culture. It's having the courage and the strength and the confidence within yourself to be an example, even if you are kind of in dissonance a bit with the culture that shifts the norm of the whole. And I feel like when it comes to hiring, bringing some people on the team that embody the type of culture that you're trying to create, that aren't afraid to kind of step out and be themselves, independent of what context they're in, help create those kind of influence in shaping norms. And you, calling people out that are in a leadership position of a place of privilege and saying, "Hey, in this position of influence, don't we have a responsibility?" If anyone has a responsibility to make the world, to create and influence the world, the people that have that real power is what you're recognizing. I mean, I respect you a lot for carrying that burden and helping to make those things visible. I think the visibility is what you bring. AMY: Thank you. I feel better about myself now. It's the worker solidarity. [Laughs] I think it's an ongoing effort and there's in some sense no way to do enough. You just accept what you can do. People come to me a lot with advice or 'hey, can you connect with this woman who is trying to get into tech'. And for a long time, my inclination was like, "Yes, I have to do this. I have to do this. And I have to do this. I'm in this position. I have to help as many people as possible." But now, I'm like, "Well, I have to put my own oxygen mask on first." And so, I'm more and more saying, "Hey, I can't but so-and-so could. Let me hook you up with them." Or trying to bring more people into the position where they're being asked for advice and connections, and all of the stuff that you can do to sort of change the culture and make it more diverse and inclusive because I can't do every single one of these things myself. AVDI: I'm just going to say to your point about encouraging the white guys in tech to use their relative power to pull their organizations in a direction by being a little bit choosy about, "Hey, that team looks like a monoculture." It's the right thing to do. But also, monocultures are boring and we don't realize how boring they are when you get used to them. Like when they're the only thing that we've ever been in. We don't realize how suboptimal they are because we're used to monoculture because it's a monoculture of monocultures. Once you're part of an organization that has more diversity to it and has people from a lot of different backgrounds, it's more fun. It's more supportive. It's richer. It's a richer experience. And richer experiences produce richer products and richer services and richer people. I'm not going to come in here and say, "Well, you should do this because business case." It's also just the right thing to do. But I guess what I'm coming against here is the idea that you might be short changing yourself a life changing career experience by choosing a diverse team over a monoculture at some exciting company. Now, you're gonna be making the better choice for your career too. AMY: Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And I want to address what you said about 'it's not just about the business case, it's also the right thing to do for people'. I think one of the things that as I've advanced in management that I've had to really press against because I'm not an architect. I'm not one of those engineering managers who are like, "Yeah, I'd still like to get my hands on the code because..." And more power to those people if they can somehow do both of those jobs adequately. But one of the things I feel pressure particularly as a woman and particularly as a manager is this sense that maybe I'm just like coddling engineers because I care about their feelings or too busy trying to save the world to really be taking into account the fact that businesses need to be profitable, or building value towards IPOs or whatever those hyper [inaudible] companies are trying to do. Those things are not in conflict. Being kind to the people who report to you is not in conflict with those people being productive. It actually leads to those people being productive. And I just truly don't understand. Do people not understand how humans work that they think that being unkind and dehumanizing leads to better products? It can't. AVDI: There was this thing that I used to experience. I was homeschooled all through my childhood. And there was this thing that I used to experience where people would be like, "How did you learn to deal with bullying?" [Chuckles] And I was like, "I didn't learn to deal with it. I learned to look at it and say that's unacceptable. I'm not going to be here if there's going to be bullying going on." And that's also a statement of my enormous power in society just from various accidents. But the point there is there is this sort of line of thought that you see sometimes that's like 'I experienced toxicity and now I'm successful, therefore toxicity leads to success or is unavoidable'. And none of those things are true. They're part of a particular game that maybe you never saw solely outside of that game because you were born and raised in it. But there are more [inaudible]. AMY: Yeah. REIN: For me, I think there's a selection process that happens. Maybe if you're familiar with Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Like, why is the media the way it is? It's because if you get to be an editor of a major newspaper, you act a certain way. And if you don't act that way, you don't get that job. Why are so many CEOs psychopaths? It's because if you're not, you don't get that job. It's harder to get that job. There's selection pressures all throughout this system. And I think it's harder to become a higher level manager who is kind. I think if you get to that position, it's just there are fewer of you around. AMY: Yeah. That's changing now but it's not what's kind of privileged in engineering management culture necessarily. There's more of this metrics-based approach to everything including sort of human productive output in engineering that I think goes against a kind of more empathy-driven approach to management. And it's not that I'm against metrics but I think they often measure -- for example, just the very basic, like measuring number of commits that various engineers produce every day. Or how many PRs have you [inaudible]. Maybe you're an engineer who is spending a lot of time mentoring someone else, answering other people's questions and unblocking other people. And that is not reflected in these metrics, you don't get credit for that. You get credit for writing code as opposed to credit for advocating for the deletion of some code, or credit for saying, "This feature could be better in this way or is going to cause problems in this way, so let's not even make that feature." We had an engineer who recently worked really hard on a feature and then something happened which changed sort of the goals of the product. And he was like, "The right thing to do is not ship this feature. This feature is no longer relevant. It's done. I worked very hard on it but the right thing to do is just pull it completely." So, finding ways as a manager to give people value and give people credit for the ways they contribute that cannot be measured by metrics. AVDI: Yeah, that is important. REIN: Can we spend like a minute or two talking about bipolar disorder because I have a history of that in my family and I've never been formally diagnosed and I wanted to talk about it a little bit. AMY: Sure. I'm not a doctor. I can not diagnose you. A standard disclaimer. I have Bipolar Type 2 for me and everybody experiences different constellations of symptoms over their lifetimes, obviously. But I spend about 80% of my days depressed. And then there's maybe like 5% of the time that I'm in a state of hypomania. That could look like I just feel kind of productive and focused and like a normal human being for once. It could look like I'm really kind of irritable and I just want to jump out of my skin all the time. I have like telltale signs if I'm feeling a little hypomanic, I'll like snap my fingers a lot and my husband will be like, "Oh honey, you're snapping. Do you want to take a Klonopin and go to bed early?" There's a significant component of anxiety there that has kind of been my experience. I'm also treatment resistant. So I've been on a lot of different meds and many people have better experiences with meds than I have had. I still have a really hard time despite having tried lots of medications out there which isn't to say that people shouldn't try medications. But a lot of people with Type 2 Bipolar, especially, end up diagnosed as major depressive because they feel fine when they're hypomanic. Their doctor may never see them in that state, so they might end up on anti-depressants when mood stabilizers might be better for them. I wasn't diagnosed with bipolar until I was 37. It just somehow flew under the radar. If someone had ever been like, "Did you write a book in a week and a half when you were 17?" I would've been like, "Oh yeah, I totally did that." REIN: So I'm actually on track because I'm [inaudible]. AMY: I would say I think anybody with a history of depression should probably ask their doctor, like who's ever felt like kind of up should ask their doctor. I don't know. Do you think it be this other thing instead? I hope that was helpful. REIN: I had three specific questions because I know we're going to wrap up soon. The first one is if people are thinking, "Maybe that's something that I might have." What should they look for to try to figure out whether it's something they should pursue? AMY: I think they should talk to a psychiatrist and raise that as a question with a psychiatrist. "Hey, I've heard about bipolar disorder. I'm wondering. I have a history." There are lists of symptoms on the Internet that you can look at, print that out and bring it to your doc. "Hey, I've had these things." That's the first thing, I think. Find a doctor to help you diagnose, but bring it up to them because they may not bring it up themselves. REIN: And then the second question and I think actually I can only remember the second question now is, is there anything you can suggest for people who are starting to get into treatment, who have seen as a psychiatrist, who have been diagnosed, in terms of how to find the right psychiatrist, how to find the right medication, how to deal with their psychiatrist and work with them more effectively? That sort of thing. AMY: Tracking your moods. That's like a pretty basic thing. I use just a little daily mood tracker on my phone so I can see sort of where I'm at from day to day. Having patience. It can take a really long time to find a medication or combination of medications that work and that's super frustrating. But having patience and I think finding a doctor who is really willing to be a partner with you in mental health, even more so, than in other areas of medicine. The disparity between the doctor who's telling you what you should do and how to be a good patient. And your lived experience as a person with a mental illness can be a huge and unpleasant. I have said to a doctor and this is not to slag on my doctors in any way. "Oh, I think this medication is causing X in me," and have the response been, "Well, the literature states..." [Laughs] And I'm like, "Sure but have you been on this med? Was the literature on this medication." So really, finding a doctor who will value your lived experience that you're bringing and your own treatment goals in terms of what is the life you want to live and how do you want to get there and what tradeoffs are you willing to make. Are you willing to be on a medication that might make you gain 40 pounds and mess up your lipid profile? Are you willing to be on a medication that might do X, Y, or Z? What's important in your life and living a good life and finding doctors who will respond to that. AVDI: There's a piece to the -- I don't want to speak for you -- but I feel like we've talked about this, you and I, from time to time. One of the things that I've heard from you, maybe not in so many words but it's there is the idea that also there isn't a fix. There's not like, "OK, we found the right set of medications and practices," or something like that. Would you say it's like it's more of a journey or something like that? AMY: Yeah, it's definitely more of a journey. For some people, I think there's like a subset of people who can just go on lithium. And then as long as they take their lithium, they're really pretty much OK. I think that is a small subset and not a lot of us are really on a journey to just live the best lives we can with the symptoms we have. REIN: That was really helpful for me. So, maybe it'll also be helpful for other people. So, thank you very much. AMY: You're welcome. REIN: OK. AVDI: Thank you. REIN: Reflections time? JESSICA: One of the things that I heard in this episode was that there is a framework for dealing with suffering because while we want to avoid unnecessary suffering, some of it's just life. And so we can work on alleviating it. And the first step is the separation of concerns between observing the feeling and deciding what, if anything, to do about it. And that by itself, that's helpful right there. JANELLE: One of the things you said that really jumped out at me was that do people not understand how humans work. And we have this idea, this culture that has sort of bred in the management world of that dehumanizing people is somehow a better way to go to increase productivity by cracking [inaudible], I guess you could say. And in truth, these two things are not at odds with one another. We can be kind. We can help people to feel supported as human beings in the world. And by supporting people, we can actually end up with a better, healthier, more productive organization. AVDI: One of the things that stuck with me the most was the discussion of kindness in the workplace and kindness in our power structures. I feel like in many ways, I'm sort of a poster child for the person that ought to fit in into the traditional, not to be just fine in a traditional software organization, or that I should have learned over time to fit into the traditional software organization. And in truth, what I found is that a lot of it just still is painful. A lot of the traditional assumptions about how we're supposed to work with each other and how we're supposed to manage each other is just painful. It's demoralizing and it's depressing and it's hurtful. And this stuff in kind, learning kindness and being skillful with suffering and emotions is not just about supporting the people that have mental illness or supporting the people that are marginalized or supporting the people that are whatever category you want to come up with, subcategory to come up with, it makes everything better. And if that's not obvious yet, it's probably only not obvious because you haven't experienced it yet. AMY: Yes. REIN: I think I'm gonna have to have a few smaller reflections because this has been a lot for me. Janelle, I saw a tweet yesterday responding someone being a jerk that said, "I don't know how to convince you to care about other people." And for me, that's one of the biggest challenges that we have. How do you convince people to care about other people if they don't? I also keep coming back to this idea that work implies suffering. That there are some suffering inherent in the work. And this question about should we say 'should' or not. And for me, the problem with suffering has -- there are two important questions and one has a very easy answer and one has a really hard answer. The question with the easy answer is what kind of a problem is this suffering? And the answer is it's an ethical problem. And so when I say 'should', what I mean is we have a moral obligation to reduce suffering. We ought to reduce suffering. And then the question with the really hard answer is, "OK, how do we do that?" I think the obligation to reduce suffering is shared by all of us but not equally. I think that people with the power to reduce suffering have more of an obligation. I also think that people that are creating the suffering have more of an obligation. But that's about as far as I've gotten on that. AMY: I think the thing that I am now thinking a lot about was a little bit of a tangent in the conversation as a whole. But when we were talking about disparities amongst different types of engineers and between engineering and other departments in tech companies, and what I could be doing, how I can address that more, I think, in my work, in engineering leadership. And so, that's something that I want to think about more. I don't have really good answers for that right now. I know Janelle, you were like, even calling our attention to the fact that these things exist is helpful. And so, I'm thinking about how I can do more of that. I guess that's the kind of thing that I'm most remembering, to think more on, going forward. AVDI: Excellent. Amy, thank you so much. AMY: You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. JANELLE: It was really great to have you on the show. AMY: It was really great to be on the show. JESSICA: So y'all, if you want to have more conversations like this, you can join our Slack channel, the Greater Than Code Slack which is very nice and not too high volume and everyone is super, super kind to each other. If you just give at least $1 to our Patreon at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Thank you.