From Developer to Manager by Sean O'Connor

Speaker 1: Come on, no.

Speaker 2: Uh hey everybody. Uh so yeah, uh before we get into the meet of the talk, uh a few quick things to get out of the way. Uh first up a quick uh motion warning. We're not going into any kind of like horrible prezie everybody's game C sec nightmare. Uh but there are some builds and there are some M8 gifts I know that are causing trouble with some people. So that's a thing for you. Just want to give you heads up so you have some time to do whatever you gotta do. Another thing I like to try in uh that tends to come up when bit. ly people give a talk. It's a little awkward. Uh it's easier to show than tell. Uh Wheers from Bitly. Cool. Who here has used bitly? Awesome. Who here has any idea how we make money and can support 90 people's salaries? Great, one person. This is the priorities where I've given this talk where even my coworker didn't put their hand for that one.

Speaker 2: So the super quick answer to this is we um Build tools for marketers to let them see into their activity across the internet. And we do it through links. Billions and billions of links Um and so normally at this point I'd be talking about all the servers and distributed systems and hard technical challenges involved there. Uh but for this talk, this picture is a lot more relevant. So this was from a company outing we did about a year ago. At that point, I think we were about 70 people. We are 90 people now. Uh so you know, not a chip group, but big enough where a few things change uh and where Uh everybody definitely a little bit before then, but even more so as you get into that range where everybody just like talking to each other and making stuff work uh doesn't really work anymore.

Speaker 2: Uh so you need managers, and so that becomes a thing. So uh as the uh talk kind of title suggested, right, the framework for this is journey from going from uh developer to manager, particularly my own uh journeys. So when I started out at Bitly almost four years ago, uh I was a full-time engineer. Didn't I make management responsibilities was happily coming into work, writing some code, building stuff, shipping stuff It's great, you know, every so often things get complicated. Uh you have some fire drills. Uh you know, as long as they're not too often, to be honest, they can be a little fun, right? Get some excitement in your day. Um it was good. Um And from there I started doing a bit of mentorship, right? Like at that point I had been in industry for a while. I had a bit more experience than the other people in my team.

Speaker 2: So you know started to give some feels and guidance and support. Somebody started working with some of the people on our data science team uh helping them understand that we can't afford to keep the entire internet in memory. And maybe there's some other options we can look at for the production version of something. So yeah, I'm doing mentorship, and that's fine. That's something I enjoy enjoy teaching. And about a year in, uh there was a bit of a management shuffle. And things got interesting, as will happen those kinds of things. Yeah, so and uh I was basically presented with a choice. I was probably one of the more senior people on my team, and I was probably the person who had the most interest in going into a leadership path. So I was given an option. And notice I keep on saying the word choice. It's a big deal. That's kind of one of our first lessons that we're learning along the way.

Speaker 2: Becoming a manager is a choice. Uh if for you it is not a choice in that like you're just put into the role and nobody asks you It's a giant red flag and you should run away, potentially screaming. Because that's a really big warning sign that things are probably not going to go well for that situation. If it is a choice, uh, which it should be It's one you should take seriously and you need to think about it because it's gonna kinda change a lot. It's not permanent, right? Like it's, you know, it's Well you you can come back to coding from going to engineering. It's not they don't like tattoo on your forehead, no code for this one, right? Um but it's still something you should think about seriously. So how do we actually go about Thinking about this, like what's what's gonna be different and then how do we uh make such a choice, right? Well to start off, uh

Speaker 2: what you're dealing with every day is gonna change, right? Instead of dealing with computers, you're gonna be dealing with soft, fuzzy humans Right? And while they can be wonderful and amazing, they're maybe a bit less deterministic than computers are, at least in the way that we can reason about them. So that makes things complicated and interesting. You have to be much more deliberate about what you're doing and that everything you do is amplified. Like the impact of everything that you do is amplified. But how you present, how you communicate, all that uh has much more impact than uh before. And you're gonna be doing less coding. Alright, for some people this might be fine, for other people this might be a really big deal. And it's a thing you need to consider. So this is my uh GitHub contribution graph that includes uh my activity at Bibli on our private repo.

Speaker 2: As you can see, there's not a whole lot of grain on there. If you look a bit closer, there's entire weeks where I'm not committing code. And as a manager, this is actually good. This is something that I'm doing my job. Right? So that's the thing you need to think about if that's something you're okay with. And looking at somewhat longer timescale, you really have to think about this that or come to understand that this is a career change, right? And with that, there's going to be a lot of things that change with that. The skills that you need to develop and that you need to do your job every day are going to be fundamentally different. How you're going to prioritize your time and energy and effort is going to be different, right? The things that are important to you are going to be different. What your goals are and how you're going to be measured by your peers and by your organization and by your managers are going to be different

Speaker 2: And when you go do your next job hunt, that whole process is going to be completely different. The availability of jobs is going to be different. How the interview process is going to work is going to be different. How you're going to evaluate a potential employer is going to be different. That's all going to be different So how do we go about thinking about this, right? We think about it, neither option is intrinsically better or worse. They're just different. So how do we how do we make this choice? How do we make this decision? And when I was when I was presented with the the choice, uh I thought about it a lot myself and I got some really good advice from uh some some friends and mentors, and a lot of it basically boiled down to what is it that makes you happy, right? At the end of the day, what is it about your job that you love? And what is the choice that gets you more? that, right?

Speaker 2: Um there's all kinds of other things that can factor into that, but at the end of the day, right, it's just what is it about your job that makes you want to come in every day and what gets you more For me personally, I really enjoy working with people and I enjoy building products that people use. I enjoy coding, but it's more of a means to an end for me personally. There's other people where that equation works out completely differently So but for me, right, like uh what a team of people can build and what I can build are different things. And accordingly I can build more stuff with a team of people, so I'm more excited. It's fun So for me it made sense to make the choice to become a manager. So but anyway, the lesson is becoming a manager of choice. For me, the choice was uh become manager. May not be for you. Uh this point in the talk, if we were to go down the not a manager choice,

Speaker 2: uh the talk would be done and maybe it wouldn't be super interesting. It's not what I did. So we're going on with, okay, let's say we're on board, we're gonna make the choice, we're gonna become a manager. How do we actually get into making that change, right? Because like just as a practical bit of logistics, right, like okay Yesterday I wasn't an manager and today I am. Now what, right? Uh how do you how do you go from sitting at your desk every day coding and being measured by how you deploy stuff or how much you get out shipped to production to making a team of people who are maybe nervous about the future and uh concerned about how things are going or not sure what they're doing, to people who are really excited to come into work every day and love what they do. Or maybe take a group of people who are maybe not super coordinated or effective and turn them into a bunch of badasses who get shit done.

Speaker 2: Uh like that uh you know going level down like that's a kind of the what what the new world looks like. But when you think about like how do I actually go about doing that, at least for me at first, like that that's kind of terrifying, right? Like I don't know how to like And it's people. Like I'm a mildly social introvert. Like I don't necessarily understand people. So how do I actually go about doing this? And I think that really uh Helped me a lot with that and that really enabled a lot for me was our next lesson. And it was that understand coming to an understanding that management is a learnable skill. I come from a liberal arts background. Presumably the thing that I know how to do is learn. And just like anything else, right, there are certain intrinsic qualities in people that may maybe make them better suited to be managers, but at the end of the day it's a learnable skill.

Speaker 2: It's something that you learn using the same tools that you learn any other skill. Right? And so to that end, right, so how do we go about learning a skill? Well start off, you have experience, right? So obviously actually doing the work of management is something you will learn from Like anything else, you will have failures and it'll be unpleasant, but hopefully you learn from that and make different, more interesting gallows in the future But even before you become a manager, right, and have direct experience as a manager, you still have relevant experience. Presumably at the point in your career where you're having the opportunity to become a manager Um you've had uh bosses, right? Some of them will be have been great, some of them will have been awful, and the rest will be somewhere in between. And you can think back, even though you weren't the one doing the management, you can think back to what did they do that was great, what did they do that was bad

Speaker 2: What they do that might that you might be able to use, what they do that like maybe doesn't work for you, but maybe you can find a different version of, right? That's all experience that you going in, even having never managed somebody else, you can take advantage of. Something else that comes up, and you know, I'm I'm hesitant to call management a science, because again, people and how science works are Super figured out yet. But still it is a very well-understood field. It turns out you're not the first person to manage other human beings. Uh we've probably been doing it for at least 10,000 years, and probably even have been doing it longer than that and just didn't have a way to write it down yet, right? Um accordingly, there's lots of people who have figured out things about management and then written it down and now you can read it and learn from it. It's really pretty cool.

Speaker 2: Some specific resources around that that I can recommend. There's someone out there, Rands. You've probably seen Rand Surpose's blog. He has lots of great writing. He did a lot of routing specifically about the intersection of management and technology and engineers, right? So a lot of his like applying general management principles to engineering specific works. Um so the blog's great. This leader all goes to like a kind of summary of like, hey, I know I've read a lot of stuff over the years. Here's like the five posts you really have to read. Uh and he also has uh two books, Managing Humans and uh you know being geek. The books are really good. Slight caveat with the book, Man and Humans specifically, is it gets into some 201 level stuff, right? So it's all really good stuff. I'd recommend you read it.

Speaker 2: But maybe don't try and do all of it on day one. Right, maybe maybe get into it for a bit and then you'll see where the things he recommends can slot in. Uh another more general management uh tool that's been super helpful to me and I'm amazed that this they put out as much free kind as they do is managertools. com. This is a company that does a lot of like in-personal management training, but they put a ton of their content out online for free. So they have a great podcast where they'll have like 15, 20 minute talk chunks where they just take on a topic and then give uh some really good background advice on it. They also have the thing that's probably impossible to see on these projectors If you go to the website, they have something called a map of the universe. And this map has like if you're if you're coming through something as a manager and like, well, I don't know how to deal with this, you can probably find it in the map of the universe, and they'll have a 15-20 minute

Speaker 2: Talk about it, right? So let's say uh you have an employee who has issues of absenteeism. How do you have that conversation in a constructive way? And how do you how do you deal with that? Uh let's say you're a manager coming into an existing existing team. How do you make that transition well? How do you deal with that? You know, all these kinds of things. And you can see like this is just a portion of that app and they just have tons of resources on there. It's great. Strongly recommend Uh so getting kind of back to more higher-level things, in addition to being able to learn about things and have experience, you can find mentors and support. I was really lucky in that. Shortly after uh I took on the management role at Bitly, we hired me a new CTO and he's been really supportive and really great. guidance for me. I also had you know people that I've worked with in the past or people I know in the industry who have also been really uh great feedback and sport.

Speaker 2: And and just like learning any other skill, right, there's a lot that you can learn from books. But it's really something else to be able to have so be able to have a conversation with somebody or to have somebody be able to bring another perspective to Washington and give you some feedback. That's really So they're going to try and seek out mentors and peers and support. So many learnable skill. That's cool. But you know, that gets to a question we're like, we're okay. We can there's a lot we don't know, but we can we can figure this out And then, you know, one day, uh maybe a few weeks later, you know, things it's going well, but like ever, things can't stay simple. Uh and maybe you start doing some coding again. Right? Maybe a bunch of your teams on vacation, maybe you have a hard deadline coming up, maybe you get hit with a dial service attack. Right. Stuff happens, you can't keep up, and you're like, oh, I'll just do this, I'll do this one pull request, I'll be fine.

Speaker 2: And you know, depending on how many people you manage, it might be fine, right? If you're just managing a bunch of people, you probably do have to do some coding. But once you get past that, right, like uh you very quickly get into the situation where first it'll feel great, right? Like You're shipping stuff, it's getting done, you have code that you can see that you have done. But it always it always comes back to bite you. Uh and the reason for that is by definition, if you as a manager are Doing the work itself, you're not doing your job. Right? Your job is to give the support and structure that your team needs to do their job well, and their job is to get the work done. Accordingly, if you're just doing the work yourself Eventually, your team is gonna not have the team the support and the structure they need to get their job done, and it's all gonna fall apart

Speaker 2: Ideally, hopefully it maybe just gets bumpy and you realize what you're doing and you back off. But still it's uh at the end of the day, the lesson is Magic is not about doing the work, it's about facilitating the work. work and making sure people have what they need to do. So we get past that. We stop the coding. Uh you know, it's it's it it's something you gotta manage. Um things are going great. Uh but you know you maybe the there's a certain point where Uh you can just get comfortable and you can just kinda get into a mode where like, well things are okay, like there's nothing worth setting up fire, so I'm doing fine, right? So I can just chill. And I've increasingly come to the opinion that while lazy engineers are a good thing because they're clever and efficient, lazy managers are not. Lazy managers are best adequate managers and usually are shitty managers.

Speaker 2: So instead of resting our laurels and just being like, what's okay, how can we think about going a step up? How can we uh Evolve our thing to a way where we we understand things in a deeper way and power up to the next level, right? And for me, the next level thing to really understand is that management is about relationships. Of course you have to like figure out like the logistics of stuff and deal with whatever situations are coming up. But really the thing that's going to enable you to deal with those situations really well is to have really solid relationships And those are the relationships, of course, between you and your reports and you and your manager. And it's also going to be relationships between your team and between the members of the individuals on your team. You have to make sure, do everything you can to encourage and build those so that when things do hit the fan, those relationships will be there and there'll be something that you can count.

Speaker 2: So how do we go about doing this, right? Well starting you need trust, right? A relationship without trust isn't a relationship. It's really pretty fundamental to everything But that's easy to say, that still doesn't tell me how do I actually do this, right? I can't just go to somebody like trust me, right? And like it's just that's not going to be very effective. So how do we think about how do we go about building trust, right? Um to start you can't communicate, right? There's if if if you can't communicate, it's gonna be really, really hard to build trust, right? Just because again, uh like uh Trust and communication are kind of like symbios, right? You can't have one without the other. And it it just you need both of those. So you need to have effective communications. A bit of a specific form of communication that I, in my experience as a manager, is

Speaker 2: probably the biggest bang for the buck that you're going to get is having one-on-ones. Uh everybody all my direct reports I have uh on the counter standing meeting for half an hour every week. Right? Maybe here and there we skip it, but like it's pretty on my list of like meetings that I'm gonna drop. There's a lot of meetings I'm gonna drop before I drop one on. And the reason for that is it especially when you get into a place where this is just a known thing, it at a minimum it creates a very low-friction environment to ask and have the conversations for things that like are not pressing enough issues to like Disrupt somebody's day and like put a schedule a meeting on the calendar or something like that for, but maybe it's still burning up you know five percent cycles in the back of somebody's brain, right? Or it's making them nervous or that they they didn't understand and and my understanding can let them do their job

Speaker 2: Going beyond that, one-on-one is going to be really powerful in that once you get past the first few, you're going to have this thing of like, well, I don't really have that much to talk about this week. What are we going to do? Where you can kind of push past some of that service level stuff and then from there continue to have deeper conversations. Conversations I mean now about work, maybe about Uh long -term career stuff, conversations about life, right? And then that's gonna do a lot to build that relationship, build that trust. So the answer you're gonna need, and we're gonna talk more about this later, is empathy, right? If you can't understand The perspective that somebody is coming from when they're trying to communicate something to you, nine times out of ten, whatever they're saying is going to sound like crazy gibberish that you can't figure out. Right, so uh while it's possible app communication without empathy, it's gonna be really hard and really ineffective.

Speaker 2: So it's gonna be really important. There's lots of other reasons for grinding empathy. We'll get to that in a little bit. And the last bit that you need for building trust relationships is you need to make a plan, right? So it's one thing to have a conversation and let's say you know you figure out uh you know maybe somebody's relatively happy where they are, but they really, really want to work on uh Project X, right? Because that's really what's going to get them excited with getting them engaged. There's a chance that project like that just going on Project X will just happen. But realistically speaking, you have to make a plan to make that happen. And if you do make the plan, now you're combining the communication with the action, the follow-up action. And that can become a cycle that then continues to build trust and build confidence that if we have a conversation about, let's say, a problem or a challenge, and we

Speaker 2: conversationally come to a solution It makes more and more trust that you'll actually get to the real solution, right, which requires action. So planning, you need it. And so, right, so the recap, management's about relationships. Cool. So you know we've powered up a little bit. We're doing we're doing a little better. But just like before, uh things can't stay simple and easy, and they gotta get hard sometimes. Uh yeah, and you're gonna have a real rough day In particular, what is almost certain to happen on a long enough timeline, and really a shorter one than you think, uh somebody in your team is going to become disengaged. I was really lucky when I became a manager in that my I had a super easy to manage team. Everybody was super engaged, they really enjoyed their work, they enjoyed the company, they cared about what we were doing.

Speaker 2: And they all got along fairly well. It was obviously work to do, but they were super easy. But eventually, you know, just life in humans and And things happen. And all of a sudden you start noticing that you know somebody on your team who normally is like uh super super active in conversations and like really uh cares about their work and um has a great attitude all sometimes like maybe you know just doing the bare minimum to technically do their job. Uh maybe comes in but has a bad attitude, maybe they're just either not not really talking much or uh or maybe worse they may be actively aggressive and it's just you know clearly something has changed and it's not for the better. At first you're gonna be like I don't know like it could be a million things. I don't know, maybe they're just having a bad day, maybe

Speaker 2: uh The weather's messing with them. I I don't know. I don't have a debugger for people, right? Like I can't step through their code and see what's going wrong, right? Um and especially if you're relatively non-confrontational like I am Your ink your first gut reaction is gonna be to stick your head in the sand, right? And just to say like, well, you know, maybe they'll just sort it out and it'll be fine. And for a few days that might be fine, but going beyond that is a really, really bad plan. It's just it's not gonna work out. And the reason for that is any almost any situation that is causing somebody to be disengaged and have major um Changes in behavior beyond a few days, by their nature almost certainly it are not going to resolve themselves. Sometimes it will and you'll luck out, but most of the time it's not going to get better on its

Speaker 2: own. And let's work through some examples to see what I mean, right? So here's a real worst-case scenario. Let's say that the reason that somebody's become disengaged and has had an emotional shift Is that they are receiving some form of abuse or harassment from somebody in the company. Right? If if you let's say somebody in your team is getting harassing messages in a DM on Slack every day, right That's gonna blow away their motivation real quick. Uh and it's not gonna be something that's necessarily visible to you, right? Like obviously if somebody is coming up and like smacking your developer on the back of the head Like, yeah, no, you you have a conversation, you deal with that. But the reality of it is, especially in the modern world where uh it's not you know considered part of flight society to do this kind of stuff It hap

Speaker 2: uh often aggressors will take those actions in ways that are only invisible to the person who is Doing the abuse and being abused, right? Similarly, when somebody's dealing with receiving the abuse, especially if they haven't dealt with this before. They may not reach out yet, right? Like they might be ashamed about it, they might be embarrassed, they might just not know who to reach out to yet So if this is happening to somebody and you notice a change in them, but you don't say, hey, what's up? and dig in a bit to get to this point, A, you might be leaving your employee in a really terrible place. which is an awful thing to do to somebody. B, you're likely uh you're also then allowing the the bad behavior on the other person's part to continue.

Speaker 2: Uh and uh in all likeness, that person's gonna eventually quit. In worst case, they might sue you, both you and your employer. Uh and Just worth stating, all those other things are way worse than the lawsuit thing, but just in case, that's still a thing. Right? So if you that's a situation that's not going to take care of itself. It might be something going on at Sideover, right? So another scenario might be, let's say, they're going through a health condition. Their loved ones are going through a health condition. Maybe they're going through some kind of mental health crisis, right? All that stuff is stuff that can impact them at work. And again, it's unlikely to resolve itself. This one is a bit more complicated, right? Because there's certainly a line to tow, right? Like there's a lot of somebody's personal life that is not really your business as

Speaker 2: their manager at work. But there's still a lot that can be done and a lot of benefit to be gained by having the conversation just by saying to somebody like, Hey, every I've I've noticed that like you don't seem to be super happy lately and to be honest your work has been going i isn't as good as it used to be. What's up, right? Just having that initial conversation can go a really long way for somebody who's going through something, and that they may not even realize it yet. Right when you're going through a really s uh something like that where uh your personal life is disrupting your professional life, a lot of times in the moment you don't necessarily realize what's happening or how you're How it's impacting other parts of your life. So just just having that giving somebody that feedback can be really helpful and powerful to them. Because just like anything else in life, if they don't know that something's wrong, they can't fix it

Speaker 2: Right? And then beyond that, if they do share with you that, oh hey, you know, I am going through something, then you can have a conversation about what support you can provide. Right? Maybe it's a situation where you can't do there's not really anything you can do, but at the minimum you can say, hey, if you ever want to talk. Right? It can be there for them in that way. But in all likeliness you can you know uh help them at least better understand what their options are, right? Like under st help them understand if they need take some leave. What does that look like in your company and what the options are there. If they are going through some kind of mental health issue, you can help help them get to resources and professional help that they may need to get what they need, right? But again, if you ignore all this and you don't have that conversation like, hey, what's up, it's not going to get better. Going beyond that, uh, or the kind of flassen errors, let's say they legitimately are just bored, right?

Speaker 2: Like they're just dissatisfied with what they're working on. It's not interesting to them anymore. also unlikely to get better and unless you have the conversation it's uh only gonna get worse. Uh so you know As I've kind of been hinting at, the solution here is to to talk and don't let stuff slide for too long, right? Um it's not gonna get gener generally speaking, it's not gonna get better on its own Uh and in addition to the the direct situation of the two you know you and your your report who were being impacted All this is having it, while all this is going on, it's also having an impact on the larger team, right? I don't know if you ever had the experience, but if you're if you're happy doing your job, but the person sitting next to you is miserable every day, That like that takes aware, right?

Speaker 2: It can become a toxic kind of thing. Um and at the end of the day you have to come to some kind of resolution, right? Like in that initial conversation, you're probably not gonna like magically fix the world because that's not how life works But at some point you do eventually probably have to get to a resolution of either you're on a path and it's an ongoing conversation and you're figuring out how to make things better Or you're coming to a place where you have the shared understanding that like, well, maybe this isn't the place for you anymore, right? And that's never a fun conversation, but it's way better than the alternatives of having somebody on your team be miserable and then turning toxic for the rest of your team So that's all then. Issues cannot be left unresolved. So again, things are doing okay. We got through that. You know, let's say we we work through the issue, it's okay. Uh and we're back to a place where

Speaker 2: maybe we're starting to invest on our laurels again. We're okay, we made it through that and feel like we accomplished something, or maybe maybe we we helped somebody through a hard time, now they're better, right? When you can help somebody through a hard time and they come back and they're better, that was a really rewarding experience as a manager. So then we're there. But again, right, lazy managers are shitty managers. So what can we do to step it up again? Right, what's the next level up as a manager? And the next big one for me is coming to an understanding of how fundamental self-awareness and empathy are. uh for being a manager. Right? So what do I mean here? So self-awareness is being able to understand being able to understand what you are feeling

Speaker 2: and at least have an idea of why you might be feeling that. that and how it presents to others. And empathy is the flip side of that, right? Being able to, as best as possible, put yourself in somebody else's shoes and understand what they might be feeling in a given situation and why they might be feeling that. And okay, sure, this is let's talk about soft fuzzy things with soft fuzzy humans and uh these are soft fuzzy things, but like how what why do I actually care? Like what is the actual practical application of means of this in this role. And there's a few of them, right? So one of the first ones that we already talked about a bit is communication, right? If you can't uh like I said, if you can't understand where somebody's coming from and what their perspective is Especially as you're getting into more and more serious and more and more

Speaker 2: stressful situations, it's going to be harder and harder to understand. what they are actually trying to say, right? Like you could hear the words they're saying and you understand, but but the you'll be missing the context of where they're coming from. Similarly If you're not aware of your own emission emotional state and where how you're presenting that, you are likely going to be saying something and being heard in another way. Right? So that's all significant. The next one also kind of relates back to something I talked about before, right? Remember how I said that uh as a manager or as a leader, everything you do gets amplif amplified? One of the big ways that this manifests is you set the tone for the team, right? Like you can't go mandate like, hey, we are happy today, so it is happy day, right? Like that doesn't work.

Speaker 2: But on the other hand, right, and you can st you you'll you'll recognize this from your own experience, right? If if if If your manager comes in and like they're in a good mood and they're excited, right, like that can be infectious and grow. And similarly, if they come in and they're an emotional mess, right, like they come in losing their mind. At best, everybody's like, hey, what's up with that guy? And at worst, they're gonna feed off that and become emotional messes themselves, right? So like that's all thing. And really at the the the bottom level of it, what it comes down to is your job is now people, right? And fundamental, you know, part of just the basic human experience is emotion. Emotion is uh a huge component of everything we do and how we experience the world. So unless you can both understand and manage your own emotions and see that in others, uh you're gonna be in a hard place.

Speaker 2: So how do we actually go about doing this, right? If this is so important, what what's the actual mechanisms for this? One of the really most powerful concepts for me in understanding this is this idea of emotional intelligence. It's uh basically A way of thinking about and understanding, being able to set out from uh the moment of yourself recognize what's going on with yourself and then be able to then from there kind of work right it's it's it's actually it's basically problem solving applied to emotions your your own emotions right so like hey what's going on here and then keep on pulling that thread until you get to the root cause And just like applied problem solving, when you can get to that place of like, oh hey, I'm angry, what's that about?

Speaker 2: Oh, this seems to start when that thing is happening. Just having that level of understanding gives you a lot of power to impact your both your your actual emotional state and how you're presenting it. One quick cave uh caveat here. Uh if you go and research emotional intelligence after this, which I encourage you to do, beware that is a very deep rabbit hole, and as you get deeper down in it, there is some stuff that sounds very science-y But maybe it's less science-y than they think. Beware. Take an increasingly large dose of salt as you dig deeper down. But still, a lot of the top-level stuff is really quite useful. Another way beyond just learning about emotional talent is that you can really develop a sense of self-awareness and get ongoing feedback is talk to other people.

Speaker 2: Right? So might mean talking to your significant other, might be talking to friends, right? Like people who are in your life, if if you are especially if you're in a state where you're different from how you normally are, they're gonna be the first people to notice and they're gonna be the best people to be able to talk to. about it, right? Just like I said before, giving the feedback to your employees if they're in a bit of a weird place. Uh you're also like you're s There's this recursive problem in management of you two are human. Accordingly, you're not necessarily always going to recognize when you're in a bad place right away. And getting that feedback from somebody who knows you is really helpful. Another form of talking to people that's really helpful Is talking to somebody who's completely uninvolved from anything in your life. Right? This might be a life coach. This might be a counselor of some kind, it might be a therapist But having that outside perspective, especially if that person who's providing outside perspective has training and understanding how like

Speaker 2: human brains and minds work, is really helpful. I strongly encourage you to find some avenue for that. Something else that's been really helpful for me is meditation. I know this can sound weird and crunchy if you're not familiar with it. I assure you like there is an extreme end of like you have a formal practice and maybe you're you're getting to you that that actually is a thing and that it's there and I encourage you to explore that if that's interesting to you. But there's also lots of forms of meditation where it's literally just sitting someplace and uh being with yourself and going through this process of understanding what's going on. on or even just going for a walk and maybe not listening to headphones, right? Like that actually gets really close to some of the lighter weightfulness of meditation and it can be a really powerful tool to help you understand what's going on with yourself and become So that kind of covers a bit of that side. On the empathy side, right, so what is empathy, right?

Speaker 2: We talked about it a little bit. So one form is saying management projection of one's own consciousness on another, right? More common colloquial way of saying is putting yourself in somebody else's shoes. But ultimately there's a challenge in this, right? In that again, one of the kind of fundamental aspects of being human is that we are the single mind stuck in the single meat body. And we don't actually have the ability to project ourselves anywhere outside that one experience, right? We can never truly understand the experience from somebody else 's perspective. But fortunately it's a spectrum and not a binary, right? So at one end of the spectrum, you just have no idea what somebody's experience is. Or you might not even be aware that there is an experience that somebody has had, right? Uh at the other end of the spectrum would be like this platonic idea of actually being able to experience the world through somebody else's eyes, which is unattainable.

Speaker 2: Thankfully, there's a whole lot of space in between there, right? And there's a bunch of stuff that we'll kind of get into the next section. Ways you can basically learn about the experiences that other people have that lets you move closer to that other end of the spectrum and just release the micro. So there's kind of two parts to it, right? So There's the practice there's the actual literal practice of empathy of having the thought and the the Habit of saying hold on let me think about this from their perspective right that that's a first step that's required But kind of like very different dimension, but still the same thing. From what Andrew was saying in the keynote on the second day, that's not actually the hard problem. The hard problem is actually

Speaker 2: then when you do that coming from the understanding somebody as much as possible and having enough background on the different experiences people can have to do that well. So we'll get to this a little bit So management requires uh self-awareness and empathy. There is an aspect of management that's really important that has some serious overlap with this. And what that comes and what that has to do with is the fact that people are different. Sarendom is in the back. Oh I forget her name, but the woman who spoke this morning, right? They touched on this a lot, right? But people are very different and have had very different experiences. Accordingly, everything that they come into, they have their own perspective and context they are coming from. So this has implications for empathy, but this also has implications for inclusiveness, right?

Speaker 2: What is comfortable and okay for you may not be comfortable and okay for somebody else See me figure out how to make that work. Alright, so uh you know what do I mean by inversives, right? So um Yeah, kind of classic white comfortable approach dude story, right? Like it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I understood the level of harassment and bullshit entire categories of people. Experience laughs. I just wasn't even aware that that was a thing, right? So that's just a minor case of uh the levels of how much you can not understand other people and On the flip side, once you understand that situation, having it become clear in what ways you may be making something less inclusive.

Speaker 2: Somebody, right? Uh you know, maybe let's say uh right, so a classic example of this is kind of like having requiring real names on social networks, right? For me as somebody who is uh who's never received any meaningful harassment who uh is lives within cultural norms and who fits into a lot of cultural stereotypes and and language Uh having uh uh a requirement I have a real name and a fixed gender and a social media profile, like that's fine, whatever, I just plug it in and that's cool. But for lots of other people, that's a much more complicated and much more problematic exercise, right? And so How how do we think about this? So getting into all the different forms of this is way beyond the scope of this talk, and there's people who can speak to it much better than I. I'm gonna point you out a bunch of resources.

Speaker 2: One of them has got Geef Feminism Wiki, as the name implies. It has a lot of stuff specific to one aspect of or one dimension of how people can be different. That being said, they also provide a lot of good, they have a lot of good material on how I generally think about inclusivity and dimensionality. Hint, if you're hearing the word dimensionality and you don't know what I mean, you need to go read. Another thing I would recommend is there's a conference that happens every year in Portland called Open Source Bridge. It's a tech conference, but it has a fantastic people track. This year's actually just happened, I think, about two weeks ago. It was right after PyCon in Portland. And they have a lot of really good talks on both general inclusivity and how different people interact with the world. but also how that intersects with technology.

Speaker 2: They have videos up from all the prior years. Definitely go check it out. There's a great program called Fun Club Run by uh Ash Dryden and Shana Kane. Uh A, if you want to throw money at people trying to make this better for people who maybe don't fit into the mold so well. This is a great way to do so. Beyond that, the organizations that they work with all act as fantastic resources to learn about the experiences of others. And I always encourage you to check it out. One less formal way, and kind of one of the less ways I'll touch on here, to learn about the experiences of the other is immediate. Obviously, you know, talking to people and hearing uh like formally structured talks is one way I learn about stuff. But uh media, particularly you know books, movies, TV, podcasts, right, all that uh and storytelling as a larger

Speaker 2: mechanism right is a very powerful and emotional way to to at least get a perspective on somebody else's experience And there's a whole spectrum of media in that that, especially once you learn to look at things through this lens, right, there's all kinds of media that obviously directly tries to convey a particular experience. There's lots of other media where it happens either by accident or is done in a much more subtle way. Something that can really act as a multiplier on this is looking for really good analysis of media Right, because this helps you, aside from actually calling things out and helping you learn about traditional concepts, it also helps you Learn to recognize when something's going on in media where somebody's having a different experience from you and how to and way better ways to think about it and learn about that. This is a particular

Speaker 2: example that that I love, so there's this uh YouTube channel called Idea Channel. It's from PBS Digital Studios. This particular uh video is talks about uh the character BMO on Adventure Time. Uh if you've just seen Adventure Time and you think it's a super weird kids cartoon, you're kind of right. There is also some really deep, amazing stuff in that, and this gets into some of the details of that. And these are all just examples, right? Like the the world of mediocre is huge. So learn about and be inclusive. It's a big deal, it's important. Right? So this is where things get, you know, have lots of uses. Understanding all this is right for empathy, but it's also really important that your team is a place that is welcome and comfortable. for everybody, right? Because otherwise, A, you're just being a kind of shitty human being.

Speaker 2: But B, uh, you're just gonna lose out on lots of opportunities to learn and get better people working on your team So that's important. And one last thing that has another mention of it is as a manager, you're on the front line of mental health, right? Whether you want to deal with this or not, um If somebody on your team is going through some kind of mental health issue, you're probably one of a small handful of people in their life who are in a position to recognize when that's happening and to be in a place to offer support. There's a really weird stigma around mental health in this country, so it's getting better, but it's still super weird. There's a guy I think where gives a lot of great talks on this. So if somebody wears glasses and they lose their glasses, you don't tell them to squint harder, right?

Speaker 2: Like that's crazy and just kind of a dick move, right? Like they should don't do that Well, telling somebody who's going through clerical depression to just smile and cheer up is equally as insane. Even on a physiological level, it's just not how that works, right? Uh so similarly to a lot of the other stuff, I can't. Get in for the mental health stuff in the time available, I can point out a lot of really good resources Uh open sourcing mental illness. Uh this is run by Ed Finkler. Uh they have a lot of great talks on the intersection of mental health and tech. There's actually, I don't uh remember the numbers off the top of my head, but there's a bunch of studies that show there's actually a significantly higher Occurrence of mental health issues within the tech industry compared to a lot of other industries. So it's something we need to be aware of. And there are aspects of our industry that make this worse.

Speaker 2: OSNI does a lot of good job of sharing information about that. Prompt is another great project. um kind of doing education about mental health and tech. And the last kind of major piece here that I recommend that you do. If you're either if you are a manager or you were thinking about becoming a manager, I strongly recommend that you go out and do mental health first aid training. So the idea with mental health first aid training is started in Australia I think around 2007 And the idea is, so with medical first aid, the idea is that we can't train everybody to be doctors for all kinds of mostly obvious reasons. But what we can do is give everybody a small amount of training So that enables them to stabilize somebody long enough that they can get professional medical help. Mental health first aid basically takes the idea and applies

Speaker 2: to mental health, right? It it gives you, it's not gonna put you in a place where you can diagnose what's what's going on with somebody. It's not going to get you in a place where you can fix what's going on with somebody, but it will give you the resources. So it's a day-long course. It's usually provided by your local health department in the US, and it's usually free. And from this course, you will learn how to recognize when somebody might be going through a mental health episode. What are some of the common forms that that can take? And from there understanding how to best de-escalate a situation, help somebody get stabilized, and then point, and then have resources to point them to to get the help. they need. Just like you should not be doing surgery on people, you should not actually be helping people with mental health issues. You should be getting them to professionals.

Speaker 2: But so learning about this is really helpful. And again, just like the inclusivity stuff, it's really important both for being able to support your team well and to be under to be able to better understand what somebody might be going through So with that, we're more or less done, right? So we're uh fresh inventory manager and we're doing okay. We're trying to feel out the world, we're trying to figure out our way. Uh sometimes we'll mess up and we'll fall down. Uh But we'll get back up and we'll keep on doing it. And as long as we keep in mind that becoming a manager is a choice, and as long as that permanent, right, you can come back. That management is a wonderful skill, and that self-awareness and empathy are fundamental to everything will be okay.