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JAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 181 of Greater Than Code. I am one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with one of your other wonderful hosts, Carina Zona.

CARINA: Hi. And I'm here with John Sawers.

JOHN: Thanks, Carina. I'm here with our guest, Aaron Aldrich. He is a Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly, Founding Organizer of DevOpsDays Hartford, and frequent DevOpsDays organizer and participant all over. When not talking about DevOps and Resilience Engineering, you can find him talking about mental health with osmi-help.org or running emotional intelligence workshops with me at EmotionalAPI.com. Welcome to the show, Aaron.

AARON: Thanks for having me.

JOHN: So, we like to kick things off with the same question for everyone. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? The same two questions, rather.

AARON: It is two questions. I thought about this one because I always am wondering, it's like, "How do you judge yourself on superpowers?" But I think if I had to answer, I have to go with what I think my wife would say about it, is that I've kind of got this ability to just relate to a lot of people on any level. I think it's a side effect of having way too many hobbies, which is probably some other side effect of ADHD. But because I'm always interested and curious about so many different things, I can always hold a conversation with just about anyone on whatever topic they're into. And it's like, "Oh, I'm going to go make friends with this group now." And, "Hey, what do you guys do? Let's be friends, too." So I think that might be my superpower.

JAMEY: I've experienced this about you. 

AARON: [Laughs] Oh, good. There's at least two of us that agree then, so it must be it.

JOHN: [Chuckles]

AARON: So, yeah. I don't know if I acquired it through practice or through coping mechanisms of having way too many hobbies. 

JOHN: Aside from the obvious ways that having that superpower affect your life, what are some of the less obvious ways that it has affected you?

AARON: Maybe I'll start with the obvious ways that it works out for me. One of the benefits, especially being in DevRel, that's super useful. I've managed to turn that ability into a solid career path because it's easy to connect with folks on different levels, especially for a career that's largely about trying to empathize with multiple groups at the same time. It helps that I can do that. I can relate to folks that are both on the development side and on the business side and understand the push and pull that sits somewhere in the middle, which is really useful.

It's definitely got me in more places than I've expected. I've told this story before, but one of my favorite, like, I don't know how I ended up in this room moments was a number of years ago. I had been running some the DevOps meetups locally in Connecticut at the time and happened to know some of the folks at Optum that were there and happened to know Nathen Harvey from Chef at the time, now is at Google. And Chef happened to be doing like this [inaudible] Chef Day for Optum. They had all the engineers come down on the thing and managing invites from both groups of like the exact buy-in at Optum. [Inaudible], "Sure. Why don't you come down?" So just as someone completely unaffiliated with both of these, I got to hang out in like the executive roundtable room, just see how this company does this thing and like weighing in on DevOps ideas and topics from there. Yeah, it was really funny moment of like, "How did I end up in this room at this time," while being associated with nobody whatsoever. It was just kind of a fun moment to be there.

JAMEY: Sometimes I have to ask, how do you recommend other people to kind of tap into your superpower? And you mentioned that having a lot of hobbies. Can you tell us more about that? Like, what hobbies do you have and how did this lead you to meet new people?

AARON: Half of it is just say yes to trying new things. When you get new opportunities, I'm going to be like, "Sure, why not." Trying to think of when I was younger, I had an older cousin who I really looked up to, like he had a Nintendo before I had anything. So it was like, "Oh, sweet." So I got into video games with him. And he was way in the board gaming, so I got way into board gaming from that. I happen to have some musical abilities running in the family. So, I took music lessons really young. So I got way into music. I play electric bass primarily right now. Consequently, being in the music, it's like, "Oh, so I can connect with folks who are in the music appreciation realm, as well as folks that are playing instruments," and having just this eclectic taste in all music as well. Because I just try things out and appreciate it for what it is at some level. Anything that allows anyone to nerd out to some extent, I really enjoy.

Even cars, this is super technical and mechanical concept that happens there. It's like, "Oh, I can totally nerd out about that, too. This is super interesting, all the mechanics and physics that go into making this work and how this works." And so, yeah, I'll hang out with the gearheads and talk about that. And then I'll go hang out with the programming crew and figure out distributed systems and how these all connect, and then go hang out with all the musicians and they're all about the key changes and how this is working. So yeah, I just love the nerd out about everything, especially if there's some technical aspect to it, which will turn out as everything. Everything has a technical aspect to it.

JAMEY: I love the general appreciation of what people are interested in because people love it when you want to hear them talk about whatever the thing is that they're really interested in.

AARON: Oh, absolutely. I think my favorite part about it is watching other people get really excited to tell you about something, is one of my favorite things, too. And so it's like, "Oh, yeah. I want to be excited, too. Tell me about it."

CARINA: You mentioned earlier that everything has a technical aspect. And this is really interesting because I've met a fair number of musicians in the industry. So for you, what is the connection between music and that technical aspect and programming and the technical aspects of that? How do they connect for you?

AARON: When I was crafting music, I had the opportunity like music theory classes as well. And I think that's where it really starts to show up, because that's like computer science. It's all theory because it's all essentially Western music oriented and centered around what we find appealing in music and how sounds work together. It's really all this learned theory on top of a science that's underneath it, but largely like what appeals to people's ears. And it's just really interesting technical framework that you can lay on top of this art that happens on top. The actual playing is an entirely different and sometimes even separate thing from the theory that's underneath it, even though that's all in place.

And I think a lot of that is very similar to coding. There's this deep computer science theory and knowledge of how the sand make pictures on your screen. But coding all exist on top of it. It's all this other work that we put on top and all of this design that we put into it and choose what those pictures want to look like and choose how the code goes through and how the numbers get crunched. That's all propped up by this computer science theory that's underneath it. And I think music a lot the same way, too. You can hang out with a bunch of friends in your garage and make some sounds that sound cool to you without really understanding what's going underneath it. And you can do deep, deep study and have these crazy skill pieces. When you think of the jazz music, especially the bebop era of like John Coltrane's Giant Steps, which was entirely a technical show off piece of like, "Can I make music that switches through these many keys sound good?" That's largely the question that he started with and then wrote this amazing song out of it that has become a jazz standard for like, "If you can play this, then you've done pretty okay."

So I think where it diverges is like music often happens, like you can record it and play it back. And that's sort of a very programmatic aspect of it. You initiate a program and you can play it back. Or sheet music is like you write this program, but then humans have to interpret it and play it back. I think that's where the artistry of music shines, where computers always repeated by machines that repeat the same steps over and over again, where music is often interpreted and how these live moments where you can add additional levels of creativity that can shine in that moment. I'm feeling differently today than I was yesterday, so I'm going to play this song differently today than I did yesterday. Computer programming isn't really affected by the need of the computer, which is probably good. Computers are terrible enough already to not have bad days. 

JAMEY: Can you imagine if your computer is just like not feeling up to it today. I would be like, "Big mood, but please."  

AARON: Whenever the computer is like hiding in its room, listening to the Smiths. So I don't know what that version is. 

CARINA: I don't know. Mine has moods. Sometimes the fan will go on and never turn off. And it's a very unhappy day for a little computer.

AARON: That's true. I mean, on the macro scale. For the most part, our Kubernetes clusters don't have moods.

CARINA: That's good.

JOHN: Although let me bring up an interesting parallel to some of the other things we've talked about on the show about computer systems being sociotechnical systems and how the computers do the same thing every time, just like a musical instrument will play the same note if you strike it the same way. But the people need to work together to do all the right things together in the right order. And so, the same sort of dynamics come into play of organizing a jazz trio as it is organizing a dev team to run your Kubernetes cluster. You've got to have the team orchestrated to match up with the computer.

AARON: Yeah, actually that parallel goes a lot deeper and was brought up recently, as I think about it, at REdeploy conference last year, which is a Resilience Engineering Conference run by J. Paul Reed. One of the talks was about comparing the resilience of a musical group and how that actually works. How does this connect and why can they do things? Mistakes happen all the time in live music, but it just works. Things go wrong all the time, but it just keeps playing and it keeps rolling. What makes a highly skilled group differently from one that can't recover from that? What's the difference from a group that they start in the wrong tempo or the wrong key and they fall apart, have to completely stop and restart versus someone who can kind of fudge through it and then all that.

So, a lot of it has to do with the concept of common ground in a team. Understanding the same language and understanding the same context. Understanding the same terminologies and how each other interact. There's a long way to making high-performing resilient teams. So, the jazz trio that deeply understands the work that they do and how each other play are the kind of people that can be like, "Hey, we're going to play this song in this key, except I'm going to change up the chorus. Just follow me." They can have that conversation and everyone can come along and play it and they can make music out of it. 

Where again, with the garage band instance. You just get together for the first time, the garage band, you kind of have to play the song as it's written where everyone kind of gets lost and doesn't really know how to get out of that space where they've kind of screwed it up. And so, different aspects of how you recover from that are valid. Like in that case, "Okay, let's stop. Let's go back to the beginning and try again." And so, we build that context. So, yeah, that's a really interesting comparison.

Yesterday was Failover Conf from Gremlin. It was supposed to be Chaos Conf, but obviously they're not doing a live conference. So they renamed it Failover Conf, which is just a brilliant move for a Chaos Engineering company. And there was a couple of conversations about resilience, both from Amy Tobey and J. Paul Reed kind of lock-noted the whole event. And there was a conversation about common ground there as well. Like having strong common ground on your teams build more resilient teams. You're able to have those conversations -- like strong common ground kind of looks like the, "So, I finally told so and so." "Well, what did they say?" "Yeah, I thought they would react that way."  Kind of how a conversation you can have with a teammate that you're really close with where you never really complete the sentence, or you both perfectly communicate what's going on and know what's happening. That shows like really strong common ground in that group. And they're going to be really able to adapt and deal with change and deal with surprises really well, because they understand both their expertise, his own and each other really well. They know how to change with that.

One of the things that Paul is saying at the end was there's a sort of this interesting indicator of teams that move quickly and iterate fast on software. So, those people that are doing 10+ deploys a day. That's kind of an interesting indicator for adaptive capacity because they're used to changing constantly. And having the ability to roll back and having the ability to adjust with like, "Oh, that deploy was bad. Okay, let's fix it," and doing that sort of thing. So these teams are the ones that are doing actually really well right now. As we're all kind of dealing with constant crisis, those are the teams that are recovering and pivoting and, "All right. Working from home now. Cool. No problem." They're the ones dealing with that. Where other teams that maybe have less common ground, like they don't communicate as well, have to spend a lot of cycles trying to rebuild and maintain that common ground that they used to have by being co-located or sharing information a different way that now doesn't work because we're all at home.

JOHN: Are there ways that are good to increase that common ground and that ease of communication amongst the team?

AARON: I think it's different depending on your scenarios. Right now, the answer is probably really different than it would have been three months ago. I think right now the key aspect is a lot of the passive communication that would have occurred in an office, a lot of the sort of tribal knowledge that passes just by interacting has to be really purposeful. I'm assuming these teams are co-located and are now working remote. That's kind of the assumption for that sentence. But assuming that's true, and I think for a lot of people it is, there's a lot more intentionality about communication. You have to purposely initiate conversation, you have to purposely share knowledge rather than it just sort of happening every time you encounter it. But I think generally, it's a lot of working together. Like working on things together rather than separately working on different bits and then assembling them all at the end. I think it's teams that they look to deal with iteration and change, and it's a lot less bureaucratic oversight and a lot more the power dynamic shifting towards people actually doing work at the sharp end, as you would talk about in that context. When they have a lot of autonomy to work together and make decisions at that point, you can start to build that common ground rather than if all of your decisions are always made up the chain and passed down, you're just doing what you're told. You really don't have that opportunity as a team to connect and make decisions and understand each other and get that deep expertise.

JOHN: That's a really good perspective on it. I hadn't thought about it in these particular terms, but it makes a lot of sense that like the team is given work and then the team figures out how to do the work versus individuals are given individual work and then go off and do it. You get a very different team out of that process. I really like thinking about it like that.

AARON: Yeah, I think it's a lot of empowering people to work in a way that makes sense to them, in a way that they solve the problem and letting everyone kind of shine in their individual corners is a big aspect to it. 

There was actually a great analogy that Ken Mugrage from ThoughtWorks was talking to me a bit. He had a talk once that was something like, everything I need to know about DevOps I learned in the Marine Corps or something like that. And there's a really interesting concept. You think of, especially military as this very like command and control, but it's sort of the opposite. It's actually more like the way that decisions are passed down are like varying grades of resolution. Higher up might be like, "Hey, we need to control this city." And then a little bit further down, "All right. We need to get this sector." And then eventually it gets to a squad. It's like, "Hey, we need to control that building." So whatever you do, you need to take that ability. I don't care how you do it. That's all left up to the people making that decision. The people that know how each other work, they know their strengths and their weaknesses, the tools they're working with. They've trained together and they can rely on each other. So there's very little 'do it specifically this way' and very much like 'here's the objective we need you to complete, do it in the way that makes the most sense to you'.

JOHN: That ties in very well a lot with David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around! book, which I have not read yet, but I really would like to get to reading because I think that is largely his thesis, is that like the top level gives the direction and then everyone else figures out how to make the direction happen at the very even levels of resolution. And I like that.

AARON: Right. The people who are actually doing the work make those last second decisions and they're empowered to be like, "Hey, this isn't working. We need to do something different to achieve that same goal," rather than someone saying, "Hey, I need you to..." I don't know. I'm terrible at coming with examples at the top of my head. But rather than giving a specific like, "I need you to do this specific task," and then you're like, "Hey, this task isn't working, but that's my job. So I guess I'm going to keep doing it." Giving the objective instead and letting you determine how to get there makes a big difference and lets you respond to surprises much better.

JOHN: We're learning the highlights at Failover Conference really stood out for you.

AARON: Heidi Waterhouse did a great talk that was Y2K and other disappointing disasters, which I think is really relevant right now, too. And it's one of those thoughts like if you didn't work on Y2K, it was sort of a whole bunch of nothing. There was a lot of worry that the world was going to end and then it didn't. Everything just sort of continued to work. But the folks that were sys admins and programmers at the time, the reason it all just worked is because they spent about a year and a half working overtime to make sure that it would. There was an incredible amount of prep work. There was tons of work that was going on worldwide to make sure that the clocks didn't think it was 1900, to make sure you didn't gain negative bank interests over a century. That was a ton of work that went on behind the scenes that if you weren't part of it, yeah, it felt like we overtalked this disaster and how we were worried about nothing. But that ties in right now. And the sentiment she left with was -- I don't know if she left with this, but it was part of it. It was like, "I hope when we start to go back to normal now and we feel like we spent a lot of time indoors for no reason, like this was a whole bunch of nothing, like everybody's fine, remember that that's because we did all the work, not like in spite of it. Because we're doing all this effort now to make sure this disease doesn't spread rapidly, that's why it's going to be okay later.

And there are a couple of other interesting bits, too. There was some really interesting conversations from the folks at Honeycomb about Modern Observability, which I've seen dozens of times. And all of those talks are so content rich, I can only grasp a corner of it at a time. It's like deep theory about observability as well as the overall concepts that I always have to race to keep up with. And there were some other good interesting points of how do we do this with serverless, which was super interesting. So I think that one's pretty apt as well.

JAMEY: We talked a few times on the show recently about kind of the idea of virtual conferences and how that's kind of changing the scene. But I don't think any of the people who are involved in those conversations have actually been to one yet since this happened. So, I'm curious about your general thoughts and how did it go at Failover Conf and how did people feel about it? Was there a lot of interaction? Was that an issue? What was just kind of your take on it from being there?

AARON: It went well. The overall sentiment, I think it was a good conference. I think they did a good job assembling the content they did in putting on the actual event. There was a Slack team -- what do you call them? A Slack group? There was a Slack [laughs] for the conference. They did a good job of driving people towards that. And I think there were like 2,000 people that have joined it by the time the conference was over. And they did a good job of having some bots that kind of when you joined, they message you and were like, "Hey, here are the relevant channels you're going to care about. Here are some things to look out for," which I thought was really good.

They had like a Hallway Track Slack channel, which is kind of neat because everyone would join in the Hallway Track. You can kind of have this group chat about whatever that was there. The really nice engagement aspect to it is each talk had its own Q&A channel. So after every talk, all the questions that kind of came through during the talk, which was actually kind of a neat aspect of virtual conferences is in a real conference, you might have a question that you kind of forget it by the end. You must write it down or you have to go up and physically stand in front of a room for 10 minutes to talk to the speaker. Here, it was like as the talk was going on, people were just writing down questions in Q&A channel. So by the time it's done, there's a half dozen questions already ready for the speaker to answer and curated by the conference. So that was really nice, but there would be like a 20 minute, half hour talk and then there would be probably another 10, 15 minutes of conversation that would happen in the Slack channel about that talk.

So yeah, I found that engagement was really nice and that kept people going with it. There's definitely some challenges, I think, of virtual conferences as well. I didn't run into as many people. You didn't really run into someone and have that conversation. You kind of had to find someone in Slack or happened to be in the same channel and connect on something. They only had like five minute breaks between talks or like maybe like a ten minute break. But part of it was this five minute icebreaker, and it was this other web app, like icebreaker web app that would randomly pair of people through video, and then you'd have like a five minute conversation. And there were like little conversation prompt cards, which was kind of neat, except that because it was during the break time, it's like that was the time I wanted to not be looking at my screen. And so, five minutes is not really enough time to have any meaningful conversation with a person and also not enough time for me to get away from my computer and stop staring at a screen to be able to go through a whole day of conferencing in front of a computer. It's a little bit like watching TV all day. You're just kind of like fatigued by the end of the constant staring at the screen for eight hours.

So that was, I think, some of the challenge of it there. But yeah, it was nice. I think it went largely well. I know I've talked to them. There are some challenges like technical issues also. It's just going to happen. The number of people and microphones and Internet connections involved, someone's going to have a challenge. I think one of the thoughts from the organizers was, "Yeah, on hindsight, I think we would have prerecorded the talks and just played the talk back and had the speakers there for the Q&A sessions." I think I would have really liked to see maybe even slightly shorter talks and an actual or fewer talks and an actual live Q&A. Have the speakers doing that live over the microphone and answer some of the questions and be able to talk about it would have been kind of cool. But yeah, overall, great. There was even that small group of people that hung around in the Hallway Track after that started the Zoom chat. Like that group of a dozen of you that go to the pub afterwards and then hang out. So, that all worked out well which is cool.

JAMEY: That's really cool to hear. I think it's interesting how different virtual conferences are trying different things and seeing what works. There's one that I'm attending next Thursday, April 30th. It already happened by the time this comes out. It's called Deserted Island DevOps and they're hosting it in Animal Crossing.

AARON: I'm speaking there.

JAMEY: You're speaking there? Yes! I can't wait. I'm really excited.

AARON: Yeah, I'm pumped about it, too. I'm like, "This is the right amount of serious and silly," that I feel like the situation calls for right now.

JAMEY: I totally agree. Like, "This is what we're doing. This is what we're doing."

AARON: Right. And we're just buying in the whole way. Yeah, I'm really excited to see how that one goes, too. There's some fun little aspects of that because it's happening in this other game world, which I realized the other day I don't have language to talk about the presence of avatars in digital realm. We're all going to be physically, not physically. I guess we'll all be digitally or we'll all be virtually on the island. I don't know how to talk about this, but our avatars will be on the island together. [Laughs]

JAMEY: I visited Aaron's island the other day. It's very exciting.

AARON: There is a lot of Animal Crossing happening all over the place. I think it's like everyone's trying to be together while also being completely separate. At least our characters could be next to each other.

JAMEY: It feels better than I would have expected it to feel. Like if you had said that to me like, "That's not the same as being with someone." It's not, but it feels nice in a way that I didn't expect to be like, "Look, me and Aaron running around together on the island." [Giggles]

AARON: I agree. Yeah. I don't know what it is about that, but it does satisfy that same craving just a little bit. Not quite as good. It's somewhere between video calls and real life and whatever else. But yeah, it is kind of fun. It's kind of neat with the voice chat, too, the Nintendo app. The most commonly readily voice chat ever. But if you happen to have it on your phone, you can also do voice chat with other people who also have the app on their phone, which is actually kind of cool when you're all on an island together, chatting over this thing and standing next to each other and everything else. It builds a little bit more of that connection than I would have thought.

JAMEY: I think the thing I like about it more than -- I mean, it's different than like a Zoom group or whatever. But I think one of the things I really like about it over that is that there's an aspect of just dropping by. When I visited Aaron's island, I just saw that it was open and I went there. I didn't tell him I was coming. And then I was there and it felt like, "Oh, someone just dropped by."

AARON: Yeah, I agree. It was a nice thing to that, too. And there's something a little bit different about being able to move around that feels a little bit different than this video call. It's like, "Oh, we're just staring at each other on a TV screen in space," as opposed to like, "Oh, hey, would you like some of my fruit? Would you care to sit on this bench that I made?" 

[Laughter]

AARON: It's a little bit closer to real life.

JAMEY: After this is over and someone comes over to my house, that's what I'm going to say, "Would you like some fruit? Would you like to sit on my bench?"

AARON: "Would you care to tour the museum that I have stocked all by myself for some reason?"

JOHN: One thing I wanted to talk about a little bit was, you mentioned ADHD earlier and how that may feed into what your superpower ends up being. And I know you've talked about various conference talks about it in the past. And so, I'm curious as to how you see that impacting the way you interact with people, how it impacts your career and basically all of your superpower stuff. 

AARON: It sort of goes both -- like any neurodiversity aspect, it goes both ways. There's moments where you can really lean in and double down and it feels like a superpower. And there's other times where it is just nothing preventing you from being useful. And so early on in my career, especially doing traditional CIS ad ops work, it's really great for [inaudible] driven work like that. When it's like, "Oh, I got a ticket. I'm going to do a thing." "Oh, I've got alerts. I've got to go fix the thing right now." So [inaudible] is a great skill and it allows me to be really adaptable and really responsive in the moment because I can both focus on the thing that is causing a lot of stimulus at the time really well, like the hyperfocus aspect of ADHD, it's like, "Hey, this thing's really important and shiny." Like, "Great. I can dive down that and focus on it for 12 hours and not even think about it." I can do the remediation aspect of it.

The challenge as I switch that great move from that actual individual contributor ops -- well, I'm still an individual contributor, but like moving more towards DevRel and interacting with people. Now my job is like, "Hey, can you write this talk that's due in two weeks?" And it's like, "Oh, that is the thing that I've always struggled with in school," like that project due two weeks from now. Started midnight the night before and you stay up all night and you somehow managed to fit two weeks' worth of work in about five hours. Prints the project as you're running out to go to school. There's that aspect that I have to fight against as well, which is the challenges that ADHD has with general executive function and motivation and focus on that sort of thing.

I think, because ADHD folks, or for me anyway, I guess I won't speak on other people's experience. I can always speak to mine. So, some aspect of it is just advanced forms of coping mechanisms. Like it's paying attention to things and a conversation is a hard thing to do. And so, there's a lot of coping mechanism of both being able to trick yourself in being interested in all these things, helps me focus on everything that's going on. And so part of it is genuine interest in the thing that's there. But I can tie my interest into someone else's excitement and that sort of thing. And that helps me focus on what's happening in conversations. Sometimes you just develop those small talk people skills, because that's how I've had to survive when it's like, "I have no idea what we've been talking about for the past ten minutes. So I'm going to try and figure out how to fit in this conversation again." Because while this conversation was going on, I went off on some other tangent and train of thought. So, some of it is coping mechanisms of trying to maintain a sense of normalcy in the conversation. That has made me more of a people person in that regard.

Some of it is, for me, like put whatever weight you want to on Myers-Briggs personality tests and the extroversion-introversion dichotomy or scale or blend or whatever we're going to call it. But usually when I take these, I sit somewhere right in the middle between extrovert and introvert. So for part of that, spending time with people is, it feeds into who I am. The concept of The Five Love Languages, I don't know if that's been talked about at all or if the audience is familiar with it. But the concept is there's roughly five different ways that people speak affection towards one another, like you show they care and that sort of thing. And for me, one of those is quality time. Just spending time with people is a way both that I feel cared for and a way that I show that I care for people is just spending time around them. Because that feeds into who I am and builds me up, being around people and having those conversations both provide the stimulus that ADHD seeks as well as building me up as a person. And so, I love that conversational thing and that builds into career that way as far as DevRel, where you want to spend a lot of time listening to what people care about and listening to all aspects of who they are. I can genuinely dive into that because we're just spending time together and like, "Oh, I actually genuinely am building this relationship with this person just by being there," for me anyway.

For LaunchDarkly, for instance, a good aspect of DevRel is not just going out there and talking about our product and getting people to want to try it. A lot of it is like, "Hey, what sucks? Where are the pain points that you're having?" And listening to people's experience and being able to relate to that and understand that and build those connections is really important to the DevRel aspect of it. Part of the sort of what manifests outwardly as like, "Ooh, shiny," aspects of ADHD that like jumping from thing to thing plays a role, I think, in thought process for me as well. I will find some connections between things that might not be obvious otherwise, because it just triggers this thought of like, "Oh, that's kind of like this." "Oh, that's kind of like this." "Ooh, this is kind of like that." And so, yeah, I think that's another aspect of the superpower as well, just connecting all of these things together and finding relationships that maybe not everybody does.

I think other aspects of ADHD for me and I think neurodiversed folks in general are having just a really tough time right now. I'm having a really tough time coping right now. I think Tiffany Longworth actually put it really great of, we've spent a lot of our lives building up these coping mechanisms of how we kind of just deal with everyday life while our brains work kind of differently than the world wants them to work. And what's happened right now is we've all sort of been stuck inside and a lot of these coping mechanisms aren't available right now. Like the ability to go hang out with people, the ability for me to get out of my house and go to a coffee shop so that the change of scenery helps me focus on writing, it's just not available to me. And it feels a lot like being a teenager again and getting sent to your room because you just don't know how to deal and you have no coping mechanisms and you're stuck in your room and you're just grumpy and bad and like nothing's working. And there's a lot of that struggle, I think, that's happening right now. I know for me whether it's getting out and seeing people or, like I said, that change of scenery, sometimes I just need to be somewhere else to get work done because I need to be novel and interesting. And I just can't do that. So it's struggling, trying to relearn how to work in sort of the worst possible conditions.

JAMEY: I totally relate to that.

AARON: There's a lot of folks, especially ADHD folks, who working in an office is really useful for them because it creates routine and it creates context switching that's sort of external. It's really beneficial for ADHD folks to have external motivations and contexts because executive function, which is largely where it comes from internally, doesn't work right. And now there's people who work better in an office, forced not to go to an office trying to work. It's just terrible. I've had, fortunately, two and a half years of working from home that I've sort of relearned some of these skills and changed some of that. But I can't imagine that if I was working in an office, forced to work from home right now without any of the equipment, without knowing that I need a separate space, I need to be able to close the door, I need to be able to shut down such and so. Without having that knowledge, I can't imagine where I'd be. I just probably would not have gotten [inaudible].

JAMEY: Yes. I've heard some people discussing. I totally agree. We're talking about working remote, like suddenly a lot of people are working remote. But what is happening right now isn't really what working remote is like for anybody, even people who have always done it. It's difficult because I've benefited a lot from working from home, specifically because of like neurodiversity and stuff. And I'm like an advocate for letting people work from home if they think that that's going to benefit them. And I'm worried that you're going to see a lot of people being like, "I tried working from home and it sucked." I'm like, "No, you tried working during the pandemic, and it sucked for everybody."

AARON: Right. Actually, that sentiment repeat at other places too. I think it's legitimate fear for folks that are advocates for working from home that that will happen. I hope it doesn't. I hope people recognize like these are extenuating circumstances and your experience now is not, the same as your experience during whatever normal is.

CARINA: I think especially in organizations that have not previously supported remote work or have a distributed team, there is a reason why you don't do that just overnight. You really need to have internal buy-in. You need to have decisions about how the day flows, about how you have meetings, especially across many time zones, and how you keep in touch with each other without that being the only thing you do all day, finding a balance. All these things that are hard and you need to think you're out thoughtfully in order to do well and not end up marginalizing the remote workers or having them accidentally miss important conversations that nobody called a meeting for, with a casual in-office thing. So there's all this stuff. And suddenly, everyone's thrown into remote without having had necessarily those conversations or agreements. For instance, I just see people talking about how they're doing nothing but meetings all day. I work remote pretty much my whole career. And at most, there was standup plus maybe one other meeting. I cannot imagine functioning with just constant meetings, interrupting the flow every time I have to be taken out of that mental flow. You've thrown me off for at least an hour of having to come back and figure out where I was and what problems I had, and that kind of stuff. So, it's not just that people are in a stressed place right now, but also we've been thrown into the deep end of "remote" instead of doing remote. And that's so far apart.

AARON: Yeah, I agree with that heavily and it is a noticeable difference. The previous company I was at, which was Elastic how'd been distributed instead of remote because everyone is. So at what point is it considered remote? It would point as the entire company not working from an office. So yeah, they were always distributed from day one. That was their intention was to not worry about where they're hiring people, not force people to come into an office, but to work from where you're comfortable, which is probably helped by the fact they start as an open source project. But the way that business is done and [inaudible] is very specific. There's a lot of intentionality behind communication and how you communicate, making sure that you check in in certain ways, depending on what you're trying to do and making sure meetings are all Zoom meetings for everybody. The meeting calendar is wide open. Anyone can join any meeting, but you can also opt out of stuff if it doesn't make sense for you or your time zone. And things are all recorded so that you can check back on that.

For the team that I was in then, which was the community team at Elastic, there were folks stretched from the Pacific Time Zone to Sydney in Australia, which is like roughly all of them. So there's really no good time to have a meeting. If you look at some of those Internet tools that are like, "When's a good time to have a meeting?" And they'll be like, "Green for regular business hours, yellow for normal waking hours but not business hours, and red for everyone's asleep." There was never a time that there wasn't at least one red block on there on that calendar. And so the coping mechanism for that was we cycled meetings between US-centric and APJ-centric time zones. Europe is kind of either way, it's always either the beginning or end of their business day. You weren't expected to attend the one that's at 2:00 a.m. for you. The one's that at 2:00 a.m. for you, you're not expected to go. If you have something really important on the agenda, but the meetings are recorded and you can watch it back. And there's extensive agenda notes taken so that you can watch it and get the notes and consume it afterwards, however it makes sense to you. Conversely, there's other teams that required everyone to be there. I know our support team cycled their meetings. I think they had weekly meetings that cycled through US and the APJ regional time zones and everyone was required to be there. So it's like, "Yeah. Sorry, one of your meetings is going to be great. One of them is going to be [inaudible], and one of them is going to suck. And that's just the way we have to deal with it, because the nature of how our team works and everyone kind of buys into that agreement.

But I think one of the key aspects that held that whole coming together was very intentional culture building that happens there and very intentional identity building that happens around like what does it mean to work for Elastic and what does it mean to be in the [inaudible]. And there's a lot of thought that's put into that. Now is really difficult because then, being in person mattered. And so, flying people out for all hands meetings was an important aspect to keeping that camaraderie even when you're remote and even when you're separate. I think that's probably a really difficult thing people are having right now. For anyone who's getting hired right now, it's super weird to not have that. I was actually the first group that launched after that on board and completely remote because we couldn't travel. And it was weird. I worked at a company that was entirely distributed, but we onboarded. We all flew in because we got that connection to [inaudible] to work for this company. And so now it's really weird to have this slow exposure to everyone and kind of meet people one-on-one as you have meetings and slowly be able to put faces to names. That's really hard. And I think it's a side effect of just not being able to be present at all. And that's even a key aspect to remote work, is have those moments of presence. 

JAMEY: I'm experiencing that too as I'm job hunting. I have had a couple interview processes tell me, "Well, this is the part where we would normally fly you over to talk to you but we can't. So, we'll just have to get around." It's been kind of interesting.

JOHN: One of the topics that we had sort of previewed in setting up the show was this concept of Normalcy Theater that people are putting on during the pandemic. So I'm curious if you want to talk about that a little bit and let's see what you mean by that.

AARON: Yeah. I think this is a phrase that I adopted now thirdhand from someone else. But I want to say that it was Alice Goldfuss that may have initially mentioned it. And then someone else picked it up and I was like, "Oh, that is a really good term." But the concept is kind of like these groups that are trying to maintain the sense of everything is fine and everything is cool, that we're working remote now. There's a lot of -- not necessarily a lot of and not everywhere. But there is this presence of mandatory fun meetings and this excessive meetings like you talk about. Everyone's trying to recreate this presence and be normal about it and it's just not. Or like, "Oh, we're still going to work eight hour days and we're still going to have our normal meetings or we're still going to be just as productive as we always were." And it's like that theater of normalcy. Yeah, we're just working from home. That's just the normal way we do things. And it really isn't. 

There's so much more happening that is just taking up our brain space that needs to be acknowledged, needs to be understood. We can't always have these meetings that are like, "Hey, let's all BYOB and have our happy hour fun time game meeting." Sometimes I kind of want to have a meeting and be pissed off about how things are. I just need to be sad that I can't see anyone. I need to be angry at the way bureaucracy is handling problems and I need to express that and I need to feel that. And pretending like we're just going to be happy all the time and what we need to do is cheer up, and that's what's going to get us through it, I think, is a false step. All of our emotions are important and need to be felt and dealt with in their own ways.

CARINA: I find this really interesting because you mentioned earlier about having all the video meetings recorded. We don't normally have recorded the sessions off in the corner of the office. Those we, at least attempt to do it privately or take out to a cafe. So it's something where you're essentially going somewhere other than Zoom and Slack to do those [inaudible] necessarily blow off steam or process what's not working so well kind of conversations. How do we reproduce that aspect of a certain amount of privacy and being a professional?

AARON: I don't think those meetings have to be recorded, for one. The recorded meetings are largely like formal meetings. When you're having the actual 'we need to decide how we're going to architect thing'. That's the recorded meetings that you can see how you have that conversation that arrived at that decision. And that's important context to maintain. But yeah, your need to blow off steam and have those. It's tough. There's not a separate space to go to. There's not a coffee shop down the road that you can go walk to with your closest coworker and gripe about that particular relationship or particular bug that you're dealing with or gripe about management not understanding the thing. But I think that's important to still have. It's important to have those moments. And maybe doubly so when we're already in the midst of constantly being upset about things.

I don't know if we've mentioned previously on this show, but for the concept of that weird, uneasy feeling you're feeling all the time right now is grief. We're all sort of dealing with grief right now of not having what we're used to having and missing out on a lot. There is a loss in all of our lives by being stuck at home and not being able to do anything. For some, it's like our favorite restaurants are gone forever. O'Reilly no longer has an events team. No more O'Reilly live events. So if that was a thing you look forward to every year, it's gone forever. There's a lot of loss that's happening and that just makes it that much harder to do everything else normally. I don't know if that made sense to where we started this conversation, but I think it's so important to make time to say, "Hey, let's just do a Zoom chat one on one. I need to complain to you about stuff." I think those are still valid things to have and remember that you can have impromptu conversations with people, just takes a little bit more work to send up. But I think they're still important to have. Maybe Slack's not the best place because Slack -- but no, you can take it to your own personal unrecorded Zoom channel or maybe take it to a private Skype or some other channel where you know you're not being watched or recorded or anything like that. But it's definitely important to still have those connections outside.

JAMEY: Yeah, I think it totally makes sense what you're saying about grief. And I think it's also noteworthy to add is that all of that grief about what's going on with the quarantine and such is on top of the fact that at this point, a lot of people have been personally affected by someone they know who has gotten sick.

AARON: Absolutely. All this is like a huge additional cognitive load on top of what we're normally dealing with. So this comes through Paul Reed's talk at the end of Failover Conf again because everything is connected of how we deal -- so there's ways that we do it overload. When you have a certain capacity and you're dealing with like, "I only have so much cognitive load I can handle, but now I'm dealing with this constant background load always on top of my normal workload," there's different ways we deal with it. One is to shed load, where you just drop stuff. It just doesn't get done. Another one is usually sacrificing thoroughness. So you become less thorough in order to accomplish what you need to do. One is recruiting more resources and the other is shifting work in time. So like, it's not going to get done this week. It's going to be next week. Then recruiting resources is like, "Hey, I need somebody else to help me with this."

All those have different costs and different tradeoffs that happen. But the interesting point that I think came out of that was the thought that probably all of us right now are sacrificing thoroughness all the time in our work. And that was an interesting thought of like, that means all of us right now are overloaded. We're all probably sacrificing thoroughness or things are getting done later that we normally would have done on time. Everybody is overloaded. And that's an interesting thought process of how we deal with each other day to day. It's an interesting thought process of like how this is not normal because we're all constantly dealing with additional load that we normally don't have. And just the amount of grace we need to extend each other or the amount of understanding that needs to go back and forth, the amount of like, "Hey, I just need to take the day off because I cannot even." We could still be understood, both like allowed and encouraged.

CARINA: I think going back to this issue of grief, I see that right now on a global level, we have countries where stay at home is almost done or they're even starting to reopen. And then there's regions within countries where that's not at all possible. And we have to look at stay at home as a much longer term thing to be coping with. And you brought up the word coping a few times, and I think that's really interesting because as we have companies with distributed teams or some sort of simulation of distributed, companies are going to have to  deal with the fact that in some regions, people are able to go back to working semi-normally and in other regions, other employees are going to be still at a completely different place and their ability to be productive and to interact, all that kind of stuff, and how do we deal with that imbalance? We're going to have to come up with some long term strategies, even just at a business level, forgetting for a moment about the huge adaptive stuff you need to deal with at a much more personal level. How do we accept that this is not something that is a couple of weeks and then we go back to working the way we've always worked and the asymmetry of all of that?

AARON: I don't have an answer for how because I think we're all learning that. And I think it's different for every team and every person. How is the question right now. But that's absolutely an important thing to think about, that this is not a moment in time and it's going to leave us unaffected and we're all going to go back to normal. I don't think it's ever going to go back to how it was before shelter in place rules were put in place. There's always going to be some scar tissue that this event leaves on everyone, especially those who are professional right now and working and have been directly affected by it.

I think it's going to be important to recognize that especially, that even though we're going to be able to go back to work, things have not gone back to normal. And there's work to bring us back to a place where we can be as productive as we were again. And there's going to be people that are still being affected by it. There's going to be people who are affected way harder than I am or than whoever else is. People are going to know someone who died because of this, and other people aren't. That's an important difference to make because those people are going to be close, they can be loved ones. There's like additional burden to carry out of all of this. And I think thinking that we're just going to go back to normal and everything's going to be fine and it's going to be like it was before, is a misunderstanding of what's happening.

CARINA: That made me realize one of the big tech centers is New York. There are different odds in a way depending on where you were, but I think there'll be a much greater concentration of people in our industry who deal with this at a very personal connection to loss than how well individuals and companies adapt to there being a tremendous amount of power to overload for people in the long term. I know after 9/11, people couldn't just move on in a day or a week as if there was continuity of grief and recovery and infrastructure completely gone, and needing to just do so much stuff other than simply say, "I feel sad."

AARON: I think the biggest thing that's happened is this rapid collision of our personal, private, and work lives and public lives all at once. We've gone from a place where sometimes you even physically could separate who you were and what you did home from who you were and what you did at work. And now, these are all becoming the same thing all of the time. My hope is that it sort of continues to an extent, that we can recognize as a professional work organization that humans have other things they carry with them into work. They are not just who they are at work. At work, you can leave everything else behind. That thing that happened at home affects your work day. And I hope that it allows people to bring who they are with them, allows people to be who they are and work more holistically and more authentically. And I hope it also brings the grace from workplaces to allow that. Like you said, if people need to work from home to be more productive, the places allow that because they understand it's a possibility. And if people need to take a day off because they just can't, then that becomes a normal thing that is allowed in workplaces. I hope that all of this comes out of it and not like, "Let's pretend it never happened. Let's go back to normal."

JOHN: At the end of the episode, we like to do what we call reflections, which is to talk about the things that each of us has taken away from this conversation. There's certainly a lot of really interesting and meaty stuff brought up in here. But I think the idea that most novel to me that I'm going to keep thinking about is the idea of a software team plays at software just like a music group plays its instruments. And for me, I think I've been approaching shifting my understanding of teams over the last couple of years, especially as all the awesome discussions we've had on the show. But that little conceptual switch, I think, is going to be a really useful way of changing the way I think about stuff.

And there's actually a great Twitter thread. I wish I could dig it up right now where someone did a comparison of analysis of Metallica's Some Kind of Monster. The documentary about creating the St. Anger album as a metaphor for cross-functional teams talking about how each of the members of the group were coming into it with completely different goals. They didn't communicate about those goals, so they were all making different records at the same time. And it did not go well. I think that is very applicable to a lot of the things we do. I'm actually going to try and get my whole team to watch that and discuss it from that perspective.

CARINA: The thing I've been reflecting on is something you said early on: everything has a technical aspect. And this strikes me for a couple of reasons. One being how often we like to make the supposedly mutual exclusive categories of soft skills and technical skills. Whereas I think it's more like everything has a technical aspect. And on the flip side, everything has a soft skills aspect, a human skills aspect. And you've talked a lot about the human skills side at the beginning. And what I heard from you today was that sense of balance of both are true. Both are part of how we are able to contribute better to code and contribute better to teams. So, that was something that I kept on hearing as a through line that I was really interested in. And I kept on hearing that quote. 

JAMEY: While this has been really interesting and great conversation I've heard, I'm finding that near the end of it, my cognitive load is kind of high. That last part of the conversation kind of got to me. My husband is actually at the clinic literally right now as we're recording this, getting a test for Covid. So I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't really have a reflection. And based on the conversation that we just had, I'm going to say that maybe that's okay.

AARON: Definitely. My reflection being that it is okay to not be getting things done right now, and to be taking the time that we need. Especially starting a new job inside of this Covid situation, I've had a really hard time accepting that my productivity is kind of terrible and allowing myself to have these moments of not getting things done and allowing myself to have the moment to just be self-reflective and take care of myself in those moments. And I think my biggest takeaway is we're all working doubly hard to get half as much work done. And it's okay to take a break from that. 

JOHN: Well, that wraps us up. It was a wonderful conversation, Aaron.

AARON: Thank you.

CARINA: Thank you.

JAMEY: I'm glad you were able to come on the show. Thanks.

AARON: Yeah, me too.

JOHN: If you've enjoyed the show and would like to hang out and have Slack discussions with people that listen to this type of show, you can join our Slack group. Normally, we open this up to people that have donated on our Patreon, even if it's only just a dollar a month. But because things are weird now and because we have a good job resources segment in our community, we've opened that up to anyone who would like to join. So you can DM myself or Jamey or Rein or really any of the hosts on the show and ask for an invite to the community and we'll bring you in there. Visit our job channel or Trello board and other things. But if you could set up a Patreon subscription, that would be even better because you'll help support the show and support the people that are producing this great work. Thank you.

CARINA: And also, we always look for sponsors. The cost of producing a show is what gets covered. None of us are being paid for this. But we do have costs for editing and transcription. And we really want to make sure that these episodes can be fully supported and being the best possible and also the most successful. So if you have a company that's interested, please do inquire via the same ways that John mentioned, and  we would love to get you started on that and talk more about what you can do. So, we encourage you or your company to reach out.

And P.S., we also do episode discussion on the Slack. So if you have questions or want to chat more with Aaron, that's the place to do it.