JOHN:	This episode is sponsored by Pantheon. Pantheon is the platform of choice for more enterprise Drupal and WordPress sites than any other platform. A platform with superpowers needs to be run behind the scenes by superhumans of all diversities and backgrounds. Pantheon actively supports nonprofit initiatives throughout the Bay Area and beyond such as Techtonica, the Tech Equity Collaborative, and Lesbians Who Tech. Learn more about career opportunities at pantheon.io/GreaterThanCode.

JOHN:	Welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 138. Today, we have an all panel episode including some guests from our Slack. I'm John Sawers and I'm introducing Rein Henrichs.

REIN:	Hello, friends and I am introducing Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY:	Hello excited to be here for our panel episode. And I'm really excited to welcome to the show my friend, Laurie Barth.

LAURIE:	Nice to be here. This is really fun for me. So, I'm excited to welcome to the panel, Jacob Stoebel.

JACOB:	Hello. And I am here to announce the topic of our conversation, which is job satisfaction.

JAMEY:	So this topic of job satisfaction actually came up because there was a conversation about it in our Slack community which is pretty cool. And then when we were trying to decide on a topic for our panelists show one of our community members from the Slack forest suggested that we talk about finding job satisfaction, how people have gone about finding it and things like this. And so we think that's a great and important topic and it's exactly what we're going to talk about.

REIN:	Job satisfaction. What is it, how do we acquire it, how do teams get it, how do people get, how do you get on a team where it is.

JAMEY:	Yeah, it seems like the original, I'm like scrolling up to the discussion random. And the original question was about like when you're interviewing for a new job, how do you kind of try to judge what that kind of job satisfaction level is going to be like from not having actually been there yet? Which is a really interesting question. But then it looks like the discussion branched off into other stuff too.

REIN:	So how about if we start here and then maybe go there? What is job satisfaction for each of you?

JAMEY:	I guess the way I look at it is you spend a lot of hours of your life doing your job in general. And so, do you look forward to those hours? Do you dread those hours? Are they enhancing your life? Are they ruining your life? How is that affecting your whole self as a person and your whole mental outlook by the time that you inevitably spend working that all of us do?

LAURIE:	Yeah. I like to hope that I never get to that point where I noticed the dread and that I've chosen to do something about it before that. My very first role I was ever in, I cried when I left the office because I was so miserable knowing I had to go back there the next day. And so, I think when you've gotten so far down that road, you know that you're deeply unsatisfied and I think the hope is on the flip side of that. If you are satisfied with your job, you notice that you're happy instead of just kind of existing.

REIN:	That's interesting because these are trailing indicators. These are things that you say, "Oh, I recognize this and this tells me that I am unhappy or unsatisfied." What are some leading indicators? What are good predictors of job satisfaction?

JOHN:	There's definitely a big part of that discussion that it revolved around the mission of the company and whether you felt that there was alignment with that. And that's definitely been true for me. I've worked for companies that I not necessarily opposed to the mission but certainly not aligned with it. And where I am currently, I'm very highly aligned. And so, that gives me a lot of satisfaction, a lot of stickiness. It makes it much harder to look for other jobs because I want to find something that's as impactful. That feels to me is important to the world is what we're doing here.

JAMEY:	Yes, I totally agree with that and I've gone through a similar experience. Now I work in agriculture and it feels good to be able to tell people, "Yeah, I work in sustainable agriculture." I feel good about it in myself and in my soul or my heart or whatever. But it also feels nice to be able to tell that to people. And I think that's kind of a good indicator too in a way. But before that, I worked in consulting and that was really interesting because I was working on a whole bunch of different projects and some of them I felt like I aligned with the -- like, we didn't really have the same kind of company mission since we were a consulting agency. But some of my projects were like, "Oh I worked on an app for doctors to use in Africa." And I felt great about it. I was like, someone needs to be doing this and it's important work and I'm the one doing it and I feel really happy about that. And then some of it, I worked on educational study guides for students trying to pass exams. And I was like, "Yeah, people need this. It's useful to them." And then some of it, I worked on Instagram advertisements and it wasn't like I was morally opposed to Instagram advertisement, it's just like I don't care about this. But I was working with it all at the same time, sometimes in the same day and it was wild.

REIN:	That's interesting because meaningful jobs in a broader context is probably a scarce resource. There probably aren't enough jobs where you feel like you're making the world a better place to go around.

LAURIE:	It's interesting. I actually have spoken to a number of people who are either making a career transition or just starting in the tech industry. And one of the things I tell them is don't worry about what you're working on, which is the opposite of what you two are both saying. But don't worry about what you're working on, caveat being make sure it's ethical. But don't worry about what you're working on because in those first few months or even few years, you're learning so much that's literally in your computer and how to be on a technology team and what these tools look like and what is software development in employed capacity looks like that your motivation is going to be what directly affects you, which is your managers and your coworkers, and even the systems you're working on. I think as we grow and we've kind of proven ourselves and done well and have more opportunities, that's when you get to look at this idea of what you're working on being a motivating factor, but I still come back to you as a person. I really focus on who I'm working with. That to me is such a critical piece of this and it drastically affects my happiness because I'm a very social person.

JOHN:	Yeah, that's a great point, Laurie. Certainly for me, I don't know if that's true for you also, Jamey, but the mission is important once you meet the baseline for the quality of the team you're working with. If it's a safe environment, if it's supportive, if it helps you grow, then you can care about the mission. But if it's like I've heard that the quality of work at Headspaces is a terrible environment, even though I would be aligned with their mission of building software for meditation. But if the environment was toxic, that wouldn't rescue me from [crosstalk].

JAMEY:	And I think that that's like when you were talking about kind of being in the tech industry because that's where all of us are. But when you talk about that, it makes me think of the nonprofit industry, which is a lot of really important stuff and a lot of really note worldly famous for weird culture stuff. And I think that it's an interesting balance when it's like -- you know, I haven't worked directly in nonprofits, but my understanding of the nonprofit industry is that there's a lot of dysfunction around like, this is important and you should care about it and therefore it's your responsibility to be taking sacrifices to yourself and your health and the things that you need out of a job in order to do this thing that you think is important in a way that can become very dysfunctional.

JACOB:	Totally. I did work in the nonprofit sector and the education sector before I started this new career. And yeah, that's spot on. There's definitely a culture of scarcity that you can see in nonprofit. Some nonprofits, they're very much established in their communities and they have very robust funding sources, but there's this sort of impression of like, "Well, we can either take care of our employees or we can serve our community or we can serve our mission." But it's like you can only pick one.

LAURIE:	I've been thinking about that a lot lately and more in terms of salaries, but I think there's this argument that a lot of people seem to make and maybe it's made more on the internet because it's the internet. But there's this argument that if you're doing good, you shouldn't ask for payment. What it keeps making me think of is if that's your viewpoint and you're making money, what have you diluted yourself into believing about what it takes to make money and what type of evils and harms you have to inflict in order to do so. So if doing good means you can't make money, then what does that say about correlating viewpoints for those who do?

REIN:	Also, the [inaudible] making money, they're not doing good.

LAURIE:	Yeah, that's exactly what I'm trying to say. I think you phrased it a lot better.

JAMEY:	Another thing that I was thinking about when you, Laurie and John were talking was that John had said, I find it difficult to want to leave in job search because I already feel like I've found something I care about. And I can kind of relate to that. But I think it's also, I've thought about this very explicitly with what Laurie was saying with like the people that I work with and stuff because particularly I'm trans and I know some people that are trans that have had a lot of bad experiences at companies. And I mean, other people have had good experiences. I've been lucky, I've had primarily good experiences. I think it's partially luck and partially being very careful about where I go. But I'm in a scenario as a work situation right now where I find that everyone is very respectful of me and I feel very comfortable with that in my work environment. And it's very hard to say like, "Oh well..." I mean, normally I'd be like, "Oh, I've worked somewhere for three, four years. Maybe I just want to try something else." And I'm finding that it's very hard to be like, "Yeah, I should leave this safe place where everybody respects me and go to a place where I'm not sure if they will or not." And so, that's been kind of, I don't know. It's interesting because on the one hand I'm so lucky, it's so great that I have this really good experience, so why would I want to give it up? But then on the other hand it's like, I actually even talked to my manager about this one. I was like, "I'm not job hunting. I like it here and here's one of the reasons." And he was like, "I'm sorry that that's what you have to think about when you're trying to decide where to work." And I guess I haven't totally thought about it that way and it's totally right. But I also think that from my perspective, there is a lot of value in being able to say I have found something that's good and that's important to me, if that makes sense.

JOHN:	Definitely. I have similar thoughts. Like right now, I have a really great team. I have a really great manager. I love [inaudible] working and that's one of the reasons why, again, I can care about the mission of the company also. But I've had similar thoughts to yours of like if I jump over into some other position, and this brings us back to that initial question is like how do you tell beforehand that you're joining a team that's psychologically safe that is going to support you. And certainly the downsides for me joining a toxic are less terrible than the ones for you Jamey. But it is still something I think about and it's reasons why I haven't pursued certain opportunities just because it's so uncertain like how much support there is going to be there that it's not worth the risk.

REIN:	Yeah. The difference between working on a team where you kind of feel okay and a team where you really feel secure and safe is huge.

JAMEY:	And I think there's trade-offs too because the very first thing we were talking about is this idea about being excited to come to work versus dreading to come to work. And I think that's something that can change over time, even in the same position and even in the same situation. And I think that there's trade-offs at that because like if I were to wake up every morning and be so anxious, I hate my job and I hate my life, then I'd have to reevaluate. But if I'm feeling stressed out at work sometimes, but I still feel very safe and secure with the people I work with, there's a trade off for that too. Maybe I can affect change and try to make better some of these logistical things I'm stressed out about if the only things that are stressing me out are logistical things and not culture and respect things.

REIN:	Yeah. For me, there is sort of a hierarchy of needs here and job satisfaction is somewhere in the middle where there are very basic psychological needs that have to be met before you can even think about job satisfaction. So psychological safety, everyone has to treat everyone with respect, things like that. If those aren't met, the job satisfaction is out the window, as far as I'm concerned.

JAMEY:	It's interesting to me that you don't think those are the same as, or part of job satisfaction. I think what you're saying is valid, but I feel like I would role being at a place where everyone is respectful and there's good culture between people. To me that's kind of like part of job satisfaction in a way.

REIN:	It's necessary but not sufficient for me.

JAMEY:	That makes sense.

JACOB:	[Crosstalk]

REIN:	Yeah, exactly. But there are other things I want. There are things I want like having a shared purpose for the team that we all believe in. It doesn't have to be doing good in the world. We all have to know what we're doing together.

LAURIE:	This kind of goes back a little bit, but I think one of the things that's really important to think about is that when you're talking about moving positions, there's two reasons people do that. And both may be true or one may be true, but it's people don't move if neither are true. You're either being pushed from a job as in you don't like it and you're miserable or you're being pulled towards a new opportunity that's really exciting. And I think when you're being pushed, that changes your equation of job satisfaction in the future role. And that's probably a negative, right? Like you should still be thinking about that. You shouldn't ignore that just to rush to get away from a place because you're probably going to wind up in a similar situation. If you're being pulled towards a job, then you're really evaluating the job satisfaction that you would see there and you're looking for what are going to be kind of your flags of 'this is a place that I want to work'. And for me at this point in my career, I can't imagine going anywhere where I wouldn't have someone either already in the company or tangentially related to the company telling me that that's a good place to work because I just don't trust marketing.

REIN:	I feel like we're willing to make sideways or upward steps on the hierarchy of needs, but we don't want to make downward steps. If you're being pushed out because you don't have psychological safety because you're disrespecting the work, we'll take another position that gives you those things even if they don't give you those higher values like believing in the mission of the company just to get out of the worst situation.

JACOB:	Okay, so going back to the original question, what do you do in an interview? What do you say? What do you do that will get you that information?

REIN:	Can I just say real quick that I once did a thing where I went the opposite way where I went from a job with high job satisfaction to pursue a really exciting opportunity and ended up working for a really tougher team [inaudible] and it was one of the worst decisions I've ever made and I'll never do it again.

LAURIE:	No, that's really valid. Everyone always says, what questions do you ask in an interview to make it look like you did research? And this question takes no research, but it's one that I always ask. And it has been so illuminating for me in a lot of scenarios. But I asked the interviewer, "What should I have asked in your mind that I didn't?" Because what immediately pops into their head is something they think I should know can be incredibly positive. It can be kind of neutral, but sometimes they'll really slip in some hard truths about what it's like to work there that have been weighing on them and been on their mind. And it shows you right away if those are realities that are not a big deal for you or if there's something that's really going to affect to your position and your satisfaction at that company.

JOHN:	I don't remember if it was on Twitter or on the discussion Slack. But someone also mentioned a great question which I haven't had a chance to deploy yet, but I'm definitely going to, which is in six months, how will you know if hiring me was the right choice?

JACOB:	That was on Slack.

JAMEY:	That's great.

LAURIE:	That's really good.

JOHN:	And there was a correlate that I think it was on Twitter where one of the things you can do when someone, this may have been something you tweeted Laurie, about like when you hire someone, you tell them why you hired them, what it was about them that that was working. So that gives them that extra positive boost when they're coming into this uncertain environment.

LAURIE:	Yeah.

JACOB:	You can turn that question around like how will I know that I made the right choice too. And if they say things like, because if they give you bland answers, maybe it's because they don't have anything to say about diversity and inclusion.

LAURIE:	I think this scares me as a hiring manager. Some of these questions will be hard to answer.

JAMEY:	I'm also hiring manager and I was thinking about the other side of this too, and I didn't want to derail from I think the really fundamental question of like if you're interviewing going into a job. But on the other hand, what if you already are at a place where you think the culture is really positive. I mean, my company just had our series A, so we're hiring really aggressively. And I have worries about what if we hire a bunch of people that ruin it? And I think that that's kind of like, I don't know, a similar question in some ways.

LAURIE:	If you can figure out how to grow a company to a larger size and keep the culture, I'm pretty sure all of Silicon Valley would like the answer.

JAMEY:	And I also don't necessarily think you have to keep the same culture. But I also think that you don't want to go from a culture where everyone is respectful to a culture where it's not respectfully. You know what I mean? Like you have to be, there's a balance where I'm open to change. I'm the oldest, not oldest, but like most tenured person at my whole company. It's the CEO and then me and then everybody else. And so, I've been going through this a lot where it's like, I have to let go and accept the fact that it's not the same as it was two years ago when there were two of us. And there's change and it's exciting and it's different and I'm okay with that. But also, there are things that are important that cannot change. I cannot have people disrespecting me. And how do you judge what change is okay and natural and what change is going to be ruining people's job satisfaction.

REIN:	I think a big part of that for me is setting up strong shared cultural norms on the team. Because then, the team will do a lot of the policing of norm violations. And you don't have to act like the boss in that situation because they want to preserve their own set of culture and ethics.

JACOB:	My last job was with a college that employed thousands of people and now I work for a company that employs dozens of people. And I think the biggest difference is the reason things work at my job now is because individuals are being decent to each other. And I think when that scaled up to thousands of people, it's a question of like when people actually who will step in and stop them or who will prevent them from spreading their bad personality towards other people.

LAURIE:	I also think if you're interviewing and you're trying to know that kind of upfront, especially in the psychological safety scenario. I mean I've had the experience that being the only woman in a room illuminates a lot of things for other men in the room about a specific person that they never would've seen if I wasn't present in that room. And so I think when you already have a company that has a diversity of view and a diversity of culture and all of those things are present in the interviewing process, that's going to reveal some aspect of how people interact with those people. And it'll show you right away at least a low bar for psychological safety. This is someone who we don't want in our culture.

REIN:	Have you seen the cartoon where there are two eagles talking and one eagle said to the other, "Do you think Mr. Owl is a predator?" And the other one says, "No, of course not." And then the first one says, "Yeah, I don't know what Mr. Mouse was talking about."

JAMEY:	Yes, I have seen that.

LAURIE:	[Crosstalk] and that's great.

JAMEY:	I have a great example of what Laurie was talking about, which is that on our application, I guess you upload your resume and cover letter. We have some questions and there are optional question for pronouns. And we had thought about this because we were asking for someone's gender has legal ramifications. But we're like, "Okay, asking for someone's pronouns, especially if it's optional, is more like asking for someone's name." Like how would you like me to refer to you during this interview process? So some people answer it, some people leave it blank and that's fine. And then some people make like attack helicopter jokes and then I'm like, "Okay, good job applying at my company because now, I'm putting your resume in the garbage." So I really like it there because the first couple of times it happened, it hasn't happened in like a ton. Like the first couple of times that people made pronoun jokes, I was mad about it and then I'm like, "No, this is great. I'm so glad I know this about this person."

REIN:	This brings up a really good maybe general topic of discussion, which are hard to forge signals that you can give off to people to say that they either are or are not [inaudible].

JAMEY:	I give my pronouns at the beginning when I'm interviewing people and I see how they respond. Some people do it back. Some people are just like, okay cool. Nobody has made jokes to my face. It's easier to make jokes in a form than to my face, but some people are kind of very put off by it, like they don't know what I'm doing. And so, it's kind of interesting because there's a very subtle gauging of reactions.

LAURIE:	This is very different. But one of the first things I do when I interview people is before I ask them the first question, I very explicitly say, "I'm not looking for what you don't know. I'm looking for you to show me what you do know." So that they know that the entire tone of the interview and the interview process is not about like how do you react to me putting you in uncomfortable situations. I'm not trying to put you in an uncomfortable situation. This is a learning experience for me and a learning experience for you. And if either one or preferably both of us come out having learned something new about technology or people or teams, that's awesome. And that's the goal. And that is completely beside the point of whether or not you eventually are in this role. And that's like a psychological safety thing for me because I have been in so many antagonistic interviews over the years that I want people to know right away you can relax. That's not what we're here for.

JAMEY:	I say it's not a test.

REIN:	I have to be honest, if we're talking about what can do when you're the interviewee to figure out whether a company is toxic. I'm a consultant, so I've been in a lot of interviews and I don't know how to tell the difference between a manager who is genuine and a really good liar. And so, I think that if you want to learn about working conditions that the best way to do that is to talk to the workers. So when I am talking to someone who would be a peer of mine at the company, I try to [inaudible] for the socialism, engage with them on a level of worker solidarity about what it's like to work there. I'm just like, "I can't always do this." And sometimes trying to do this has backfired, but that's probably a good thing. But to try to ask them about what it's like to work with their manager, what it's like to work on the team, what their favorite and least favorite things are about the job and so on.

LAURIE:	If you don't meet your coworkers in an interview, I think that's a red flag. If you are not introduced to the team that you will be working on. The manager is one thing and absolutely you should have interacted with them throughout the process, but if you never have a conversation with any of the people who will be your eventual coworkers, I don't think I could feel comfortable taking that job.

REIN:	Yeah, absolutely agree. It feels like you're hiding something either knowingly or otherwise. I think if I were a manager of a team, then I would on some level know that.

JOHN:	Yes.

REIN:	And I think I would definitely know. But I think any manager on some level has to be aware.

JAMEY:	What do you do if you're a manager and you know that your teams are unhappy? If you're not a manager and you and your coworkers are unhappy, what do you want a manager to do?

REIN:	I want to focus on that as now the most important issue for the team to solve together, regardless of what our sort of delivery expectations are. If we can't work together as a team, we're not going to succeed on the long term. And so as a manager, that is now my number one priority.

LAURIE:	I think it's also important to understand if the issue is an internal dynamic or external pressure. Because as a manager, it's your job to shield your team from as much external pressure as possible. And so if you're not doing a good job of that, you need to know. But if it's internal issues, the way you address that and the way you can kind of start to fix that look very different.

REIN:	I have to be honest, I don't know how to build psychological safety in a team that doesn't care about other people. If I have a team full of people who don't care about each other, I don't know what to do. So my only solution is to not have a team that's like that.

LAURIE:	Hire people. I'm kidding. But I'm almost not because if you have people on your team that are creating a toxic environment and you remove them, the rest of your team will be grateful.

REIN:	I've been in that situation once, and I did do that. I think it turned out to be the right choice.

JACOB:	And they would need to know why, because I feel like there's always some amount of friction when a person is removed because everyone else on the team to one extent or another is going to be asking questions like, "Will this happen to me as well?" Or, "Is the company in financial trouble?" Some things like that. And if they know the exact reason and I get that that's like a difficult, that's a so thorny subject from an HR perspective. But if the team has just no idea why someone left, that's hard. That can be really hard on the team as well.

JOHN:	I would imagine if that person really is the most toxic person that's souring the environment, probably everyone knows that that's who they are. So you can have one on one conversations with the team members and say, "I know you've complained about this guy. What you said was one of the reasons why we took it seriously and got rid of him." And I think that would certainly be something very gratifying to hear from a manager.

JACOB:	Totally.

JAMEY:	I think that's a real part of job satisfaction. If you have legitimate complaints being taken seriously and then something being done about it.

REIN:	I'd be honest. The only reason I get up in the morning to go to work is because of the people I work with. It's not the code I'm writing. It's not the system I'm building. It's because of other people. And if that's not there, I'm going to go somewhere else. So for me, almost the whole thing.

LAURIE:	I agree with you for the most part and especially beyond those foundational issues that we were talking about. But I have had multiple experiences in which I have been completely miserable in my job because I don't have anything to do. And I think part of job satisfaction is like part of life satisfaction in feeling needed and feeling relevant and feeling like what you do matters. And I think it's kind of a joke, right? Like you have nothing to do, you can just do whatever you want today and like coast. And isn't that the dream? Get paid to do nothing. It's not. And I think anyone who's ever been in that situation recognizes how terrible and toxic and demoralizing that can be. And actually one of the things we do here, I work for consultancy as well. And one of the things we do here is our work is so fluid and it ebbs and flows so much. Before we bring anyone new on, we say, "Okay, for the next three months, do we have work to keep them busy?" Because if we don't, we're not in a position to bring them on even if they would be a great fit for our company overall.

REIN:	When I say that thing I care about are the people, what I mean is that to my end value and that other things I care about, I care about because of their effect on people. So, if I can't contribute meaningfully to the team's success by doing stuff right, then I can't help the people on my team. And I feel bad.

JOHN:	I gave a talk about two years ago called Everything is Broken and It's OK. And one of the bits of research I had done on that was a book called The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile. And she had done a whole ton of research about job satisfaction and what leads to it. And one of the primary factors she was able to identify was progress on meaningful tasks. There's two parts of that. The work has to be meaningful in some sense. It doesn't necessarily have to be world changing, but it has to be meaningful because there are certain people whose lives are better because of what I do. And then there's the progress part, which is I think a part that also gets sort of short shrift in the way work gets done where big launches, maybe you worked on the project all year and there's a big party to celebrate but that doesn't come around very often. And so one of the things she identified was like celebrating the small wins that like, "Hey we got our sprint done. Everyone get a beer like or get a whatever." There are ways to celebrate things more frequently that can counteract a lot of the negative things that we do because as developers, we spend our whole time looking at broken code. Once it starts working, we stop looking at it.

JAMEY:	Seriously. I think about this all the time. I work remote, I don't see my team very often. And the first time I ever met our head of customer success, I was nervous because I had this perception that all of our interactions have been like 'Mikael is mad because things are broken'. And he probably just thinks I'm a screw up and that everything's broken all the time. And then we met in person and he was like, "Jamey! This is my friend, Jamey, who always fixes everything when it's broken." I was like, "Oh shit. That's so great! Yes! Thank you." So I took being in person and having that to have that feeling about the way we were interacting with each other on Slack.

LAURIE:	I joke all the time that the reason I became a software engineer is because I'm Hermione Granger. I was obnoxious Hermione Granger in school and the grade grub and all of that. But what kept me going and what made me feel really good about myself was seeing a good grade on a test or a quiz or a paper, whatever it was. And every time you close a Jira ticket is one of those grades. And it's just the satisfaction of like little check boxes that I've accomplished something. And that progress, I mean that's exactly that progress piece. It's so important. I was talking about this the other day and I think we always talk about the fact that people in technology are always learning and need to be. But one of the things we lose sight of is that progress piece doesn't happen if you are constantly learning and never actually using the things that you learn. Even if that means that last week I learned how to make a CICD pipeline and then this week, I'm iterating on that pipeline, you're building on your learning instead of constantly feeling like you're drowning and doggy paddling and miserable.

JACOB:	I saw a talk and I'll have to find it because I have no clue who gave it or what conference is that, but it got into this idea of like, there's often one of three roles that people fill, which is I think something like janitor, firefighter or a rockstar. A janitor is someone that's like constantly cleaning up after your broken code or your legacy code. A firefighter is someone who has to be on call all the time. And it's responding to problems at 2:00 AM. And then a rockstar is the person that's making all kinds of people happy and building new systems, but then trashes the hotel on their way out of town. And then the solution that they offered was there are upsides and downsides to both because as a janitor at the very least, the stakes aren't too high. And as a rockstar, everyone appreciates you. So the solution that this person offered, and I'll have to find this talk, is there needs to be an intentional balance. Everyone needs to get a chance to be a rockstar once in awhile. And then everyone needs a chance to have some downtime and just like do some janitorial work because janitorial work needs to be on too.

REIN:	My solution to this is listening as my solution to everything else, which is variety. Find people who like different things, find people who work in different ways and value each of their unique skills and put them together.

JAMEY:	I totally agree. I made a joke one time on Greater Than Code. This is like six months ago. I was like, "Nobody likes updating libraries." And several people, I believe it was John and Jess were like, "I love updating libraries." And I'm like, "Great! I'm so glad that you exist so that I don't have to do it." And I think that that's so true of everything.

REIN:	I'm going to drop a Virginia Satir quote again. "We come together through our sameness and we grow through our differences." Having different people on a team is a thing that enables the team to grow.

LAURIE:	I make this joke with my husband all the time. He works at a completely different field, but he has incredible attention to detail and love of spreadsheets that I do not have. And I am grateful that there are people like him that exist in the world to do all of that work so that I don't have to.

REIN:	Yeah, my wife is an accountant so I'm right there with you. I like to say that she is better at her job than I am at mine, mostly because it's true, but also because the work she does completely blows my mind. She basically taught herself to be a programmer in Access and Excel. She doesn't think she is one.

JAMEY:	Oh, wow.

LAURIE:	So this is actually interesting and I don't know why this just popped into my head, but I feel like a good portion of my job satisfaction, and this probably aligns with what Jamey was saying earlier, a good portion of my job satisfaction comes from my job respecting my life. And that means my job being okay with the fact that next week for 4th of July, we have a standing trip that we take to visit both of our families. And that's okay. And it's known that I'll be gone and they don't expect me to be working or on call or available while I'm on an Island that has really bad service. And I don't need to bring my computer with me and I can leave and feel safe and confident and they can feel good about that and I get to have a life, and I'm not thinking about work for that period of time.

REIN:	I like to say that people should be able to bring their whole selves to work. The more they can do that, the more psychological safety you have because sharing yourself isn't an interpersonal risk.

JACOB:	One bit of advice that I think I was given a lot was you shouldn't be, I don't know if it's true. It's like you shouldn't be seen too interested in details like vacation time and benefits and stuff like that. It's okay to ask questions but you shouldn't seem like that's your biggest questions you have. But I'll share that I have a two year old, right? And two year olds get sick a lot and they can't go to their daycare. And when that happens, either my wife or I, we have to just suddenly within a moment's notice not come into work that day to watch him. And you better believe that's like a big question that I have about any environment that I'm working. So I guess I'm wondering is that the kind of advice that only companies give because they're trying to take advantage of people or is that an exploitative piece of advice?

REIN:	Obviously yes, but...

LAURIE:	I was given the advice by someone I truly respect that you should never choose not to take a job because of the commute within reason. And I actually tweeted about this and everyone seemed to agree with me that that's terrible advice if commute and traffic is something that's particularly draining and miserable for you. I hate driving. I hate driving in traffic and I live in Washington, DC. I took a job that's two miles down from my house. I can work from home if ever I need to. That is huge for my quality of life and my job satisfaction. And so every interview I have ever had and will ever have will consist of a question about can I be completely remote? If not, what is your work from home policy and how far is your office from where I live? And I completely think that if that changes their perspective on how committed you are to the job, you don't want to work there.

REIN:	This is why it's so hard to give general advice here because different people were going to value different and sometimes even conflicting things. The only advice I can give to people is to try to find a job where you can be your whole self, where you can take advantage of all of your gifts and your interests and they are okay with your labels and your things because everyone has them. And I don't know how to select for that in an interview except for by being honest about myself. And that's something I can do because I can find a different job relatively easily. I wouldn't suggest for everyone. But if you are in a position where you can do that, try being honest.

LAURIE:	I almost wish viewers could see us nodding vigorously.

JACOB:	I guess one other question I have is how do I, not just ask, because it's one thing to say like, "What's your sick leave policy?" There can be something on paper that says, "Yeah, if you need to take care of a sick child, you can." But then there's the cultural aspect of what happens when I don't come to work within a moment's notice because I have a sick child. What's the attitude around the office if I will do that.

REIN:	If I were me in your situation. I would literally just say that to an interview or I would say, "Hey, here's the thing I do. When I do that, how is that going to be for the team?"

LAURIE:	I think that's the unlimited PTO question that everyone always debates. Is it good, is it bad? And I think the answer is it completely depends on who's in charge of managing it and how they react to it, and what the rules are surrounding it. It looks good on paper, but that doesn't mean it's good in practice.

JAMEY:	That's also hard though because you could be in a situation where you're like, "I have this unlimited PTO policy and the person who's running it is really reasonable and it's going really well." And then that person could change and then you could have a totally different policy even though it's the same on paper.

REIN:	So many things already depend on the [inaudible] of your manager.

JAMEY:	That's true.

REIN:	The fewer things that do, the better.

JOHN:	Yeah. I think the minimum vacation policy is much more helpful than the unlimited.

JAMEY:	Yeah. I also think that when Jacob was asking about benefits and stuff, I think that there's a terrible culture around this in general. I think you can even look at talking about salary is a difficult thing and people will be like, "Oh, don't bring up salary." And so, they bring it up, blah, blah. And it's like, "Are we all going to pretend that we're not working to get paid," because I'm pretty sure that's why all of us are working. And I don't find it helpful to pretend that we don't care about that when obviously we do.

LAURIE:	Especially when there's like seven rounds of interviews these days. I'm not going through all of that work and take home assignments and calls and videos and whatever to find out that we've both invested all this time and we aren't anywhere near where we need to be. And this is especially true. I don't know why I find this especially true of non co-located positions because remote companies may not be aware of the cost of living in other areas. If they're based in San Francisco, yeah, maybe they are. If they're based in, I don't know, North Carolina and they're saying, "Well this is our max," and I'm saying, "Well, I'm sorry but I live in Washington DC and that doesn't pay my mortgage." I don't want to discover that after seven interviews.

REIN:	Either way, don't talk about wages is literally a capitalist plot to suppress wages. That's not a conspiracy. It is literally true.

LAURIE:	And it's especially harmful for the people who don't implicitly know their worth. And we know this. We know this everywhere because people who are not supposed to get these jobs but become the exceptions, have no idea what they're worth. And so, even if they get the role that they "shouldn't have gotten", they're probably still not getting paid what they should be.

REIN:	One of my first experiences in the industry was moving from a junior job to a not junior job with a larger company, and they asked me for a salary requirement and I wasn't smart enough to not do that. And so I just made up a number that was too large. And they said, "Oh yeah, that's no problem." And I said, "I should've given this more thought." I should have done some research.

JAMEY:	And I also think it comes back to this thing that we were talking about earlier, specifically with nonprofits, but in general where it's like, if you really want to work here, then you should just accept whatever. And it's just harmful. It's just generally harmful.

LAURIE:	I've had kind of a keyword on Twitter for the past couple of months railing against the idea that people should be passionate about their jobs in order to get their job. And it really riles me a lot because there's a bunch of people who are like, "Absolutely. Positively." And then there's a bunch of people who are like, "I want to work with people who are also passionate about their work." And I'm like, "Okay, but what are you really saying with that?" You're really saying that you want someone who cares about the value of what they produce and you want someone who's going to have your back. Why does that mean that "passion" is what they need? Because passion is used as an excuse to not give you a bunch of other stuff because you care about this one thing so much that you're willing to give up all this other stuff.

JAMEY:	People want to act like work isn't work. It's great to love your job, but work is still work.

LAURIE:	You're dev advocate now, Jamey. Isn't the whole point that your entire life is your work?

JAMEY:	I am a dev advocate now.

REIN:	If someone says that they're working for passion, what you should do is mentally replace that with someone who is easy to manipulate.

LAURIE:	I mentally replace it with 'they're looking for me to answer the question, what do I do off hours and what free work can they get out of me that will benefit them'.

JOHN:	Yeah. It reminds me of that old aphorism that if you can get a job doing what you love, you'll never work a day in your life.

 [Crosstalk]

JAMEY:	My side hustle is comics. I work in comics, I do reviews and I'm like a new comics creator. And you hear that a lot because people want to make comics their full time job. And I get that. I get why people want that. And obviously I think people should be paid for their work and I think you should be physically able to make a living off comics. That's what you want to do, which is a lot of like where the discourse comes from. But then there's people like me and I'm like, "I don't want to do that at all. I don't want comics to be my full time job." It's not just because I would never be anywhere as comfortable, even if I was wildly successful in comics because I am in tech, which is like a part of it that I'm not going to lie about. But additionally, I like doing comics and I would like to continue liking it. And I think the fastest way to not like doing comics anymore is to have to worry about the business side of it and deadlines. I do reviews for free and I think that it's a tough thing because people are like, "You should get paid for your work and you're devaluing other people's work by doing it for free." And I think that that's a valid argument. But I also think that it's valid for me to say I get free comics to review. I get editorial support from my editors, I get other freelance opportunities and I get the fact that my deadlines are like, if I am like I'm sick, I don't feel good, I'm feeling overwhelmed at my day job and I'm not going to get this in by deadline, my editors go, "That's fine. We're not paying you so you should do it to your comfort level." And I'm really comfortable with that. Anyway, that was a very long winded way of me saying that I think there's real value in keeping work, work and keeping hobbies, hobbies, if that's what you want to do.

LAURIE:	I think it's also important to notice when your work is spilling over and becoming a hobby and see what you can do to address that depending. I mean, there's side projects and those work for a lot of people. But I found myself doing a lot of teaching, doing a lot of blogging and doing a lot of speaking and developing those talks and writing those blogs and doing those workshops was all of my evening time. I mean, really just a huge amount of it. And my employers saw me getting burnt out and they saw how short my fuse was in terms of frustration during the work day, which wasn't good. And they sat me down and they said, "Okay, is this stuff that you enjoy doing?" And I said yes. And they said, "Okay, then we need to make it part of your job now so that you can do this during the workday and you're not spending 80 hours because this does benefit us and this is good for us, but it's also good for you and we want you to continue doing the things that you enjoy." I mean, talk about job satisfaction right there. Just someone saying, "We see you as a person and we see the things that you're excited about and interested in, and we want to support that, whatever that means for your career." But the idea that it wasn't sustainable for that to be my life and my hobby, as well as my job and it was showing. And I wonder how far down the road people get on that before they realize how kind of burnt out they've become.

JAMEY:	I had a similar experience. It was something that like people at my job and noticed what was wrong with me before I noticed, which I was really impressed with.

REIN:	Honestly, that thing that your manager did is a sign of a manager who knows what their job is.

LAURIE:	Shout out to Frank.

JAMEY:	I had been struggling in my role and I think -- well this is actually something that I wanted to come back to about playing the people's strengths and I think this is related to it. I had felt like I was struggling my role and I wasn't sure why I was feeling kind of burnt out. I was feeling a little bit like I was having some impostor syndrome-y feelings and my manager was kind of like, "I see that you're having impostor syndrome-y feelings. I don't feel that way about your work. But if you come into a project that you don't know how to deal with the attitude of I'll figure it out and it'll be great, then you'll figure it out and it'll be great because you're capable. But if you come into a project with the attitude of like, I don't know how to do this and it's going to be a disaster, then it's going to be a disaster," which I totally agree with. And he was actually the one that kind of pinpointed like, "Hey, you've been at this company for so long and things have changed in so many ways. You're feeling uncomfortable about the fact that you used to know everything that was happening in the code base because that was you and maybe one other person touching it and now there's a dozen people touching it every day and there's all these changes that are happening faster than you can keep track of, which is natural at a company that has more than two people working on it. But you're not used to it and you're having not like a power struggle," that I want to control other people," but like a power struggle that I feel so out of control in this code base that I used to understand. And I was like, "Wow! That is absolutely what is happening. Thank you for noticing that and explaining to me." And it was cool because then I had like a sense of what was going on that I didn't before and it was really gratifying that someone else had been watching me kind of doggy paddle and go like, "Oh, I see what's happening there." And I like couldn't see. But yes, I also had a very similar experience to Laurie. We were joking about this, but I had just became a developer advocate at my company like on Monday.

LAURIE:	Woot woot!

JAMEY:	This is my third day as a developer advocate and it was kind of really cool that my company was like, "Listen, we value what you're doing, we value your knowledge of the code base, we value your technical skills. We also value the fact that you are going out and representing our company and doing conferences and talks and stuff on your own that you want to do. And if we find value in that, then we should foster an environment where that's what you can focus on". And so I'm focusing on that and I'm focusing on our API, which is really cool. We basically made a really cool compromise. It was like, I still want to code, but now there's this little API piece of the codebase that I can know everything about. And I don't have to know everything about everything. I can just know everything about this part. And I'm feeling really positive about it. And I'm also feeling really positive about the fact that people at my company went like, "Jamey's having a problem. I think this is the problem. Maybe this is a solution that would get at that problem. So let's do it." And to me that's what being valued and having job satisfaction is really about. I think it's really important to play the people's strengths.

And I'm going to tell one more anecdote. I'm sorry I'm being very long winded. But even before this, I used to be in charge of all of the deploy process at my company and that piece of my job description at one point was taken away from me and given to someone else. And it was like I had this really visceral reaction to be like, "You took away this thing because I was bad at it," or something. I don't know. I'm like, "You don't trust me to do the deploy process like I used to." And I was really worried that it was reflecting on me in a negative way. And our CTO was like, "No, I just have someone else at the company -- you obviously don't like doing deploy process. You just do it because it's part of what you do. I have someone else do..."

LAURIE:	You don't like it but...

JAMEY:	And he's like, "I have someone else who's actually interested in it. So they're going to do it now. And then you're going to start..." That's when I became hiring manager because he's like, "I'm doing hiring and I hate it and now you're going to do that." And then I immediately was like, "Oh, I love hiring. This is great. I get to talk to all these people." And it clicked for me then. I was like, "Oh, I see. He's not taking away things I'm bad at. He's like replacing it with things that don't feel like a burden to me but feel like a burden to other people." And then the things that felt like a burden to me that don't feel like a burden to other people, it's smart. It's an art. I think it's a skill.

LAURIE:	How funny is that.

REIN:	Two things. One, Mandy, please edit out all of the parts of this episode where Jamey apologizes.

 [Laughter]

REIN:	And two, managers, if you're listening, give people your reasons. This is important, not just so that they can understand and feel good about the decisions you make but also so they can execute them better. Because if they understand the goal you're trying to achieve, they can make better decisions about how to achieve it.

LAURIE:	Because isn't it funny that Jamey even said, "I don't like doing this part of my job. But when a role and responsibility I have is taken away from me, my default assumption is that I did it poorly." And that's so often not the case. Jamey was overloaded, I'm sure. And hiring, I can't imagine hiring manager made you less overloaded. But sure, we'll go with that. But it's so often people have tasks shifted around because either it's no longer a company priority or you have too much on your plate or it was clearly something that was making you kind of miserable and you didn't like it. And if that never gets spoken out loud in their own head, their mini-me is probably saying, "What did you do to mess this up?"

JAMEY:	That's right. And it's a weird confusing feeling to be , "I'm really unhappy that I don't have to do a thing I don't like anymore."

 [Laughter]

JACOB:	Yeah, because it is taken away. I think we're taught from the very first job we take as adults that it's death to say that you dislike anything about your job. Come on, who doesn't dislike something about their job?

REIN:	Our team, the team I'm working with now does a retro that I based on Virginia Satir's Temperature Reading. And one of the parts of the retro is -- the very first part of the retro is appreciations. And a later part of the retro is complaints with recommendations. And what I tell people is that complaint is often two things in disguise. One is a very insightful assessment of what really is. And two is a very insightful suggestion about how things can be different. And that's what we want to get out of those.

LAURIE:	I love that.

REIN:	It's okay to complain.

LAURIE:	Yeah. I also really like the fact that it's appreciations at the beginning because I think one of the things I've noticed, especially in Twitter land, is it's the Yelp rule, right? The negative voices are always the loudest and the ones you're going to hear the most. And we could all do better at making sure that the only time our coworkers or our managers or the people under us hear from us are when we have feedback. And instead of that, they should hear more positives than they do constructive criticism. The constructive criticism is going to be well more read that way. That phrase made no sense, but you knew what I meant.

REIN:	Yeah. So, the whole thing is appreciations, puzzles, complaints with recommendations, new information and hopes and wishes. And it starts with that way, I think for two reasons. One is that it goes from the past to the future and two was that it sandwiches the whole thing with good feelings.

JOHN:	Yeah, I like that. In the interview process of my current company, we we have a specific slice of interview set out aside to do a values interview where we just ask the person, we say, "These are our values. How do you demonstrate these values? How do you interpret what this means and how does that play out in your life?" And one of the ones we ask about is like, "Have you ever made a mistake and how did you deal with it?" And I was trying to think of, as we were having this discussion, how I could turn that around to be a question that I could ask as an interviewee of a company to get a sense of how they would handle that situation. Because I think that would also get at some of that psychological safety that you're trying to find out about on the team. And what I've come up with, and I'd love to hear any of you all suggestions for other ways of doing this. But the first one that came to me was like, "Tell me about the last production outage you had. What happened and how did it go down?"

LAURIE:	Yes, please.

JACOB:	[Inaudible] a lot of content, a lot of information from that sort of thing. Who was blamed? Or how did it happen in the first place?

JOHN:	And how does their demeanor change when they talk about it, right?

JAMEY:	Yeah.

REIN:	Honestly, attitudes towards failure are so important.

JAMEY:	I totally agree. Everyone's going to make mistakes. You can't prevent mistakes from ever happening. The only thing you control is how you're going to react to that. I strongly believe that in all parts of life actually, but particularly when we're talking about working blame.

JACOB:	And also who's responsible when something goes out. Is it whoever deployed or committed or deployed the thing that broke it? Is it the team that surrounded that person? Is it whoever's on call and caught the bad luck? Like how is that decided?

REIN:	[Inaudible] is sort of shibboleth for modern production ops teams. But the important thing is what are the attitudes towards blame, not just trying to avoid it in general.

LAURIE:	So who wants to say their superfluous job satisfaction thing?

JOHN:	This actually came out of a discussion I had with [Jeremy Weiner] at RailsConf this year where we were just talking about remote work and how his team had a big release and there was a celebration. They had some food at the office, everyone was hanging out, but he worked remotely. And his manager privately arranged to have some food delivered to his house at the same time so that he could like play along remotely. And we were like, "So, what do you call that sort of a thing?" And I was like, "It's sort of the opposite of a microaggression." And then we started brainstorming on what we would call this. And I actually asked him the Slack and I forget who it was that suggested microvalidation as a word for that.

LAURIE:	Love that.

JOHN:	It's a great term and I actually have a whole series of tweets in my drafts that I haven't actually sent out yet about this because I think it's such a useful idea. And I think I wouldn't call it superfluous at all, but it's not one of those sort of deep core satisfaction things. But knowing that the company or your manager cares about you to that level to think of, "Oh yeah, this could be isolating. This could be just mildly inconveniencing for the people that are remote," or the people that are in the office or vice versa, whatever it is. Knowing that you're being thought of in that way and that completely is, I think, a really good source of satisfaction for sure.

JAMEY:	I thought of one and it's similar in that micro, someone's thinking about you except it is totally superfluous. So it's a great answer. I do this thing at work where I sound the air horn in meetings. And in meetings I'll just be like, [horn sounding in the background]. And I had this vague idea that everyone else found it really annoying and only I found it funny. But I was like, "It's not like I'm ruining anyone's day, so I'll just keep doing this thing that I found funny." And then my boss made like a Slack auto-response so that when you say the word 'airhorn', it answers with like a YouTube video with the air horn sound. And I was like, "You did this just for me. You made the Slack bot notification just for me." And he was like, "No, Jamey. I only do things that are important to our company."

 [Laughter]

LAURIE:	Amazing.

JAMEY:	And it makes me happy every time I see it. And it's just so silly. We also do farm meme Fridays which is the other thing I was going to say. I don't know, it's like a culture thing that we do on - farm meme Fridays. And I just really love them.

LAURIE:	The reason I came up with this question was because I just got -- okay, it's taken a year since my physical therapist yelled at me and told me that having a side shoulder bag that's really heavy, that like pushes me to the right side is terrible for my body and I should not do it anymore. So it's taken me a year of searching for the perfect backpack and that's ridiculous. But I don't care because I'm a small, petite person and I have a 15-inch laptop. And finding a backpack that solves both those problems is not easy. So I got it this past weekend and it has made me smile every minute of every day that I see it. And that makes the year of searching for it worth it. And it's completely superfluous. But I love the idea that there's something associated with the start of my day that makes me smile before I even leave for the office or even bring it upstairs if I'm working from home.

REIN:	Okay. I'm going to do two because that's how I roll. The first one is superfluous in that it's like not a requirement for me but it's really cool when it happens. So a thing that our team will often do when someone has a complaint in a retro or otherwise expresses frustration is they'll ask, "Hey, how can I help you with that?" And it's a small thing, but I think it demonstrates a lot of things that are going right on the team. And if you're a manager then you can demonstrate that behavior by asking that question at those times. And then that will show your team that it's [inaudible] to do that. The actual superfluous thing is for some reason, at some point in the prehistory of the team, [inaudible] on the team, someone tried to get better seen emoji response for someone saying they're taking a sick day. And what they ended up with was the [inaudible] emoji. So, I don't know exactly how that happened. But now whenever someone is sick, they get the [inaudible] emoji response. And one of our onboarding tasks for our team is literally explain our idiosyncratic emoji usage.

LAURIE:	Amazing.

JAMEY:	That's amazing. We used sweet potato as like approval because if you type in the word sweet, it's the only thing that comes up.

[Laughter]

JACOB:	Our favorite is the dumpster fire emoji, which you can add from admin Slack. Mine is a story that happened to me recently. So, I had to have my Mac service. And you know, when they send it back to you, you have to set up everything again. So, I'm setting up my development environment and I'm sort of working through the sort of interesting particularities of our company's codebase and just sort of working along through that. And I found myself thinking of like, "I can't remember how hard was this for me on day one when I started my job." And I honestly couldn't remember. But what it's making me think of is, I don't know if this is the proof of this or not, but how hard is it to set up your development environment because that's like the first thing you did. And so, I think what I'm going to be doing the next time we hire somebody, I'm going to let them know, "Hey, because I am infamous for having computer problems, I've set up my development environment more times than I care to admit. I may be an expert at it. Let me know if you have any questions because I'm here to help." Because honestly, that should be a low friction thing.

LAURIE:	You are right up for it that you could pass to them too.

JACOB:	Yeah, we do. I've been working on that. And it's something that seems like new things come up all the time.

LAURIE:	Definitely.

JOHN:	This has been a fascinating discussion. I'm so glad we managed to get this all put together and we got some great guests on here from our Slack group. Speaking of our Slack group, if you like what we're doing and you'd like to join the Slack group and hang out with all of these really cool people and have conversations like this all the time, you can go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. And if you contribute anything more than a dollar a month, you will be given an invite into the Slack and you'll be as cool as we are. Thanks everyone for being on the show.

JAMEY:	This is really great. I love it when we bring in people from the community, even on short notice.

LAURIE:	Thanks for having us.

JACOB:	Thanks, I love it.