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JAMEY: Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 199 of Greater Than Code, a very exciting number in my opinion. I am one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with fellow panelist, Avdi Grimm. 

AVDI: Hello, and I am here today with Jessica Kerr. 

JESSICA: And I'm here today with our guest Amy Newell. Amy Newell graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard University with a degree in Comparative Religion and Women’s Studies. Then she did post-graduate studies in Computer Science. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she's an engineering director at Wistia.

And Amy has written about suicide, psych wards, adultery, and Brazilian bikini waxes. She manages software engineers, does stand-up comedy, reads Taro, advocates for the mentally ill, and parents two teenagers in a pandemic. 

Also, she has an amazing boot collection. She can identify your boots, brand, and probably year from across the room. And you can find her with serious stuff on Twitter @amynewell that's N-E-W-E-L-L. But the real stuff is on Instagram @amywearsboots.

Amy, thank you for coming today. 

AMY: Thank you for having me, Jess that was quite an introduction. [Laughs]

JESSICA: Well, you sent us a lot of options. 

AMY: I know, because I just realized that I had all of these different ways of presenting myself. The first one you were meeting was the one that I submitted to my eighth grader's school district so that I could get approved to homeschool, which was not on my plan for 2020 but is what I will be doing with the 13-year-olds this year in addition to all of the other stuff that I already have in my life. That'll be very exciting, for some definition of exciting. 

JESSICA: This is a year of developing skills we never really wanted to develop. 

AMY: Yeah. That's actually really -- I know you're about to ask me what my superpower is.

JESSICA: [Laughs]

AMY: So I will circle back to the superpower question. But what's really interesting is asking someone "what is something you know a lot about that you wish you didn't know anything about?" So for me, it's psychiatric meds. I would love to live in a world where I don't have to know a ton about psych meds. But instead, I live in a world where I have a Stahl's Psychopharmacology Prescribers Guide within arm's reach because I have to think about those things. Anyway, do you want to ask me about my superpower now?

JAMEY: I feel like you already asked yourself.

[Laughter]

JESSICA: I know. I feel like I should say something different. But I really do want to know what is your superpower today and how did you acquire it?

AMY: So last time I was on the show, I said my superpower was I was really good at dealing with suffering, like emotional pain, which is true. But I also just realized that I'm really good at search algorithms. And I don't mean like depth-first or that kind of search algorithm. I mean something is lost in a house. How do you find it? I'm really good at knowing where I should look to find a thing. I don't know how I acquired that power exactly. [Laughs] But it's super useful. 

JAMEY: So how do you find something? What's your logic behind it?

JESSICA: That does sound useful. 

AMY: Yeah. I think it has something to do with pretty good visual memory and sense, good visual scanning. I'm good at foraging for mushrooms, I don't, because I don't want to accidentally die by eating a mushroom that I misidentified. But I'm good at seeing -- 

JESSICA: But if you wanted them, you could find them.

AMY: Yeah, but I'm good at seeing little things or recognizing landmarks. Like yesterday my partner was like, "Where's the chicken broth?" And I'm like, "Start your search looking on all the high cabinets in the kitchen and begin with the cabinets above the seltzer maker." So it's a different algorithm for everything.

JESSICA: Your chicken broth might be expired. [Laughs]

AMY: It's not. 

JESSICA: Anything in my house that's up that high is probably expired. 

AMY: I have to make really good use of my shelf space because I've got six months of food in the house because I'm one of those pandemic weirdos. And there's just not a lot of storage space.

JESSICA: Somebody told me the other day that this is also a property that they've seen in senior developers is that as they're reading code, they just note things that, "Huh that's interesting." And then two weeks later it's "Why is it doing this?" And they are like, "Hmm, I saw this conditional in a class over here. You might want to look there."

AMY: That's interesting, yeah. When I think about my work as a manager, it's been a pretty long time since I've written code even nonprofessionally or unprofessionally, I guess.

[Laughter]

AMY: That ability to kind of just remember like, "Oh, I think I heard someone over there talking about that. Why don't you go ask them?" Kind of making those connections.

JAMEY: Would you call finding things in code also spatial awareness because I hadn't thought about it like that, but I think I might. 

AMY: Maybe. I think it's visual actually because I think about how do you spell a word? I spell a word by closing my eyes and seeing it. It's like a visual memory of the word. So I think that remembering where you saw a conditional or -- I have a lot of books, and I like to leave highlights in them -- Where did I leave a book on the bookcase? That's visual memory, and I think it's the same for code too. But I'm just speculating. 

JAMEY: I have one trick that helps with being able to find things around the house. And it's whenever I can't find something and I struggle, when I do find it, I move it to the first place I looked.

JESSICA: Oh, that's really smart. 

AMY: That makes a ton of sense and probably would work with code too. If there is something like, why is this here? Well, where did you look for it first? Can we move it there? 

JAMEY: Yeah. Either that or at least if we can't have it in all the places we need it, we can put a comment or a clue. 

AMY: Oh, breadcrumb. 

[Laughter]

JESSICA: Amy, we hear you know something about toxic masculinity. 

AMY: I think this originally came up in conversation with Jamey when we were talking a few months ago about hierarchies in engineering roles - so what is considered a real engineer versus what is considered like not real engineering and the way that plays out all across sort of software and tech generally -- so, okay, most masculine kernel hackers security folks. And of course, you hear about all the incredibly toxic ways that plays out in those engineering subcultures. And then the lower down the stack you are, the more manly and then the more you're sort of writing code rather than talking to people. Front-end is somehow supposed to be less technical than other --

JESSICA: But it's so much harder.

AMY: I know. I know. [Laughs] 

AVDI: And confirmed.

[Laughter]

AMY: So that's why I didn't do much front-end when I was writing code because I really wasn't very good at it. And it was very hard and frustrating and even the way that people think about quality engineering as being different. I saw an argument, argument is maybe too strong a word, but it was something -- I think I put the tweet thread in that giant email of junk I sent to you all, which was just two different security people talking about which of their types of security was more technical.

[Laughter]

AMY: And I didn't understand any of the details of what their types of security were. But I was like, "Do y'all even know what you mean? Is there any content to that word at all at this point?"

JESSICA: Technical. 

AMY: Technical. I meant to look up what is the dictionary definition of technical. But plenty of things have a body of knowledge that you have to master and techniques that you have to use to accomplish a goal. And yet some of those things are called technical and some of those things are called not technical or not masculine enough.

AVDI: Or they get broken into hard and soft.

AMY: Yeah. I think some of the hardest things that I have done in my career as a software engineer are having really challenging conversations about feedback and how people's actions are impacting other people and suggestions about how they could change those actions to have a better impact on other people. That is really hard to do. And it's also very emotionally hard. It doesn't feel good to do it, but it's somehow considered a soft skill.

JESSICA: Yeah. Soft like squishy. It's hard to measure, it's hard to know you're doing it right. And it's kind of the same with front-end. It's harder to know you're doing it right because, at some level, you have to look at it and look at it in 18 different browsers and 18 different screen sizes. And maybe that's part of what people see as technical is they can be sure they're doing it right. 

AMY: That is interesting. 

JESSICA: That there is a right answer and gosh, darn it. They're going to get it.

AMY: But there's not. [Laughter] You can still do things in a lot of ways. 

JESSICA: There are kinds of correctness that we can measure but really those are the puzzles. You can call them the hard technical problems. But the fact that they're technical, that they're in the computer, which makes them reproducible and it makes them measurable, and you can reason about them using symbolic logic, that makes them easier. 

AVDI: Yeah. There's the tractability there when you can reduce them to those terms.

JESSICA: And not everyone can do that symbolic logic and think through that stuff. It's not easy, naturally, necessarily so respect to be able to do it. But the power of a software developer is connecting that way of talking to computers to ways of talking to humans. 

AMY: Yes. And that, again, is considered a soft skill that is not necessarily worth mastering. I mean, I don't want to go on this kind of oh, no engineers understand this and certainly --

JAMEY: I know a lot of engineers who do. 

AMY: Yeah, sure. And yet there are still ways that I see this -- It continues to have, I think, a huge impact on the industry as a whole and on kind of what people's sort of expectations of what is expected of them as engineers and sort of the engineering cultures that they're in, and how they expect to be compensated, and kind of what they think they can get away with or where they want to devote their energies to learning more about --

JESSICA: At work the other day, we were talking about possible ways to measure skill advancement and some of the ways we were talking about were if we want to measure whether people are getting better at writing secure code, on one hand, we can look at static analysis that we put in the build process, and we can look at numbers there. How do you measure whether people understand the aspects of secure code that are not amenable to static analysis? Are they sending the right pieces of data to the right places? You have to know the data to understand that. 

And I was thinking we could ask them to tell a story about a time they noticed a security problem and fixed it. And if they post that in the internal Slack channel, then one, people around the company could learn from that. And two, we could give them points as this would demonstrate understanding. And it demonstrates actual helping. And I'm picturing the engineers being like, "What? I have to do social activities? I should be measured on my technical skills." But the fact is it's the social aspect of being human that gives those technical skills value or at the very least drastically increases their value to the organization as a whole. But I can anticipate engineers not wanting to be measured. They don't want to go into management. They want an individual contributor track where it's just about continuing to solve puzzles. 

AMY: Yeah, it's funny the way you said, "Tell a story about a time." I just got off a phone screen and when I do phone screens, they're mostly behavioral interviewing questions. Tell me about a time when you had to X. What did you do? What was the outcome? And you do that because instead of asking, "How do you feel or what's your theory?" you're asking someone to articulate the story of a time they actually put whatever theory that was into practice and what happens. Everybody's going to say, "Oh yes. I love to collaborate."

[Laughter]

When you ask, "Tell me about a time that you had a disagreement with someone on your team or you were having problems with someone on your team. What was that disagreement? How did you go about trying to resolve it, and what was the outcome?" Then it's exactly that. The storytelling part of it shows that they actually sort of can walk that walk, I guess, or gives at least hopefully, a greater level of confidence of that, more signal is what I meant to say. 

IC versus manager track, I think was the other thread that I wanted to pull out there. It's super important I think to have those two different tracks because not everybody is going to get their dopamine hits off of doing management work especially for me, my whole job is management.  Folks who want to get those quick little I'd shipped something hit, they either have to be able to -- When you move from IC to manager, at some point, you have to get your dopamine hit somewhere else. And if that doesn't work for you, then you're not going to be happy doing the management work. That's a totally separate issue from whether you can develop the skills to do that. [Chuckles] 

JAMEY: I find it ironic that the individual contributor track is named individual contributor. And yet at least when I was at Stripe -- But I think generally when you look at the higher levels, they're about having influence and impact wider and wider in the organization all of which are social. [00:18:15]

AMY: Yeah, 100%. And that's as it should be because yes, it's not that there's no use ever for a super senior person who really just wants to sit in a corner and not have to interact. But I think there are a lot fewer kinds of -- So I don't want to say there's never a use for that sort of role. But the vast majority of product engineers as they grow as ICs, if you have an idea for an important new rearchitecture, you need to pitch that. You need to get people to sort of understand why you want to make that choice and what are the tradeoffs and that's -- And if you can't get people on board with that, then your project is not going to be successful. And obviously, part of management is helping to do that. I work with senior ICs and tech leads all the time to sort of help support that kind of mobilizing of cross-team, cross engineer, just mobilizing those connections to get something done so that everybody can move in the same direction that some group of people has agreed is a good direction to move in.

JAMEY: If you want to move the code in a direction, you have to move the people.

AMY: Yeah, precisely. And then the other thing is that a healthy org, I think, has a mix of people at different levels of sort of experience. And so you need your senior folks to be good mentors and maybe different senior folks are good mentors at different levels. Everybody's an individual and everybody has a different set of things that they're going to have their maximum impact in that particular org with that particular other group of people that they're working with, and that's kind of unique to each person. 

So one of the things I love about management is sort of helping people figure out all right, well, at this moment in time, given what you love, and what you're best at, and what we need, here's a suggestion for your place of maximum impact right now. And so maybe circling back, maybe mentoring isn't that for everybody. And then maybe mentoring is a lot of that for particular people who are really good at that and really that's their sweet spot. But generally speaking, yes, senior ICs also need to have these so-called soft people skills to deliver a product that people will pay money for.

JAMEY: So we don't see soft skills as difficult or important or valued. We want the technical stuff and that technical stuff is masculine. 

AMY: Typically coded masculine. Yes. 

JAMEY: Or ingressive as Eugenia Cheng would say.

AMY: Ooh, ingressive. I do not know that word. 

JAMEY: Okay. This is an important thing to talk about because Eugenia Cheng's book just came out. It's called x + y something, something, something, gender. empire

AVDI: A mathematician rethinks gender or something like that. 

JAMEY: Yeah. So Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician. And I met her at the (inaudible) Conference. She was on Greater Than Code, I think it's episode 82. And she has these terms ingressive and congressive that you can often substitute for masculine and feminine in our discourse. They're not inherently gendered but yet in our culture it kind of fits that way. Ingressive is advancing yourself, is pushing toward your own purposes within a group or in opposition to a group. And congressive is advancing the group, is working toward the betterment of the group, not just yourself. 

So when you are moving a division forward or a whole software team forward, you have to be congressive with that. You have to move the people and the code together. Whereas if it's about closing the most tickets, or being the most technical, that's very ingressive. It's about you. Maybe it's going to move something forward that also helps the company, but it's individual.

AMY: That makes sense. And it's interesting. And I also want to read that book just going to add that to the very large pile of books next to my bed right now. [Laughter]

JAMEY: I just ordered the hardcover. 

AVDI: Oh, good. I am interested in hearing more about ways that toxic masculinity shows up in technical discourse or in the technical workplace. There I go using that term technical. But what are some ways that it shows up that I might not look for or be aware of because it's just in the water? So another way I ask that -- I know that you're involved in a lot of hiring decisions. And I'm curious what are some of the yellow flags or red flags that somebody might come in thinking oh, this is an asset. And you recognize that as, okay, this could be something toxic.

AMY: Sure. So when you talk to people, a lot of them are coming out of orgs that are very driven by the measurement of individual contributions. So sometimes you'll see that in -- I once had someone apologize for saying that he took a couple days to help a new engineer get up to speed, to onboard basically. This idea that asking for help or being very generous with assistance or sometimes sort of a subtle sense that what you're doing when you're working on your own thing is your real work and anything else is not your real work. 

So I spend a lot of time emphasizing the other pieces of work that I consider to be real work, helping and hiring, mentoring. We have a Frontend Guild at Wistia. So the folks who are running the Frontend Guild and taking those notes, and organizing those meetings, and giving those presentations, and facilitating those conversations, that's all real work. And reviewing other people's PRs or pairing with someone, all of those kinds of things are real work. I think in really healthy workplace cultures, there's still this sort of anxiety in the back of people's heads that really -- And I think it's especially based on kind of what their prior experience has been. I like to say that everybody comes into an org carrying the baggage of whatever they just came out of and what their prior experiences have been. And so one of my jobs as a manager is to help people feel safe enough to understand what that baggage is and be able to kind let it go.

JESSICA: [Chuckles] So a part of them working in your organization is you have to get them to stop working in every previous organization. 

AMY: Yes. Well, recognizing that for a lot of reasons -- I mean, a lot of us have baggage that's really hard to let go because of the things that have happened to us in the past. There's some baggage that's hard to let go. And the best you can do is say, "All right. I know I have this baggage. Let me look in this moment. Am I seeing what's in front of me through the lens of the baggage? And is that fair and reality or is it the baggage?" I mean, it's the same in personal relationships. [Laughs] Am I bringing this baggage from this prior friendship into this new friendship where it's not relevant? Nobody lets go of the baggage of the entire sort of technical culture and all of their workplace. Again, I use technical like that. 

The entire culture around software engineering and tech companies, nobody is able to let go of that baggage entirely. So you have to understand that. And part of that baggage is the sort of toxic masculinity that most of us have experienced or been part of. I've been in tech now -- 1999 I think is when I took my first programming class. So that's a long time with a lot of stuff that builds up. And what I'm finding now at this point in my career that's been really, I think, accelerated for me in the last couple of years -- It's funny the first talk I gave when I met you Avdi -- Jamey you might have been there. I don't recall. It was at that...

AVDI: Buffalo.

AMY: Yeah. Buffalo Code Day. 

JAMEY: Yeah, I was there.

AMY: That was the first talk I ever gave at a tech conference. And I had a whole slide that just said "patriarchy" on it. And I was completely terrified to give that talk because I'm like, I'm going to stand up in front of a bunch of engineers and say the word "patriarchy" which is not something that I had kind of been shooting my mouth off about in public as a director of engineering or as an IC before that for my entire career. So that was the first time I even maybe suggested that there could possibly be, which is absurd to me looking back. 

And then since that moment and just accelerating over the last couple of years, really speaking up more and more for just even small unintended ways that people in the industry are kind of sticking in those kinds of patterns. I say "unimportant" in quotes I guess because those things can feel very -- I mean, we're starting to talk about microaggressions here and microaggressions that other people are not aware of and calling those out more. And also recognizing that while I'm super good at calling those out on sort of the gender access, I have had to do and have a long way to go on being able to call those out on other axis like race. 

JAMEY: One thing I think that's interesting that I think you've been kind of getting at is that toxic masculinity is something that's pretty pervasive and insidious and you have to kind of unlearn it. And I think that this stuff that we're talking about with tech is also something you have to kind of make a point to unlearn. And everyone keeps using the word technical and then being like, "There, I did it." because you have to unlearn it. And so I guess I'm wondering how do you start doing that?

AMY: To the extent that I have begun to unlearn some of it, it's an obsessive level of self-questioning or self-interrogation. And by no means want to hold myself up as I'm so good at this or I'm not missing -- It's all a journey. 

JESSICA: Is it like the baggage thing? You mentioned that when you get an experienced engineer and that experience comes with baggage, these things aren't separable. And then you have to ask them when they see something, are they seeing what's in front of them or the baggage?

AMY: It's like that. Some of it is certainly like having the gift of feedback. And so being able to receive feedback from others about things, which sucks, it hurts. I love feedback, but I don't like how it makes me feel. It's painful. Having that willingness to just be like, "Oh, I made this judgment. Are there reasons that" -- or "I said this thing. What are some possible reasons why I did that or behaved in that way?" And which of those are relevant to this moment at hand and which of those aren't?" I'm trying to think of -- I want to give some concrete examples. And I feel like I'm about to -- Okay, So tell me about a time when...

[Laughter]

And I want to tell you about a time when -- And sometimes this does happen in interviews too. You put people on the spot and they're like, "Oh, gosh. I know I have a bunch of these stories, but I just can't think of one." And then you have to correct for how anxious is this person likely to be in this context? And is there a way that I can help them feel more relaxed so that's just easier for them to think? I don't appear on podcasts frequently, so my anxiety is higher than usual. 

AVDI: That was part of the learning process for me is just recognizing that some people are baseline a lot more anxious than I am in the context that I'm used to being in. There are people that do not feel like they belong the way I do. I'm supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be at the front of this computer writing this code, or I'm supposed to be in front of this microphone. That is not a universal experience. And I think for me, that's part of sort of implicit toxic masculinity in the industry is just that expectation that anybody who belongs there is going to feel like they belong there.

AMY: Yeah, I think that's a really great point. A lot of what I see is folks who really want to unlearn that stuff and don't want to contribute but just aren't aware of what they're doing. So for example, if you're a white guy and you're in a room with a bunch of other white guys, and you're kind of asking pretty direct questions like, "Why did you do this? What about that? What happened here?" And all of those folks may feel completely comfortable with that conversation because it doesn't occur to them that you're questioning their ability to do their job. And so that conversation can look completely fine. And then you put someone whose experience has been 'I don't belong', and they get questions like that and they're like, "Oh, wow. This person doesn't trust me. They doubt my ability to do my job. They're hostile." And a lot of times people just aren't aware. They haven't seen that. They haven't heard that perspective. They need someone to tell them, "Hey, this is what this could feel like to someone who doesn't look like you." 

JAMEY: It reminds me of personal relationships when you're starting a relationship, especially if it's a potentially romantic relationship, everything you say is about how do you feel about me? And then the content. Every conversation is about the relationship first and only secondarily the content. And it feels like that in code reviews too until you're solid and secure.

AMY: Yes. And some people come into an org already super solid and secure and some people because of their prior experiences -- And some people you need to -- We're talking about psychological safety. So if you have had the experience of feeling psychologically safe, then you come into an org and you're like, "Hey, let's change this. Let's do that. I belong here. I'm comfortable." And if you haven't had that experience or you've had that experience sometimes, but maybe not in your most recent role, then you come in and you're like -- I mean, when I came to Wistia as a director, I spent my first few months being like, well, I don't know anything about anything here because I'm new but maybe X. And in a new environment, I don't want to trigger anyone's "aggressive woman" stuff. And I want to be clear - I love Wistia. It's a really great workplace environment. Coming in new, I felt pretty confident about that but I still, because of my history, came in with care. 

And so you see the different ways that people come into the org. And what I love is when you see someone who hasn't had these past experiences that have gone well for them. And then that moment when you're able to help them realize that this is different, and that they are supported, and that they aren't going to get backed up and they are going to be listened to, and to see them be able to blossom in their role and grow really a lot more quickly than might have been anticipated from just the interview process, that's the stuff that warms my heart as an engineering manager.

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JAMEY: So we've talked a lot about the word technical and the problems with that. But I think that an even worse word could be non-technical because people use that kind of as a sledgehammer sometimes. It's like an insult to call someone non-technical. And so I think that that's interesting because obviously, A, it's not insulting to not be a programmer. That's allowed. I do think that it's sometimes helpful when I'm talking to a manager or a product manager, if someone understands code the same way that I do, I talk to them differently because I say things that we have a shared understanding about. And so I do think it's helpful to have a distinction, but I wonder how we could make that distinction in a way that's less accusatory than that.

AMY: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that it's really an issue of understanding kind of the domains in which people do have expertise and feel comfortable in their expertise and then separately, do have expertise, but for various social reasons, don't feel comfortable in their expertise and then where people don't have expertise and do need you to share in a different way. I work with marketers, and I don't have any marketing expertise. And they don't necessarily have a software engineering expertise. When they're telling me about sort of marketing stuff, they have to explain it to me. I've certainly learned a lot more about marketing since I came to Wistia because our customers are marketers. Marketing is very important to our business. But that's not my expertise. And so really just respecting one another's expertise -- I mean, if you want to go even more broader, then let's talk about different types of expertise in tech organizations. This whole division between skilled and unskilled labor, all labor is skilled labor. [Laughs] 

I think I remember reading an example about sort of how the people who clean hotel rooms, the number of hotel rooms that they have to clean in a certain amount of time and the number of things that they have to do to prep a hotel room for a next guest, which I'm sure is even way more now right now. But I couldn't go in and do that. I would have to learn to do that. And it's the same with the people who are driving for Uber and Lyft. They not only have to master whatever they need to do to be able to drive and deal with customers, but there's all this funky stuff that they have to master about understanding how those apps are workings so that they can -- like whole blogs that I've seen of people just being like, "All right, well, Uber just did X. So now we as drivers have to do Y." 

Again, I don't know what jobs people are doing that don't require some expertise. And so I basically go into any conversation -- I will say I aspirationally attempt to enter any conversation with someone no matter what they do for work with some expectation that they have expertise that I don't and that I also have expertise that they don't and that we are engaged in explaining to one another our various areas of expertise in order to collaborate.

JESSICA: Amy, you were talking about that beautiful moment when an engineer realizes that they are valued here, that they are supported. It made me think about yesterday. I took my youngest child to get their first set of glasses, which is always a beautiful moment. And on the way home, they're like, "Why are there so many distinct leaves on each tree?" 

[Laughter]

JESSICA: You were like, who even needs to see this clearly? 

[Laughter]

AMY: Actually, I do remember that exact moment with my daughter, when she got her glasses. And she was like, "Oooh." 

[Laughter]

JESSICA: So this is what it's like when I don't have to constantly strain to decide whether that comment was about me. What does it say? Do I belong here? 

AMY: Yes, exactly. And then you're able to devote all of that extra effort suddenly to doing your work. [Laughs]

JESSICA: You can see more clearly because you just don't have to use half your brain on do I belong? 

AMY: For me, so much of what that first talk that I gave where I talked about patriarchy was talking about what I had learned from starting to speak openly about my mental illness and the amount of energy that it would take to cover that up at this point and to try to pretend that I do not experience mental illness. I wouldn't be able to function at all in my job actually at this point in my career. So as I started to shed all of that sort of covering up that I was having to do, to be more of my authentic self in the workplace, that was just a lot of extra energy that I then was able to devote to my work. Which is why I always talk about how being able to be your authentic self and feel supported and seen as that person, is not this soft, not necessary to business thing. It's how people can be their most productive. 

JAMEY: It's how we can really apply all of our mental energies to the job at hand. And software development is hard. It takes all of our mental energies.

AVDI: Yeah. And something this makes me think of is just there's kind of -- I feel like there's a first level of awareness of toxic masculinity issues and a lot of toxicity issues that's just the awareness of oh, some people have a harder time with this than others, so we need to support them in feeling more comfortable in our culture. But then there's a second coat. There's a second level where you start to say, "Wait a minute. What if our culture could be better? Instead of helping people fit into this culture and lean in, what if the culture could be better for everyone?" And that's where I start looking at things like getting away from strong opinions loosely held which turns out to be very toxic. It's something that I learned as a young engineer. This is how we do things. And it turns out to be a really toxic pattern where the loudest voice in the room often just makes everybody else feel belittled.

AMY: It can so often be disputing and conflict just for the fun of it, arguing for the fun of it. Well, yeah, some people find arguing for the fun of it fun. And a lot of other people are not ever going to be able to experience that as fun because there's real consequences involved. [Chuckles]

AVDI: And there's just so much emotional energy that we don't think about because part of toxic masculinity, I think, is we don't count emotional energy as a thing. 

JESSICA: Because anger is not an emotion.

AVDI: Right. Anger is not an emotion. That's just how we communicate. And so we burn so much energy on those interactions on asserting how right we are.

AMY: Avdi, I think that the thing that you said about sort of supporting people coming into a culture versus also helping other folks lean out -- Someone did a New York Times Op-Ed, that's, like, women don't need to lean in more, men need to lean out more. And that struck me a lot. That was a while back. But actually, the world would be better if people did -- I spent a lot of time being told "Oh, you should work on your I'm sorries, or your exclamation points, or don't be so careful." And I'm like, actually, I don't think that's a bad way to be, that sort of social extending.

JAMEY: It's congressive.

AMY: Yes, it's congressive. But it does require emotional energy.

JAMEY: I just think that it's really interesting once you start noticing the way in society whenever there's an issue, society really wants to put the onus of fixing it on the people that are experiencing it in a way that doesn't actually make sense. And once you start noticing that, you notice it everywhere. And that was what struck me when you were talking about this like, "Oh, you don't feel valued. Well, here is what you have to do to feel valued."

JESSICA: "You have imposter syndrome. Fix it."

AMY: Yeah. As I've grown as an engineering manager, I want to use my power for good to the extent that I do have power and privilege at this time in my -- One of the reasons I talk about my mental illness is because lots of other people can't. I make space and constantly thinking of the ways that I can make space myself and also help a lot of great folks around me make more space who aren't aware of the ways in which they are not making space. Like, hey, offer to schedule the meeting or the lunch, or take the notes, or just talk less sometimes. [Laughs]

JESSICA: Or look for opportunities to say, "Oh, you're right. Thank you. I was wrong. That's really helpful. Good job." Because if the senior engineer in the room says, "I was wrong." that gives space for other people to be wrong and suddenly you're not so grrr. 

JAMEY: Or I wanted to hear what X person had to say. 

JESSICA: Notice the person who wants to talk. I use my powers of interrupting sometimes to say that. And as a parent, it's really powerful to say, "Oh yeah, good point. Let's go with your suggestion."

AMY: Oh, that's so hard for me, Jess.

[Laughter]

AMY: We haven't talked about parenting a ton, but I feel like I do learn a lot from what I understand of your parenting in terms of being more of like "Yes, and..." kind of parent rather than a "No, but..." I'm trying to "Yes and…" more. 

JESSICA: I see your painting on the dining room wall. And can we paint on a different wall too almost entirely for the rest of the time? How about the basement? 

[Laughter]

AMY: Cool.

JESSICA: And with that, it's time for reflections. 

JESSICA: I had a couple of little things that struck me. One was that Amy said, "Every person has a unique set of ways they can have an impact, the ways they're going to best contribute." And you want a diversity of those. You want a lot of people who are able to contribute in different ways. And yet that makes it incredibly hard to define a career path and say, "This is what you need to do in order to get ahead." And in particular, there's all those ways you mentioned, organizing the meetings, giving the presentations, internal nervous system wiring kind of work. They're not valued nearly as much as sitting in your cube typing. But there's a reason we form a company instead of farming out work to individual contractors. The software hangs together because we hang together and hanging together is our work. 

JAMEY: There is something that Avdi said that was really striking to me that I'm going to keep thinking about - feeling like you belong and not realizing at first that other people are having a different experience with that. And I think that that makes a lot of sense and is also kind of true from the other side, feeling like you're struggling to belong and not really fully occurring to you that other people aren't dealing with that. And I think that the idea of being aware of both of those mindsets and how different people might be in different ones of them is going to be helpful as a communication tool both ways, which I think is interesting.

JESSICA: Because if you weren't sure you belonged and you were like, "Why did you do that? Where did that come from?" Then it would seem like -- I can imagine that if I didn't feel like I belonged and I said that, it would be because I'm trying to push myself in. I'm trying to show that I know something whereas from a place of belonging, I just really want to know where that came from. Is that accurate, Jamey? Or maybe I missed it. 

AMY: I think what I understood Jamey to be saying was that the folks who for whatever reason in whatever context do feel that they belong, don't have a real sense of what the experience is like from the other side, nor do the people who don't feel like they belong understand what it feels like to just, oh, obviously I belong here. [Laughs]

JAMEY: Yeah. I think that that mindset will lead people to communicate differently in a way that if I understand that is why they're communicating differently, it gives me a better insight into what they really mean. Because I think you can say things that are frustrating or hurtful to someone and you totally didn't mean it that way, but I have interpreted it that way. And I don't think the onus is totally on me to interpret. I think it's also on you to communicate. But if I understand where you're coming from, I might be able to say, "Oh, so and so said this to me and I found it hurtful, but I can tell that that's not what they meant." You know what I mean? 

AMY: Yes. I just had another thought, which I don't know is a reflection. It might be a whole other episode. But it was about the onus being on the person -- Maybe this is my reflection, that the onus really should mostly be on the people who do have the power and privilege in any conversation to be doing most of the work to be aware of that and be thinking how is my power and my privilege affecting this other person's interpretation of what I'm saying? What might they be seeing that I am not seeing? And how can I help them feel comfortable enough to even be in a position to be able to tell me that which is the piece that is necessary. Because I know there's lots of -- I'm really good at picking up on toxic masculinity. I have a long way to go of picking up racial microaggressions. I'm white. So the onus is on me. All right, well, what is, checking my privilege, basically? And so that's the burden we should, to the extent that we have power and privilege in the world, that we should have and should carry. That's appropriate.

JAMEY: Amy, this was a really amazing conversation. Even in all this time, we talked about so many great things, and there's so much more that we could still discuss. But I want to thank you personally for coming on the show. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this kind of stuff with us.

AMY: Thank you so much for having me. I love talking about things like this. So I was really excited to be invited and thanks a lot. 

JAMEY: Thank you. And for any of our listeners who want to kind of participate in these kinds of conversations as they're ongoing, we do have a Slack community. You can donate to our Patreon. If you donate even a dollar, you'll get an invite to the Slack community. And in fact, we are still doing a thing we've been doing all through kind of the pandemic season, which is that if you can't afford to donate to us, you can just ask one of us directly for an invite, and we'll bring you in. And we have a job board, and we have good conversations and a cool community. 

JESSICA: We'll see you all next time for episode 200.

JAMEY: Two-two-two 200.

JESSICA: All right. Bye. Bye, all.