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JAMEY: Hello, and thanks for tuning in to Episode 211 of Greater Than Code. I am one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, John Sawers. 

JOHN: Thank you, Jamey and I'm here with our guest, Brandon Weaver. Brandon is a Ruby Architect at Square working on the Frameworks team, defining standards for Ruby across the company. He's an artist who turned programmer who had a crazy idea to teach programming with cartoon lemurs and whimsy. He's also autistic and would love to talk to about those experiences.

Welcome to the show, Brandon.

BRANDON: Great to be here. 

JOHN: All right, well, we're going to get started with the first question that we always ask everybody. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? 

BRANDON: So my superpower, I would say is being able to see the superpowers in others, being able to recognize potential talents just from talking to someone and say, “You know what, you'd be really dang good at this or this or all these other things,” and being able to take all those people and make them into a team to be able to do so much more than I could ever really do myself. 

JOHN: That’s fantastic.

BRANDON: Now, as far as I managed how to get this power, that is kind of a long story starting a lot with some of my background of not being great at this and trying to play the hero all the time and I got everything figured out, I'm clever and then the more I got into my career, the more I figured out, that's not the case and the more I figured out really, there's no such thing as a self-made person. It's a really insidious myth. It's far more that we're all community made people and as soon as I started realizing this, I started realizing a lot of the beauty of the programming community, especially in Ruby which kind of fostered me and brought me into a lot of things, and that was kind of what started to unlock that power. 

JOHN: That's fantastic. I think being able to spot the superpowers in others is incredibly useful because a lot of people don't quite realize the things that they're good at, right? Because if you're good at something, you just do it and you don't have to think about it very hard for a lot of things like that and so, you may not even realize that you're doing something so much better than other people just because it comes easily. However you got there, by the time you're doing it and it's feeling easy, you may not think of that as an asset, but if someone else can point that out and realize how that fits in with maybe other people with complimentary skillsets, that sounds like a pretty cool skill. 

JAMEY: So to keep going on this superpower metaphor, you're like the Nick Fury of superpowers who put together the team. I like it.

BRANDON: Yeah, and one thing that I've seen while I've been doing this—even yesterday, I was speaking with a young gentleman who had a lot of innate ability to be a programmer, but he's from the Midwest and he just kind of has this issue of imposter syndrome of “I don’t belong in the Silicon Valley. I don't really belong in any of these companies.” I'm like, “Okay, well, here's a problem real quick, go over that whiteboard. Let's talk through it.” About 5 minutes later, I'm like, “Oh no, you're absolutely fine,” and he's like, “Really?” 

It's just kind of like, there's so much potential in all these areas of the country and so many people that just don't really believe in themselves or believe that they have a chance for this. And it's just such an amazing experience not only to be able to recognize that, but to be able to see these people recognize those powers within themselves and start to become, in essence, who they were meant to be and what they can be.

JAMEY: Yeah. I was going to say, I kind of want to split the superpower up into two things, because what you originally said was like being able to see this potential in other people, but I think that being able to convince them of it is almost like a whole other skill in some ways. I've also been in that situation where I'm talking to someone and I'm trying to convince them like, “No, but really I understand imposter syndrome, but I want to express to you this potential that I think you have.” Do you have any advice on how you've done that with people in the past?

BRANDON: You know, somewhat yes, somewhat, no. I mean, I wish they had a very nice succinct answer here that could give you that would solve all these problems. I'm still working on it myself. I'm still learning every day and trying to be better about this stuff. A lot of it that I've been troubled with is that I can hype them up, I can get them ready to go, I can make them feel I have this, I got this, I can do it, and then they go and fail 10 interviews in a row and feel miserable by themselves and say, “I don't belong here. Look at how many I fail. Look at how many of these great companies that don't even make a call back. They don't even give me the time of day.” 

What do you say to someone like that? And that's a hard question. So the best I can do is to keep on motivating them and tell them some of my story and say, “Hey, before I actually got my first programming job, I probably failed somewhere north of, I think I counted it, 59 interviews before someone actually gave me a chance.” I hate to say, but that's kind of the way the industry works. 

So short of actually changing the industry to behave itself a little bit better on programming interviews, which I'm working on and trying, you have to keep on motivating those people and say, “I know it's hard. I know it sucks, but I know you have the strength to be able to go on, the strength to be able to do this, and I believe in you even if no one else seems to right now, and I want to see you go and I want to see you do this because it'd be a shame if you spent all this time and effort just to walk out on this.” 

JAMEY: I think it's really powerful to be able to talk about your own failures. I've seen people do this in that context, but also, particularly, in the context of conference speaking. People that I consider to be really big name, talented speakers will post on Twitter or whatever about like, “Oh, I got 15 rejections this month” or whatever and it makes me feel so much better just to see it.

JOHN: Especially if you know someone well and how good they are to see that there's that struggle there even for the people that are super qualified. It can provide some salve to your damaged ego after 20 rejections like it's hard, no matter what, but it does help a little bit.

BRANDON: You know, what's funny is I actually had someone who invested in me like this awhile back by the name of Shannon Skipper and what happened is, I talked to him for years on IRC and we'd gone back and forth about all forms of these enteric Ruby topics, just going off into the wild and then eventually, he joined us over here at Square and became a developer evangelist. Now, one of the first things he did is he said, “We need more people doing conference talks because we need to see more of us in the community actually investing and giving back and speaking.” 

So he took a look at a lot of work I did, he’s like, “Why in the world are you not speaking?” I'm like, “I don't know. I just never really get accepted.” So he spent a lot of time working with me workshopping things and then we started adding things to it until eventually it went from okay, here's this really dense topic and a bunch of really dense coding slides to let's break that up, make it easier to wait, what if we added art illustrations or something to wait, you remember, why the lucky step – why don't we put cartoon lemurs instead or something like that and then it kind of took off into what you're seeing today. 

This was not even 3 years ago that a lot of this stuff happened before I spoke at RubyConf for the first time and I've just seen so many people do the same thing after that happened, that it's kind of inspiring to see so many other people falling after and trying that type of thing for themselves.

JOHN: Yeah, jumping back to what you were seeing a little bit earlier. I really liked what you were talking about trying to keep someone's energy up after they've had a barrage of negative experiences when they interview. I think that's also one of those incredibly powerful positions to be in for somebody because by that point they're probably not believing in themselves and being the one person giving them some objective like, “No, no, seriously, you still have this.” It doesn't look like it right now, but that must be gratifying.

BRANDON: Yes and sometimes you even tell them, “Look, it's okay to feel defeated. It's okay to feel like you failed a little bit, but letting that define you and letting that rule you and letting that set the tone for the rest of your experiences, where you need to draw a line and say, ‘There's a time for weeping. There's a time for reflection. There's a time to get back up and try again and keep on trying.’” I mean, it's hard. I'm not going to diminish that at all. It's depressing. It can be demeaning and in a lot of ways, very negative experience to people, but there's also a lot of fulfillment in that of finally reaching that point to where you get that job, to where you find the people that you feel like you need to work with, and where you start seeing your skills become valued at a company. 

JOHN: So one of the things you called out earlier that I would love to dive into a little bit, that you talked about this solo hero role that you had put yourself in and figuring out—I'm assuming it was a somewhat lengthy process for realizing how destructive that was, and what the downsides were, and then starting to look outward to other people and seeing how they can help with that. So please tell me more about what that was like for you.

BRANDON: Yes. Very early in my career and very early in high school, I will not lie to you, I was a very arrogant, very presumptuous type of person who is extremely proud of myself, who is extremely arrogant and believed I am on the top of the world, I can't be defeated and through various events that happened, I ended up getting brought back from that and shown how wrong that was and how much damage that had done to people. 

Because my belief was that I had learned everything, I had spent all this time studying, researching, doing everything I could to learn everything I could and anyone who wasn't doing that was not at all worthy of being a programmer and they had no business being a programmer. Just seeing the damage that did to people that had children, that had lives, that had people they need to support and telling those people you're not worthy is just such insidious evil in our industry and I've seen that become much and much more common and it breaks my heart to see all these people going through some of these same struggles. 

But as far as the actual heroism and everything that I had done back in the day, it was that I had memorized so much of the Ruby programming language that I believed it was my given duty to show other people how wrong they were and show other people here's everything you should be doing to be a proper programmer and I did not listen to anyone else. I was so interested in talking, in being heard, in showing everyone that honestly, I never stopped to listen, I never stopped to consider to empathize, to believe in other people, to trust in their strengths, their abilities, their innate ability to go and do that it just ended up demolishing so much team morale and everything else.

JAMEY: I think it's interesting that you traced it back to this feeling of wanting to be heard, because I think that that's a really natural thing to want. I think everybody wants to be heard and so, it's interesting to me how you can take this need that, I think everybody has and like let it become this other thing.

BRANDON: Yup, and I would definitely agree with that. The irony of everything is that I wanted so desperately to be heard that I didn't consider that others might want the same thing that other people want to be heard. Other people want to feel fulfilled. Other people want to feel smart, like they're valued, like they belon, like they have a home and that's what really flipped for me is that other people had these concerns. 

Now myself being autistic, there is a tendency to obsess, to fixate, to go deep on a subject and get to a level of expertise by which some other people might not be able to get to, just due to that nature of absolute concentration on something, and due to that, you have a certain arrogance and a certain pompousness of other people just aren't serious if they can't do the same as me. 

Honestly, there are substantial dangers to that type of mentality as far as even going deep and having that ability to concentrate. Because let's say, for instance, you decide you're interested in topic A. The problem is your manager wants topic B done and it's been off for about a month or two and they're trying to figure out what in the world you're doing. Meanwhile, you're diving deep on topic A and topic B is lingering in the JIRA queue for months, which I can tell you, it's not very conducive to keeping a job.

JOHN: Identifying those sort of downsides to yourself and like, it can be a superpower in the right situation, but it's an anti-superpower in a different situation. So it sounds like being able to be in a situation where it works for you, but also maybe finding ways to work around that tendency. Is that what I'm hearing you have found or not?

BRANDON: Yes. I would say that with a lot of powers, a lot of strengths that people have, there is a corresponding weakness and if you're not cognizant to the weakness, the trade-offs and what you're losing by pursuing certain strengths, you're going to put yourself into a very dangerous situation because I guarantee you, everyone listening to this has their own weakness. They have their own flaws. They have their own things that they can't do very well and I'm going to tell you, that's okay. Everyone has them. It happens. 

But if you don't acknowledge that and if you don't own that and you don't work to constantly improve that, it's a problem and a really large problem. Of course, you have your strengths. Everyone has their strengths as well. But to deny that you have any form of weakness is in and of itself, one of the biggest weaknesses of programmer and really, anyone can have.

JOHN: You talked a little bit about coming to the realization that you had been arrogant and somewhat destructive in the way you were approaching things. I'd love to hear more about like your journey from like that realization to how you were able to build up the skills and techniques that got you to where you are now.

BRANDON: Yeah. So I would say one of the biggest moments where I had the transition was back in high school and college, I was a cross-country and track runner and I had a lot of pride in this. It was my identity. Back then, I thought I was going to go to national competitions. Spoilers, I wasn't. But I believed that I was actually decent at it and looking back, I really wasn't. I was not able to really assess myself. 

But what happened is that eventually, during a meet, I passed out and then all of a sudden, my entire identity I'd built up to that point, everything I put my pride in was gone. Destroyed. Absolutely and irrevocably gone. I went to the hospitals. I went to all forms of doctors. No one can really figure out what in the world was going on. All they could tell me is that you're not really able to compete anymore like you were and if you do, there's a good chance you might die from this. 

That was a real issue for me is that I had placed my entire identity in I am a runner, I am able to do anything and that was an extremely valuable life lesson for me, which is I put so much of my identity into this and I had dismissed everything else that as soon as I got to this same stage in programming, I reflected on that and said, “Am I doing the same thing I did back then and how much damage have I been doing?” Because what I would tend to do during these days is I would be hypercritical of little nitpicky things like code review, syntax, bugs, or other things like this and I thought I can see all the things that Ruby language I know exactly what's wrong with your code. Meanwhile, I'd be focused on such a microscopic level that I missed everything valuable about their code—all of the architectural ideas, all the potential flaws, all potential strengths, everything that made that code actually valuable, I missed because I was so obsessed with the microscopic level of things.

JAMEY: So once you were had this realization, were there specific things that you did to start developing that empathy and that broader understanding of the team and how you fit into it or did it come naturally once you realized that's what the context was that you were in? 

BRANDON: So the thing about a lot of people with autism, especially out of the Midwest, or really, a lot of neurodiverse traits or people who tend to be considered ordinary is no one listens to us. In a lot of cases, you don't feel like you have a home here, you don't feel like anyone understands, listens to or cares about you. So you want desperately to be heard and as soon as I got to communities which actually did hear me, which actually did listen to me, what I felt there, I wanted to share with others. Because even if I had that arrogance, I still wanted others to feel some of the same things as I did. 

I won't say I was a completely horrible person back then, but I did have a lot of growth to do and in the process of healing, I realized how much damage there was out there, how many people that weren't being heard, how many people had these abilities and I started to listen. I stopped talking, I stopped trying to dominate the conversation. Instead, I sat back, I listened, I nodded, I tried to empathize, and I tried to actually hear what their stories were. Because I realized how valuable that was to me that especially the Ruby community was willing to listen to me, was willing to take me in that I believed very dearly in my heart that that needed to be done for other people as well and that's really what started the transformation, is that started empathy of, I want others to experience the same feeling.

JAMEY: I think that this ability that you have to talk very candidly about what you used to be like is really amazing, actually. I think that in general, that's a thing that's hard for I'm going to say probably a lot of people. I know it's definitely difficult for me because I think that again, I want to break this into two abilities. There's the ability to learn and grow and have character development, which obviously you have. But then there's another ability to speak candidly about that. I think that it can be easy, even if you've gone through growth to be like, “I'm in a better place now, but I don't really want to acknowledge what I was like before and what I had to do to get here,” and so, I think that that's really powerful. 

The question I was going to ask is like, well, how do you do that? I'm not sure that that's really that intelligent of a question, but maybe was that a conscious decision on your part to include all of this in this story that you're telling about yourself?

BRANDON: Yeah. So a lot of my candidness comes from a desire to be a better man. To be the man that I want to be in the future, I have to be able to own who I was in the past and I have to be beyond that. I have to know that that is who I was. I cannot deny that. I cannot say, “No, I wasn't that person.” Because if I do, in essence, I'm denying part of who I was that led me to who I am today and while those traits may be negative, they are the traits which ended up building the foundation of who I ended up becoming.

Even your darkest days can contribute to a bright future. Even the worst characteristics you have can eventually help to make you a better person, but only if you own that. Only if you're willing to acknowledge that yes, what I did was wrong. Yes, what I did was hurtful, was evil, was damaging. If you're not able to own those things, even privately. You don't have to be on a podcast or radio show and say your deepest, darkest secrets. Even if you're able to admit that to yourself, that is a critical step to self-growth and if you can do that, I want you to know, I am deeply proud of you because that's difficult. That's hard. It hurts. It feels like it's tearing at your soul, but it is a critical and necessary step for healing and progressing and for becoming a better person. 

Even now, I would say in 5 years, I'll probably have several things to say about myself right now and I'm okay with that. The fact is, I'm never done growing. I'm never done becoming the man I want to be because that is not a goal. That is a destination and a path that I walk on and I'm never going to find the end of that path and part of it is being okay with there is no end goal. There is no end by which you can say, “I'm good enough. I'm a good person. I'm going to hang on my laurels and say, ‘I have done enough. I am enough.’” Honestly, it's never enough. 

There's never a destination reach and the beauty of it is that you can always become a better person. You can always progress. You can always be more helpful. To some, that would be terrifying and I understand. It's saying that there's no point by what you can say I'm done and I've managed to become great. But every day, every person you talk to, every person you say, “You know what, I'm here for you if you want to talk,” you're becoming a better person and that is a very beautiful thing. 

JAMEY: I can see why you say it would be terrifying for some people. But actually, I think what you just said was really inspiring to me in the sense that yes, the journey is never done, but also, putting it in that way encourages you to give yourself room to not be perfect now, if that makes sense. I think by saying, “I can always be better, I'm striving to be better, but I'm not going to beat myself up about the way I am right now. I'm just going to keep moving on this path,” and I think that that's really inspiring.

BRANDON: Yeah, and there will certainly be days where the climb is much higher than others, where you manage to say something that is especially damaging on let's say Twitter, for instance and a lot of people call you down on that and say, “Hey, what you said was deeply hurtful.” When that type of thing happens, you have one of a couple of choices. Either you can double down and say, “I'm a good person. I know I'm a good person in my heart,” and in doing so, you've missed a critical point that people will only tell you this type of stuff because they believe you have the ability in you to change and be better. They say this because they deeply care about you as well and they deeply care that you improve and become a better person. 

So a lot of it is that you will have days that are harder to own, days that are harder to improve, days where you feel like why in the world am I bothering if I'm just going to get knocked down for saying one thing? I think that's the wrong way to frame it. I would just see those as larger growth opportunities to realize that within us, we still have things that need calling, things that need to be taken away, things that we need to get over and I will not deny it is difficult, it is hard, but in the end, it's worth it.

JOHN: I think it's so powerful that that ability to talk about one's past when it's negative, when it's negative, whether it's a way you used to behave or something traumatic that happened to you. When you're able to speak that, you're able to connect to people at a very different level whether it's connecting to someone else when you say, “I used to be really arrogant like you're kind of being right now. So I know you're coming from. I know you're not an evil person, but let's figure out how to work on that.” Or to say to someone, “I've been through what you've been through, we can get through it.” What we could call flaws of our past can be really powerful ways of connecting with people.

BRANDON: One thing that I've learned is that every person has a story. Every person has a battle they've fought, a triumph they've had, a sorrow, a tragedy. They've experienced life in a wholly different way than I'll ever be able to experience it and because of that, their stories may be the salve for the wound of someone today. Those people by sharing their stories, by having the strength and honestly, the courage to be able to speak power to their past and say, “Yeah, I screwed up. Yeah, I've done this stuff. I know what's at the end of that road and I want to help you and I want to save you from some of that.” 

But at the same time, sometimes we can mistake that and say, “I know the solution to your problem.” Meanwhile, someone else has an entirely different story and to some cases, it might be arrogant to say, “I know exactly what you've gone through. I know exactly what you're doing right now” because they may have a different story and that's all right as well. 

I think a lot of it is the give and take of empathy in that you're empathizing with the person, but they're also empathizing with you and you're trying to find a mutual path to where you can both heal and both grow and both progress.

JOHN: A very important point. There has to be that listening in there.

JAMEY: You mentioned the Ruby community earlier as a community that was important to you in this path that you were on. I feel the same way about it and one of the things that you specifically said about it was that you felt like people were listening to you when you first became acquainted with the Ruby community and I think that that's really huge. But I wonder if we could like talk about—I think the Ruby community is pretty special. I've been a part of lots of communities on and offline and some of them are just special and that's how I feel about it. So I was wondering if we could kind of talk about what makes a community feel special in that way?

BRANDON: I believe deeply in my heart that we are defined by who leads our communities; we are defined by the character, the moral compass and the beliefs of who we choose to put in charge. In the case of Matz, he is a very kind and empathetic man who I have deep respect for and his very motto is, “Matz is nice and so we are nice” and I believe that it's an extremely powerful thing to say is that we believe in being kind to each other. We believe in listening. We believe in considering points of view. We believe in all of these things and the potential of people. That opens the door to so many conversations. It opens the door to being welcoming to new people. 

At RubyConf, you have a Scholars and Guides program which has done an immense amount of good for so many people that are trying to get into the industry who otherwise, don't know a path. That's one of the greatest challenges is unless you know people, unless you have connections, trying to find a path into the industry can be absolutely demoralizing and to have a community people who welcomes you with open arms, who finds people who've been in the industry for a while. They're able to connect you with these people and say, “This person will show you around, will introduce you to people, will give you the connections you need to be able to succeed,” and that was a really beautiful thing to me. 

Whenever I was getting started the community, whenever I went up to Kansas City, for instance, I found the first actual Ruby community that was a part of and it went from me being the person rambling about all these crazy ideas rattling around in my head to people nodding along and saying, “That's kind of interesting. Have you considered X, Y, and Z?” and actually building a report and feeling like I belong here. I'm not strange here. People actually appreciate some of what I have to say, which is why I believe so strongly in showing the new members of our community that they belong here, that they have something interesting to say, they have a special ability, they have potential. The Ruby community I've seen, by and large, has taken this attitude and embodied it in so many amazing ways.

JAMEY: I like that you brought up the Scholars and Guides program because I also have very strong feelings about it. But I think that even the fact that it's called the scholar and guide program is indicative of what you were just saying like, yes, just because you're new and it's your first time and I'm helping you get acquainted with this community and this event. It's not that I don't think that you have anything to bring, I have things to learn from you, which is how all mentorships should be, and calling the new people that are coming in and getting the scholars, I've always liked that about that program.

Naming things is hard, as we know in tech, and what we name things is important. It makes me really happy when I can tell that someone was very thoughtful about what they wanted to name something and that's how I feel about the Scholars and Guides for it.

JOHN: And I like that it's not just the scholarship program, right? It's not just, “Here's your ticket. Welcome,” you're done. It continues that process all the way through the conference so that it's not just, “Okay, great. I get to go to my first tech conference, now what? Like, “Oh my God, there's 800 people here.”

BRANDON: Yes, and that can be very overwhelming to walk into a conference hall to know absolutely no one and to say, “What in the world am I doing here?” That is honestly, absolutely terrifying. In the past, I was very much a heavy introvert. I was not able to converse with people, to walk up and say, “Hi, I'm Brandon” or anything like that. I was terrified of that and I see a lot of these same things in some of the scholars and some of the new people who walk in to the conferences. 

But you know what else I see? I see all these members of the community—many of which have a decade or more experience, many of which I've learned from for many years—go up, find those exact people who look so much out of place, welcome them, invite them to dinner, invite them to events and say, “You're welcome here. Come join us,” and maybe it might be breakfast, maybe it might be lunch, maybe it might be who knows. But I've noticed that they take a very, very strong role towards making sure that they're not creating these cliques to where they only hang out with each other and only talk to each other. 

The entire purpose of the conference for them is to meet new people, to welcome them into the community, and make them feel like they have a home here. I've been to other conferences where that's not the case; where it ended up being very clique-ish and standoffish to where if you're new, unless you happen to be very extroverted, you probably were not going to find many people and the Ruby community has really changed a lot of the framing of how I look at this now.

BRANDON: So I learned to program in Ruby from Michael Hartl Ruby tutorials and as some people who have learned from this book may know, which I think is a lot of people in my experience, it's under the… Oh, I forget what the code is called. It's like the free beer license or whatever and it's like, “You can use this book. You can use it for free. You can distribute it to your friends that need it. You just have to buy me a beer if you see me at a conference or something.” 

When I first learned Ruby, it was well before I was really involved in the tech community as a whole and I remember reading that and laughing and being like, “Oh, that's cool. But like, what am I ever going to meet this person that wrote this book that I found on the internet?” Then I started going to like RubyConfs and I met Michael Hartl and he invited me to dinner and now we chat on Twitter and I think about that like, it seemed so outlandish to me that I would happen to be in a room with this one person that I didn't know. Now that kind of thing happens to me all the time and all of those people, in my experience, once I've been in that room with them have been pretty great. So that's my story.

JOHN: You know, what's funny about that and I guess, this can segue into another topic is that whenever I had joined the current team or the current organization I'm in, I was greeted by one of the directors, who was very high up, that said, “So you're the Ruby expert,” and I remember feeling deeply, deeply uncomfortable with that like, Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I know like Avdi Grimm, I know Eileen Uchitelle, I know Aaron Patterson, I know Coraline; I know all these people who are way, way better than me. I am no expert by any reasonable imagination. 

Then I started talking to other people and I realized in some cases, after a while, we start becoming those people that people are looking up to and it's a very strange feeling that the same reverence that I might've had for an Avdi or a Coraline or anyone else is the type of reverence that some people have for me and that is very humbling to know that people see you like that and people want to be with you like that. 

Michael Hartl was the same way for me. We've had many great conversations on the side and just, so many of these people are so welcoming that it's insane that you could even approach some of these people. In other industries, this would be blasphemous. How dare you approach this well-known person? Meanwhile, you go into Ruby and they're like, “Oh, hi! Want to grab a drink. Want to go to supper? Want to potentially grab tea if you're not really a drinker?” I mean, people are open, people are empathetic, and they are very welcoming. 

That said, I still don't consider myself an expert. I still think that's very funny, but that's another topic entirely we won't get into. 

JAMEY: I call myself a Ruby person when people ask about what I do. I'm like, “Oh yeah, I'm a Ruby person,” and I say it in that tone of voice and people are like, “Oh, yeah.” But I like that.

JOHN: Right. It's just very casual. Not like, “I'm a Java person! Aah!”

JAMEY: I like to think that people are like, “Oh, those quirky Ruby people.” I don’t know f that's how they feel about it. That's how I feel about it.

BRANDON: Yes. I guess overall, I want to be known as a kind person, not necessarily a Ruby or a JavaScript or a Java or a Go or anything else person and I guess I'm just trying to make sure to hold myself accountable towards being kind above all things, not being tied to anything necessarily. But I do believe very strongly that Ruby does that very well.

JOHN: I like also that you said kind there and not nice. I think on previous episodes, we've talked about the difference between being kind and being nice and so, is that a difference you feel like you're making a distinction there?

BRANDON: In some cases. I'm not sure what you discussed on previous episodes as far as the semantics of it, but I feel like some people will be nice in order to gain things, they'll be nice in order to put a pretty face on it from someone that they think well, I have an advantage out of this. Meanwhile, to be kind is to me, to embed that in your character and to say, “I am kind no matter who you are, no matter what you are. It is my belief that I must be kind to you and I must treat you with the dignity and respect.” 

There have been cases in the past where I've seen people that have interviewed at various companies that have done amazing on the programming portion and have really blown people out of the water and people said, “Of course, we're going to hire them and they've done amazing. This is the best person we've ever seen.” But the interesting thing is, a recruiter might come up, one of the female staff might come up, someone of a more minority position might come up and they'll tell us horror stories. They'll tell us of everything this person had done to them in the past, of everything they'd done even during the course of the interview; be horribly racist, xenophobic, sexist, misogynistic, any of it. 

The fact of the matter is, as a white male, I see the nice space of that person, I see the polite face of that person. They see the real face of that person. They see who that person is. As soon as the mask is off, as soon as they can get away with who they really are, that is what they see. I want to make sure that those people are heard first and foremost and that we find the difference between someone who is merely being nice for the sake of pleasantries versus someone who is actually sincerely kind and empathetic as a person. Because quite frankly, tech has no room for such malignant people. 

JOHN: That's why it's so important that those non-white males are in the room in the process of hiring of so that you can get that perspective on the person; you get that extra glimpse that maybe you just wouldn't ever see either because you're not sensitized to certain microaggressions or because they just don't exhibit them because know they're talking to another white male.

BRANDON: And I deeply believe that when someone tells you who they are, listen. Because it's not a mistake, it's not a joke no matter how much they might insist, “I was just joking, don't be sensitive,” no matter how much they say, “Oh, I'm just horsing around.” What someone jokes about and what someone is willing to make fun of is who they are at their deepest level and I've seen it so many times and if you give them permission that one time that if you laugh at their joke, if you take a racist comment offhandedly and don't critique it, you're going to find that they'll progress. That they will become more and more entrenched in this and that all of a sudden, you go from that into certain amounts of white supremacy and you go into much, much more vile subjects and you'll find these people are trying to fish to see, am I safe with you? Am I safe in this place? It feels like such a perversion of the idea of being safe, that they would try and inject these vile premises into a conversation because they feel like they can get away with it.

So I believe it is critically important, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant seeming, that your minority staff, your women staff, or otherwise say that this person gives me a bad feeling. You should listen to them with all due seriousness because chances are, they've seen something which you're not willing to see. 

The interesting part to go back to privilege and everything is that as a white, straight male, in a lot of ways, I'm safe to talk about the damage I've done. I'm safe to talk about the harm I might have caused in a lot of ways that other people might not be. That would destroy their careers and that is extremely troubling to me that I'm allowed to be candid, that I'm allowed to be open about things because in a lot of ways of who I am and that other people might face extreme discrimination from this. They might not be able to get a job. They might be taken off lists. They might have all types of issues. 

Even in conversations about being autistic, there are several staffers at even any of the companies I worked at in the past which are not able to have safe conversations with their managers. Because for me, I happen to be at a very senior level, having a decade or more experience in the industry, me being candid about something is not necessarily nearly as dangerous as someone who's a very junior engineer being candid about this because to them, that might end up being fired. For me, it's just, “Oh hey, they're eccentric and have a weird way of doing things, but see, they do all this productive stuff.”

So that really concerns me is that I'm able to speak, like I do today, because in a lot of ways of my privilege. So the question I have for myself is, how can I use that to try and speak power towards the struggles of people who might not be able to?

JOHN: That's an incredibly important point. It points to the fact that the value of what you're doing on this other level, right? The ability to talk about your autism and about your journey and about the way you used to be in the way you are now. You're able to take those risks without impacting your career. It allows people to see others talking about that so that those conversations can become more and more common and once they're more and more common, then the risk of revealing those parts of yourself to the people with lower privilege are correspondingly reduced. I mean, they're still there and it's really unfortunate, but I think this is a way that those of us that do have a lot of privilege can use that for good by helping these conversations keep happening so that they become more normalized.

BRANDON: Yeah, and one thing I'll say, before I get into the story that this reminds me of, is that even if you do have privilege, you may have had a difficult life, you may have had a difficult time getting to where you are today. Saying that you have privilege does not demean the struggles that you've had to get where you are. It just means that you have not had nearly the obstacles that some of your coworkers or colleagues might have had and in fact, I had a bit of a difficult childhood in that I did not know I was autistic until I was 19, and that was well into my adult life. So I went through the entirety of elementary and middle school being a very strange child who's never able to really get work done, who's never truly understood, and in many cases, I was about failed at multiple things.

A very interesting story that I have on this is that whenever I started the entire Lemur Talks, I had decided to also make stickers about this just to have a scavenger hunt to have a little bit of fun at RubyConf. Well, I happen to have leftover stickers because that's always the case in the conferences and my mother asked if she could borrow a few of those. Now, my mother is a special education teacher and now, special education director so she had these stickers all around her classroom and the kids loved them. They played games with them. They treated them as prizes. They had all types of fun with them. But the interesting part was eventually, those stickers started migrating back to their homes, back to their parents, and the parents understandably said, “What in the world are up with these cartoon lemur stickers? I don't get it. What in the world is going on here?”

Now, the thing you have to realize about the Midwest is that autism to them is a death sentence. It means my child will never be successful. They'll never be normal. They'll never hold a job. They'll never have a future and people earnestly believe that. So whenever those same parents walk into that room with my mother, for any type of session about their child and their future, and say, “What's up with these lemur stickers.” She says, “Let me tell you a story about my kid and now he grew up a lot like your kid, what he's doing today,” and those types of stories give them hope, give them a future to know that yes, I can make it. Yes, there is a future for me. Yes, there's an entire industry which is willing to welcome me.

And that's a lot of the reason why I invest substantial amounts of money into education, into scholarships, and to finding these people and trying to get them on the path; into college, into industry and to wherever they need to go. Because I believe strongly in the future and that we have responsibility to give back to those same children who are going through some of the same struggles that we've went through in the past and to give them a bright hope for a future because I've seen them, I've talked to them, and I'm excited to see where we go in the future from that.

JAMEY: I think that’s such a good attitude about it because—I don't want to project that I feel the same as you—but from what you've said, I think I feel a similar way about the trans community and in my experience, it can be kind of easy to fall into guilt about it like, I have achieved this success and other people who are like me haven't achieved the success because of this and this and this reason of things that were holding them back that didn't hold me back for whatever reason and I, sometimes, feel guilt about that. But I think it's so much more healthy and I try to push myself to look at it more like you're describing it, as like, “I'm a success story. I did this and I can show other people that they can do this and now that I have this privilege of being successful and being stable and secure, which not everyone I know is, these are the things that I can do to help other people who are like me achieve in the same way that I have managed to achieve.”

BRANDON: Yeah, and one interesting thing that's happened recently is I've realized that I don't have to be the one to be the visible person. I don't have to be the one that's out front to set the example. What I mean by that is the school district I grew up in is very heavily Hispanic and a lot of them first generation work in factories and extremely hard workers. They're doing 68-hour weeks to make sure their kids can go to school to make sure they can live a better life and they are working dang hard and I have nothing but respect for those people. 

But one of the things I saw is that there aren't very many teachers who look like them, there aren't very many people in the community who look like them, who have models of success, who have models of what they might want to be. They just see that my future is, I go to the factory and I do all these things just the same as everyone else and not to demean them at all—it's extremely, extremely impressive what these people managed to do to build foundations, to build communities. 

But to show these kids there is another path that they can take, to show them there are other options in the future. So what I've been doing is investing in scholarships to reinvest teachers into the communities they grew up. So a Hispanic student, for instance, would graduate from the high school would go to a local college and get a teaching degree. It would reintegrate back into the school district they grew up in because they have experiences, they have stories; they are so much closer to those children than I'll ever have. 

So what can I do to give some of the power I might have through any of this salary I have from technology to allow them to be the aspiration for these kids? To let them know that yes, there is a future. Yes, there is a hope. See, my teacher looks like me. My doctor looks like me. They engineer across the street, doing this incredible project, looks like me and to see those people gives them hope to say, I can do that, too and I believe that is critically important and in a lot of ways, there is a certain amount of toxicity in believing that one has to be the forefront and one has to be the face of these movements to make change. Whereas, you can find people in these communities and give them some of the power you might have to allow them to also invest back into their own communities. 

JAMEY: I can't agree with you enough about the looks like me thing. It's so important and it's so powerful. 

BRANDON: Yes and that's a very interesting thing that I've had to contend with is given the choice of taking power for myself or giving that power away to someone who could use it more effectively than I ever could. I need to be willing to step back from that to not pursue my own gains solely and to be able to say, “The betterment of the community matters far more than my own personal fame and success. It matters far more that these people have someone they can look up to than for me to maybe make an extra couple of thousand dollars.” In doing this, we're able to get people on school boards. We're able to get people local government. We're able to get all of these people that have much more insight and much more view. 

Even while discussing scholarships and talking to the superintendents to some of these districts, I said, “I cannot begin to know your struggles. I cannot begin to know every concern that you have here because you work here because you know these people, you know their hearts. You have far more insight into this and I ever will.” It takes a great amount of humility is step back and say, “Sure, I have money. But that doesn't mean that I know what your problems are. It doesn't mean I know how to fix it,” and it would take a supreme amount of arrogance to say that I'm going to come in and I'm going to fix your community. I'm going to make it better. Instead, it's so beneficial to step back and say, “You already know how to fix it. You just may not have the money, may not have the resources do it. What can we do to try and get you in a position where you can help?” 

JOHN: That hubris is one of the defining factors of the Silicon Valley attitude in so many cases, just that well, we can do government better, we can do public education better, we can do food delivery better without ever talking to the that are impacted by these things, or who've been working in it for 50 years and maybe have some insights. 

You even get into that situation with charities, like Tom's Shoes, where they'll deliver all these free shoes to a community without really knowing that there's like that much need for the shoes, but also, simultaneously like taking the business away from all the local cobblers because all of a sudden, everyone's got free shoes and now you've just ruined a couple of people's businesses. That sort of like, “We're going to come in because we know better and we have this money” is such a destructive attitude so calling that out is really important.

BRANDON: Yeah, and I very, very deeply believe that to have that arrogance and that hubris is probably one of the cornerstones that will cripple any technologist’s career. To believe that I have the solution, only I am able to do is because I'm smart, I'm clever, I know better than you do, that type of arrogance will not serve you at a job and in fact, even in your team to not listen to the people under you, like we've said earlier, to not listen to the various experiences, to not be able to do this. 

A lot of extremely senior and even above senior positions rely on the fact of being able to acquire knowledge about a domain. They require knowledge about your stakeholders. They require a deep and intimate conversation with the people who are using your products and if your arrogance is so high that you're not able to have these conversations, quite frankly, you have no business leading these types of projects because you will lead them to their own destruction and I've seen that happen in so many cases. 

With a lot of educational materials, for instance, people have built entire applications around school systems without talking to a single teacher and I met some of the teachers—most of my family are teachers—that have had to struggle and suffer through some of these experiences because they never saw it as necessary to actually talk to a teacher once in their life. Or there’s other people who have never had the experience of being worried for their lives on a date that are making dating applications or all these other cases. 

It's like if you cannot get the people who are most vulnerable to your product, or most impacted by it and have them in a room and have a conversation, what are you doing leading a project like that? 

JAMEY: Or even knowing who those people are and just being aware of the vulnerable people in your own community or demographic or whatever word makes sense for what kind of project you're working on. I like the fearing for your life on a date example, because I think that's also a good example of something that if you haven't experienced that, not only do you not know what it feels like and don't have insight on that, but it might not even occur to you that there are people in that bucket.

JOHN: Exactly, yeah. You don't even know that you don't know that that's a whole big thing that's there.

BRANDON: Yes, and I suppose this gets back into a little bit of tech hiring. I believe it was Jack Danger one RubyConf that said something to the note of if all your interviews happen to be white, straight male, Stanford graduates that believe the algorithm textbook is a rule of law, chances are they're going to hire people who look very similar to them and those people are going to then hire people who look similar to them and you have a very homogenous culture. Meanwhile, I can tell you from experience, people who don't even know that algorithms book exist are still extremely valuable in technology. People who have diverse perspectives, who may have learned differently than you. 

Trying to quantify the use of an engineer from the ability to replicate say, a bubble sword or replicate a reverse binary tree or any of these other things is a critical misunderstanding of the value of technologists can give and if we exclude all of these people and all these diverse perspectives from our products, they will suffer in the end. Sure, you might be able to crank out an algorithm in 5 seconds, but if someone literally dies because your application did not take these things in consideration, I can tell you that your hiring bar doesn't mean very much because damage is done. 

JAMEY: I think the hiring people that look like you aspect of it, it's very interesting because—I've had this conversation before and I totally agree with you—but from my perspective, when I get hired at a new organization, I'm like, “Yes, put me in your hiring process. I'm going to hire a whole bunch of people that look like me.” So it's just interesting to think about it and I think that's the right thing to do and so, it really depends on perspective. It's just interesting to me I guess, is what I'm getting at that these phrases are meaningful in our industry, but it really depends on who's saying them to what they mean.

JOHN: Yeah.

BRANDON: Yes, and that's perfectly fair. What I would say is there needs to be a balance of people at the table that makes these decisions. If the entire table are again, white men, then chances are, they're going to bias towards people like themselves. Now if you manage to split that table and have different people sitting there, chances are, that bias is going to start to be neutralized to a certain extent. It's still going to exist no matter what you do; there's going to be bias injected into everything. Everything by its very nature is biased. Everything by its very nature is political. There's no such thing as apolitical technical company. There's no such thing as an apolitical person, even. Your entire lives are political decisions, biased decisions. The question is, what can you do to have enough people at that table to manage counteract it and check each other?

JAMEY: Yeah, I think it all comes down to self-awareness I was thinking about this same thing earlier when you were talking about having a bad feeling or a bad vibe about somebody and taking that seriously if underrepresented folks on your team say that. Because that's another phrase that I think matters a lot on who's saying it like, a lot of people will say, “Oh, you shouldn't hire someone just on a vibe,” which I think is true. That's how you get a bunch of people that are all Stanford grads that feel the same because they had a good vibe about each other. But then if a different person is saying something about a vibe in a different context, it means something very different and it needs to be considered in a different way.

BRANDON: Yes, and that very much can be used for discrimination and hiring. The question is, what's the bias that leads the statement and if we dig into it, what we find at the bottom of it? I would say in the case of a lot of these minorities, if we dig to the bottom of it, they've had experiences in their past where someone has treated them poorly, malignantly, or otherwise made them fear for their jobs, their careers, and made them feel lesser. 

Meanwhile, with some white people who happen to have some racism issues or otherwise, they haven't really resolved yet, they may have issues with say a Black person and they may feel like they are not properly equipped for this job because say, their hairstyle or something like that or something absurd, which has no bearing on anything else. You could dig in to that, what you're going to find is a pretty crap excuse and a lot of very closeted racism. 

So I guess, the question, whenever you're saying this, is anyone's free to say it, but what do you find as soon as you start digging and hit the bottom of that? Do you find a deep pain and resentment and issue, or do you happen to find a lot of closeted racism that people have not really taken on?

JAMEY: It's almost like the world is so complex.

BRANDON: Yes, and I wish that we could have simple answers to anything, but nothing has a simple answer, nothing has a very clear, straightforward yes or no. A lot of things end up being extremely nuanced and we need to take that in consideration with everything and that's not comfortable. It requires a lot more work. It'd be nice if I could just give you a simple answer as “This is what you need to do,” or “This is how things work.” But quite frankly, it's impossible and I think we do ourselves grave disservice by saying that everything can be simplified and given a simple answer.

JAMEY: I agree.

JOHN: Yeah. I think being in code, until you start thinking more deeply about it, you can get the impression that things can have simple answers because you can write your method that returns true or false. But until you think more deeply about the real world that that method is running in, the sociotechnical system, then you're not going to really understand what sort of answer it needs to provide.

BRANDON: Yes. So let's say that a developer has built the most pristine looking high rise you've ever seen. It's perfect. It's architecturally beautiful. There's not a single thing you could criticize it for. The thing just screams that this person knows exactly what they're doing. Problem is that the person who wanted the product wanted a nice soft mountain house in the woods. So even if you've done everything, it looks perfect; until you scope out and see what your client actually wants, you probably screwed up there. 

So it's like even if everything – you have a series of simple answers that are of course, obvious in the moment until you scope out, until you look at the greater picture of the code, you're not going to see what the client actually wants, you're not going to see the impact of your code, and you're not going to see that those simple answers lead to very complex solutions.

JAMEY: Yeah, I think because of the proximity to math in tech leads people to feel like there's objectivity to it in a way that math has some sense of objectivity, but I don't think programming does. The fact that so many people, in my experience, feel like it does, is right or wrong in the way that a math equation is right or wrong as opposed to all of the different ways you could write a paragraph of a story versus all of the different ways you could write a method in code and how they're different and subjective from each other.

BRANDON: Yes, and I think a very valuable lesson is that tech is, by its very nature, political. Every decision we make that affects the world, every decision that interacts with any other person is inherently political. Let's say for example, some of the algorithms on Twitter recently that highlighted white faces versus Black faces, that was a very political decision whether or not people meant it to be that way or whether people had the intention of which is irrelevant. The fact is, outcomes matter more than intentions and the outcome was damaging. 

With facial recognition software, you have the same thing which is used in multiple police applications, which identify as Black faces is very similar to each other. So you have all forms of arrests that occur because a facial identification system confused to people. That algorithm is of course, political and of course, it has severe ramifications. Even if the intention was nowhere near that, it doesn't matter. The result is still the same and we are judged by our outcomes. 

It's deeply concerning that people feel that tech has not political and that tech has no clinical outbreaking because, by its very nature, anything that interacts with the outside world or interacts with people outside of your company and even inside your company, is political.

JOHN: Yeah. So we've come to the time on our show when we do what we call reflections, which is each of us can talk about the ideas that have struck us most from this conversation, or the ideas that we're going to continue to think about afterwards.

JAMEY: So closer to the beginning of the show, Brandon was talking about being given feedback and taking feedback and he said something that really resonated with me and struck me, which was that when someone gives you feedback, it's because they trust you that you're going to use that feedback to change something about yourself and do better. I think that that's so important to think about and I'm almost kicking myself for not thinking about it, in quite that exact way before, because it can feel like such an attack when someone gives you that kind of feedback. 

You used an example about Twitter, which I think is what made me think of this, because I definitely think very consciously before I reply to someone like, I'm going to tell this person they're wrong, but first I'm going to decide if I think that they're acting in good faith at all and if they're not, I'm not going to waste my time on this. I make that decision every day and so, to flip it back on myself and be like, “Oh, somebody saw something that I said that they thought was wrong and they made that decision about if they think I was acting in good faith or not,” and they obviously, do because they told me. It's so simple, but it's really going to change the way I think about being told difficult things in that way, I think. So thank you for that.

BRANDON: Yes, and for me, I believe that Jamey had a very good insight earlier about thinking well, who's saying it and what makes it racist or problematic if the white person might say something than depending on what you find at the bottom of that, it may be deeply problematic or it may be an actual concern versus more minority person who has extreme damage that's been in the past of these things. I think that's very valuable to consider, which is with thoughts, feelings, or otherwise you can't objectively measure what comes from the source of this and who's saying it and how does that impact our perception of it and that's something I'm going to keep in mind in the future.

JAMEY: Yeah. When you’re talking about like anger or hate, you have to think about where does that come from? Because I think it can come from just general hate, negativity, or evil, but it could also come from fear and that's a whole different ball game of a situation.

JOHN: Yeah, I think what struck me is the continuing importance of talking about one's personal—for those of us with the privilege to do so, the power that we can embrace by talking about our personal history is striking and it's not just everyone should always do this, I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that I think Brandon, you found this valuable and I think I myself have found this valuable in the things that I talk about that being able to bring that part of myself out into public to help other people understand and resonate with whatever that is, is incredibly valuable. It just reminded me of what a great responsibility is about how rewarding it can be.

BRANDON: Yes and that does remind me of a concern that I'd heard in the past, which are, what are your motivations for doing so? Are your motivations to show other people the damage it can be done, or are your motivations “Please feel sorry for me and hit me with praise for being such a good person for admitting to my faults”? 

For me, I'm not trying to earn a commendation, a cookie, a stamp, or any type of star. I'm doing it because I've had problems in the past and I believe they need to be shown the light of day so they're not allowed to fester, they're not allowed rot; they're not allowed to become a much deeper issue. So very much so, I would say check your motivation and everything you do and make sure you're doing things for proper reasons.

JAMEY: Brandon, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was really a great discussion and thought-provoking and inspiring and I really appreciate it.

JOHN: Yeah. Thank you so much. 

BRANDON: Well, thank you for taking the time to have me today.