Ashley: 0:00

It seems like developers are sort of an unhappy crew.

Cat: 0:03

88 to 90 percent of managers—engineering managers specifically—s ay, making my team's technical work visible and understood at the organization is a key part of my job. When you ask developers less than 25 percent of them say my manager is actually doing this people doing software work don't feel understood.

Ashley: 0:30

We want to tackle this question of what technical work is and what that means. What happens when we invite people in who we wouldn't have considered as being quote unquote technical.

Cat: 0:41

what happens when we discover people have expertise we didn't plan for? What cool possibilities are there? What does it mean to think interdisciplinary about how we do this technical work?

Ashley: 0:54

Last episode, we talked a little bit about how you and I got into computing, right? But as we know, we're not the only people who came in through these sort of alternate, you know, non traditional computing paths. And so to set the stage here, we know that not everyone has access to computer science education. In the most recent report from code. org in 2023, the sort of state of computer science education, it looks like something like about 50 percent of high schools, for example, have. Computer science classes. And that's really uneven too across the United States. So in some states it's way less than 50%. So not everyone gets a computer science education. Very few people do. And very few people have access to what you and I would call a community of practice, right? For technical work.

Cat: 1:42

What is community of practice?

Ashley: 1:44

This is a theoretical framework, which basically says that, you know, in order for people to learn a skill set and get enculturated in a field, they, they enter what we would call a community of practice, which is really all of the norms and the skills and the culture that is commonplace in a particular field? So I think about it often for STEM and like neuroscience research specifically, but we can think about it also for technical fields. And what are the things people do? What are the norms around their work?

Cat: 2:14

I went to, uh, one of my very first tech conferences where I was presenting psychology work for software developers. So most of the people at this conference were software developers. And I met, um, Amanda Kasari, who works at, in, uh, open source stuff, uh, really cool work there. And she had like a big, uh, Packet of stickers with her. And she was like, it looks like your laptop doesn't have enough stickers here. Take some. Um, and it was like such a lovely, cool, you know, this is sort of a silly example, but people in tech, we'd love to have our stickers and we love to like have our little allegiances and show like, uh, you know, I know about this group, I know about that group. And, you know, it was such a welcoming little moment of someone being like, Oh, you, you actually don't work in Python. That's okay. You want to support this Python for women, you know, community here. And I was like, I absolutely do. And now I felt like, Oh, okay. I can kind of go home and Google this and see there's actually a meetup about it. You know, so all of that kind of social stuff is part of a community of practice, right? What'd you say?

Ashley: 3:20

So I think what you described is, you know, a symbol, right? Like a symbol that other people can see the sticker, right? And there's so many like little cues like that, that we pick up when we're in a community of practice. And those are the things also on the other side of it that can exclude people that don't feel like they're in that community of practice. Like you went to a tech conference and you didn't have a bunch of tech stickers on your laptop. And then, you know, you might notice like, Oh, everybody has a GitHub sticker or whatever it is. Like, you're not a part of that. There's this. amazing study that's kind of a classic study in Um sense of belonging which we talked about, you know before in computer science Where they had people go into a room that either had a bunch of nerdy things or didn't so they had like software posters Or sorry, they had um star trek posters or you know, some other like nerdy paraphernalia or not And in the spaces where there was this nerdy paraphernalia, people felt, you know, a little out of place and they felt more like male spaces. And, um, anyway, all of these things are cues for us as we are trying to decide if we

Cat: 4:24

I know what you're talking about. You're talking about Chernyan's work on ambient belonging, right? And I, I think something that's really, really cool here that people often miss, so this is like a psychologist who studies, how do we form all these beliefs about who's good at what? Who's good at computer science? I'm actually a huge Star Trek fan. I grew up watching Star Trek. Love Star Trek. And, um, So I said with love still, uh, we make these associations, these stereotypical associations between things that actually don't really tell us anything about whether someone has the potential. You know, they just tell us about the probabilities of like, Hey, you, you match a certain default. And often that default is, you know, white and male. Right. So, and comes from one of those high schools that happened to have a computer science, you know, class. So something that I'm really excited to talk about here is kind of like the uplifting side of this and the part where, where people might not look at themselves and think, Oh, I could be good at programming because I'm good at X. That's something that I just love. And I see across both your, and my work, a lot of like connection to people who, um, say, actually, I'm good at programming because of this other thing you might not have thought is, you know, connected to these skills. I started in developmental psychology and there's this famous work that says, um, children are kind of like little scientists going about the world and experimenting. Um, this is like the, uh, Gopnik work on the child as scientist. And I think when you think about, for instance, let's imagine like, uh, inquisitive, curious, creative little girl. Who's always experimenting with, you know, the social relationships, who's trying to understand friendships, who's trying to negotiate. I mean, some of these kids are like involved in full diplomatic negotiations in their classroom. And actually my youngest brother was like this. I remember picking him up from school and he would give me a full rundown of every child in his class and, and that child status with everybody else. Who was friends with who? And, you know, that's the sort of thing we often don't think of that as like book smart, you know, but that is like a beautiful, cool skill set. And it actually comes into play and work all the time. Um, Getting to see, oh, you know, what relationships are happening here, what communication is happening here, being a peacemaker, maybe can I smooth it over? I'd make the connection to highly, highly technical things. Sometimes it's not just this, like, nice to have, but You know, I do this work with software teams and we see in order for people to effectively move through code review processes and get real technical benefit from it and keep high velocity in producing features, like all the things we might say are the driest, most technical things in the world. They need communication skills. They need to be empathic. You know, it doesn't mean everyone needs to be a huge extrovert or a people person. But I'm just saying those skills are like incredibly valuable. And often we don't look at a person like that and say, you should consider working on a software team, you know, cause you really like people, but the products we're building in the world are products that are having to be built across design and product teams and business leaders and, you know, individual developers who are starting to feel a little burnt out and all of these different, you know, communication, people skills are very important in the world.

Ashley: 7:54

Yeah, so what I hear you saying are really two things. I mean, one, the people skills and sort of the, the noticing around you of the social structures and the ability to negotiate those social structures. But I also hear you saying that these people can also map these sort of abstract relationships, like, you know, this person talks to this person, and, and, you know, almost like mapping power

Cat: 8:17

It's logical thinking.

Ashley: 8:19

yeah, it's, it's, it's like logical thinking, sort of connecting these like chains of relationships,

Cat: 8:25

Yeah. You know,

Ashley: 8:27

what we do when we're programming.

Cat: 8:28

Totally. There's actually, there's a really cool CogSci paper that came out recently that I loved that was saying, We have overlooked the extreme cognitive skill sets of, you know, kids who have to manage, for instance, um, a lot of, you know, social relationships. So we tend to value, oh, we think of our, our cognitive skills as like, mostly being pure or like really showing up in these realms where they're like very abstract. So like you solve a math problem that has nothing to do with the real world. That doesn't match current cognitive science that says we are basically recruiting, you know, these abilities that we have, and we're deploying them to these certain certain tasks in the world. And obviously, if you're a kid who's like navigating You know, is it poverty? You're navigating like a really complicated social landscape. That's what you're using your brain for. But you're, that's, that's intelligence. That's problem solving. That's creativity. You know, it's not this other thing. Um, so it really drives me up the wall that we don't recognize that.

Ashley: 9:37

Yeah, yeah. This is kind of bringing me back to, um, grad school when you taught this intelligence class. And I remember you telling me that

Cat: 9:45

Scariest class I ever taught.

Ashley: 9:47

yeah, I remember you telling me that, you know, you would do this thing where you would have people kind of brainstorm like, what does intelligence even mean or look like? And there's a lot of pushback against the idea that it's pure memorization or it's like pure math, right? Students will tell you like, oh, but what about street smart and stuff like that, right? Yeah.

Cat: 10:06

No, they, they, have these wonderful instincts because, okay, it's important to, for everybody out there. The seminar that I taught was called conceptions of intelligence, because there is actually not any one consensus in psychology or in any other field about there's a hotly debated like what is intelligence. Some people believe there's only one thing. I think every way that we define it is always. very culturally situated, I would mostly throw it out to my class and say, we don't have a consensus on this. We have used it in really damaging ways in our society. And, um, can we come up with a better definition? And so we always started talking about, Well, what do we want from this idea of intelligence? We want to solve problems really well in the world. So then we would start to say, okay, well, what helps you solve problems really well in the world? And yeah, again, the first thing everybody always wanted to say was, I don't feel like school always captured all of it. I don't feel like the grades captured all of it. I don't feel like my teachers always saw me. Sometimes my parents were getting a divorce and then I couldn't study because I was sick. You know, focus on something else. Like everybody's been through at least some version where you realize there's a difference between what you can do and like how you're being measured at that moment, know? So I think validating that was like a really important part of that whole class. And yeah, then we would do this fun exercise. I would have them sit down and try to design a different college application process. And they would break off into little groups and do super fun things. I mean, some of them would be like, okay, let's, let's let people, you know, submit videos. Let's let people, you know, do, um, an art collage about it. You know, just there's so many ways we have to express who we are as people. And, um, I think we all run up against the fact that a lot of these moments where we're being let in to college or let into a job are moments where we're not being seen for our full selves.

Ashley: 12:07

Hmm. Yeah. That's such a fun activity. I love that. I wonder what would happen if, you know, we took our students and said, you know, what would you do as the interview process for this, like tech org or something, right? Like, you know, would, would they be doing the same take home assignments that is, you know, really common for a sort of technical job.

Cat: 12:28

I dare any tech leader listening to this, any person in a position to implement this, to do a little experiment. Go ask your developers what they think of how you're evaluating candidates.

Ashley: 12:43

Mm,

Cat: 12:44

curious. Maybe they think the process is perfect.

Ashley: 12:47

mm,

Cat: 12:47

I'm really curious, especially if you, if you said it from the point of view of what do you think we're missing? What do we systematically miss, but actually really love when we have it?

Ashley: 12:58

mm hmm, mm

Cat: 12:59

So I used to do this when I would consult sometimes with orgs that were trying to broaden their hiring. And I would say, every time you come up with a criteria, you know, and the criteria maybe maps onto a real skill you think you need, like, okay, I need someone who's been a leader. But how are you defining leadership? And can you come up with at least a couple different definitions, including one that sort of surprises you? And that would help people a lot, that sort of exercise. So for instance, you'd say, Okay, I think I want, you know, I think the best predictor of whether someone can do this job is that they've been an engineering manager before. But on the other hand, challenge yourself to say, but I would consider someone who has demonstrated leadership in some unusual way that I don't have a perfect box for, you know, and that has been transformative. Like I've seen people do that and then realize they can still care about the skills, but they don't have to pick only one way of showing the skill.

Ashley: 13:59

mm, I love this. And I feel like this is the, the challenge of, you know, what we might call like parameterizing something,

Cat: 14:07

Well, maybe you'd call it that. I don't think anybody else would ever call it

Ashley: 14:11

yeah, sorry, I guess the, the, the psychology term is operationalizing, right? So You have some like, you know, sort of abstract thing, like you're looking for leaders, you're looking for people who collaborate, whatever it is, right? And you have to distill it into things that you can measure. And this is what social science does at its core. This is like, so, so central.

Cat: 14:30

what all science does at some point.

Ashley: 14:33

So you have to operationalize these concepts and, and assess them and the people that you are recruiting. So like, how do we do that for non quote unquote, non technical skills or for these, like other skill sets that we want on our teams?

Cat: 14:47

Well, really hard question. First of all, I think people don't realize that that's what they're doing. I will just, I think that people just think, okay, there's these five things. I guess every software developer should have them, but they don't really take a good look at, am I being super vague? Am I making assumptions? Um, am I looking at someone at a conference and saying, well, you have the sticker, so you must have this skill. Um, you know, I actually think that we are really aware that these processes are flawed and then we get really scared and then we cling to whatever we think Is going to keep us from going wrong. And I guess a meta point I would make us like the cost of actually like where we're excluding so many people and that cost is huge. And I would take a couple false positives that cost. I would take it any day. And I think we're making the opposite choice. We have this huge need to grow these technical skills. And as we said last time to be generous about it. Okay. But to get concrete, like, how do you start to break it down? I mean, I do skills inventories when I'm thinking about, okay, here's, I have to talk about what is this role going to do and who's going to be set up to succeed for it. But those skills inventories can't just be like my gut sense or, you know, my like favorite thing about someone. It has to map onto work that they do. There's a lot that comes out of when done really well, like behavioral based interviewing, where you say, I'm not sure what this looked like in your life, but please tell me a little bit about where this kind of problem showed up, and how you solved it. And, you know, I think that also, it's really important for us to ask ourselves if we've picked certain things that we're really doubling down on that don't actually match the role. So do people have to be good at math, like in the stereotypical way that we imagine people being good at math, good at mental arithmetic or something like that, which isn't even all of math. Do people have to do that in order to actually do the role you're hiring for? Do people have to be good at like, a certain weird technical whiteboarding task that just became the thing that this engineering team always interviews on. I mean, look, I know it's really, really hard and scary to change these things Because there's this weight that it starts to carry with you and you're like, well, it must be rigorous because we've always done this.

Ashley: 17:14

Yeah, but I hear you saying, we need to question some of these things. Like we need to question some of these practices and ask, how are they serving us in the broad scheme of the kinds of people we need on our teams?

Cat: 17:26

And look, you know, just accepting maybe that, again, we're in a world now where Developers can't know every technology that might come up. They cannot. There's no way. It's an impossible question and we're not gonna make this technical work less complicated by somehow looking for unicorns. Like, the amount of waste that's in the process versus time we could be spending actually giving them just some learning time to, like, learn a new framework if they need to, fine.

Ashley: 17:56

Mm hmm.

Cat: 17:56

You know, we're, we're letting these arbitrary things like knock people out who otherwise could have the skills to go teach themselves and teach others. I remember I interviewed somebody for this research project and he looked me dead in the eyes, a developer, he was like, you want to know the one thing that I'm the absolute best at? I am so good at understanding a code base and then explaining it to other people. I would spend my entire time doing that. And when I do it, it makes our team so much more efficient

Ashley: 18:25

mm.

Cat: 18:26

everybody. And I just want to do that. I'm just so good at it. And then he was like, they don't let me do that.

Ashley: 18:33

Wow. Wow. Yeah, that's so interesting. So, I mean, that person, like, opted in and sort of recognized their own strength in doing this and the utility of, like, that skill set, right? I want to circle back to your point about, like, accepting false positives. And, like, I think there's, there's kind of two sides of this we need to inspect. There's the side of, what happens when we exclude people? Sort of, like, what's the negative side? And then, The positive side of what happens when we bring these people in and let's start with the negative side. They're like what? Let's Get this out of the way. We just got this out of the way Like what is the cost of not welcoming people in

Cat: 19:15

Uh, the cost is like billions of dollars and like, airlines not working and, I mean, the cost is freaking enormous, okay? Somehow we've gotten to this place in the world where we kind of think technology's here and it's just gonna work or something. Um, when I say we, I mean, I mean, I include myself in that because I didn't really understand the state of Software in the state of technology in part because I was gate kept the hell out of it. You know, I wanted to understand it but until I started working and doing just so much research with software teams, and I was like, oh, this is bad This is bad bad for y'all. And I mean, it's It's, it shows up in every labor analysis. It shows up in every, you know, every, if you want to look at like the big nationwide, you know, reports that come out that are like, why should America care about the STEM jobs or something? You know, why should we care about technology? I mean, we could pull up a million of those statistics. We need this work to be done. Every industry needs more of it. Um, and there's so many places where we need. Things to be better. Like we need our healthcare to modernize in this way. We need these systems to face challenges of cybersecurity that we've only scratched the surface on. Um, you know, I'm not trying to sound like the ship is sinking kind of feeling, but I, I get why the developers in my research sometimes feel deeply that the ship is sinking. Yeah.

Ashley: 20:47

like what they tell you like I know you've sort of told me broadly that It seems like developers maybe across the board are sort of an unhappy crew. Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of teams, right. That don't feel super productive or people don't feel like they have space to grow and things like that. I mean, can you say more specifically about what these people are reporting to you?

Cat: 21:10

all, there's a statistic I like to tell people, which is that across our research samples, um, managers, about like 88 to 90 percent of managers—engineering managers, specifically—s So like frontline managing a team, doing code work at managers ay um, making my team's technical work visible and understood at the organization is a key part of my job. No, like pretty much no, no one really disagrees with that. Um, and then when you ask developers that same question, Like less than 25 percent of them say my manager is actually doing this

Ashley: 21:44

Hmm. So there's a huge disconnect. Hmm.

Cat: 21:47

People doing software work don't feel understood. They don't feel seen and they feel understaffed. The size and shape of the problem is just difficult to wrap your head around. You know, the fact that we have. Code doesn't just stay like you don't just solve a problem once and then it's done forever because it keeps getting used in the world. And so as we move through time, you know, there's this kind of idea that code decays, you know, that just even things you never planned for suddenly become problems, right? So I think we need to relate to this technology that runs our world like it's a dynamic ecosystem almost like this is a this is a big ecosystem that we're cultivating and it has history in it and has legacy decisions in it and it has a lot of dependencies in it.

Ashley: 22:34

Coming back to this, like, challenge of conceptualizing big abstract systems, whether that's like your social network, as you originally sort of described, some, you know, child maybe navigating, or in this case, like a big technology network or our relationship to our climate, like these huge systems that are dynamic and have existed for, you know, in the case of, you know, The world, millennia, but in case of technology, you know, sometimes decades, right? And, and are, are changing

Cat: 23:04

A millennia in computer time. Yeah.

Ashley: 23:05

People need space to deal with that abstraction and to talk to other people about it. And it sounds like a lot of developers feel like they're pushed to the grind, like get to the next thing without getting time to really think about the big picture.

Cat: 23:23

totally. I mean, I think, you know, we just, we don't have enough people who can do this work.

Ashley: 23:27

Mm-Hmm.

Cat: 23:28

the day, and and we're systematically cutting out some of the skill sets that could really help in this work. So, like, I did a study with engineering managers, and I was like, wow, you know what working with engineering managers reminds me of? It reminds me of working with Um, doctors who work in ERs, I don't, I don't mean that like, you know, I don't like to be like, you know, if your doctor works in an ER, like, you know, don't, don't, don't confuse this. You know, you're a hero. These people get paid a lot, you know, and they're, you know, there's, there's differences to consider. However, I think it's really important to realize the kind of stress that people can be under. is actually enormous. I mean, you and I both know someone who works with a hospital system, who's a developer who works with a hospital system. I mean, you're directly thinking about saving lives,

Ashley: 24:19

Mm-Hmm.

Cat: 24:19

and not making mistakes. So what did I think to myself as a psychologist? Like, Oh my gosh, we need, we need like the kind of way we approach how we try to help firefighters, how we try to help medical professionals. Some of these software folks need that kind of care. And then maybe we need jobs in here that are more about triage and that are more about communication. And there are more about, you know, the parts that we're struggling with. And we're devaluing those parts and we're acting like they don't matter. And then the bill is coming due like over and over and over again the positive side of this, you know, I think about an example that you and I were talking about is like, maybe always comes to my mind. It's like the counter example of the idea that, Oh, you can get into code. If you're good at math, then you're like a tech person or something. And I always like to think. you know, if you're good at literature, if you're good at books, you know, you could be a tech person. And

Ashley: 25:18

Why is that? Yeah. Why is that?

Cat: 25:20

So I think I write a lot of fiction and I've taken a lot of law and form fiction writing courses. And I think navigating through a law and form piece of fiction, like a novel is so similar to understanding a code base.

Ashley: 25:33

Hmm.

Cat: 25:34

And you have to go to like different levels of abstraction and you have to understand does this scene flow to that scene and if I change this thing way back here, what does it do to this thing at the end? And that's an example of how if you're talking to like, You know, a 14 year old and you're like, hey, you love, you, you really get these hard books. You really like love it. You're reading all this cool stuff. See that as the potential for solving technology problems too.

Ashley: 26:02

Yeah, yeah,

Cat: 26:03

What about you? What do you see in your students?

Ashley: 26:07

I see some students bring in a lot of creativity. Like, they might say, like, I'm someone who loves puzzles or problem solving, or, you know, they, they might do this in their labs in my case, but I think it's certainly true of people that just, like, solve problems in, in any field. Like, solving problems in an art piece, for example, right? People that bring that kind of broad sense of, like, How do we test whether something works and then assess the output, right? Like fundamentally, that's what a lot of coding is, is like that kind of hypothesis testing. And so, you know, I, I see students bring in those skillsets and then it's, and that's really cool because they are a little more guided in their exploration of the solution space. You know, they're a little bit more systematic sometimes and saying like, you know, we have six variables. Let's change one and see what happens. Let's change two and see what happens. Like, and that's the kind of training that I think like science gives you. And, you know, obviously a good, uh, programmer does that too. Um, but I think people can bring that in just from a different angle.

Cat: 27:17

Yeah. I feel like I do that. I mean, I make learning how to make sourdough bread

Ashley: 27:22

Yes.

Cat: 27:23

and you've got variables and you tested and, and I'm, I teach myself to make new pieces of clothing

Ashley: 27:31

Yes.

Cat: 27:31

you're like, I know, I know some of it, I have a plan and I'm going to, but then I'm going to put it into motion and then something's going to go wrong because this piece of fabric is like, the tension behaves differently in this way than I thought. And, yeah. Those are just skills that we just, we don't see that as like mapping onto a career in tech, you know, at all. You're like, that's so domestic.

Ashley: 27:52

No, but, I, direct this program that is designed to equip transfer students who are coming from community colleges, to my university with the skills that they need to succeed in a research lab and maybe ultimately a PhD. And we have this sort of big problem or challenge in the beginning, which is identifying who those students might be. And we don't want to filter on GPA. We don't want to filter on research experience because the goal is to find people who are at ground zero in terms of research experience. And so then what do you ask, right? One of the questions that we have on the application is to describe a time you had to problem solve or overcome some sort of challenge. And people talk about these wonderful things. Like, um, one of the applicants this past year who's now actually in our cohort talked about the process of making coffee. And they were like, you know, like I was trying to make the best cup of coffee possible. I changed the size of the grounds. I changed how long my pours were. You know, I went through all these variables and it's like. Okay, this is someone who can think about things, you know, like a scientist or like a quote unquote technical person. And that's, you know, it's, it's something you can find and assess without asking someone, you know, do you have, have you taken a programming class or something like that? Absolutely.

Cat: 29:13

You're allowing people the chance to even see that in themselves. And like if you start out the whole thing with like, this is also a pet peeve of mine, you know, so just another, if you run technical interviews, think about whether you're doing this when people are like, uh, okay, let's run through this whole list of inventory of things. Do you know X framework? Do you know this thing? Do you know, I can't stand when I see a job ad that's nothing but a list of tools. And I'm like that tools, aren't skills, tools, aren't

Ashley: 29:40

And they change. Like, it's gonna change next month. Like, who gives a

Cat: 29:44

Absolutely. All you're doing is making yourself out of date. No. But what people are getting from that is the message that that's how you see them. That's the only way you could see them, as a little robot who does X framework or whatever, or you're this person or you're not. You're a Java person or you're not. You're a Python person or you're not. And um,

Ashley: 30:04

It's like asking someone to, like, go into their kitchen cabinet and, like, ask what spices they have. Like, then that's not really the question. The question is, like, do you have the ability to, like, Go to a store and get spices. Ha, ha,

Cat: 30:15

to be fair, to be fair, the spice cabinet question is somewhat revelatory. You and I both grew up, we both grew up on the East Coast. And when I first came to California, I was like, Oh, this is what a burrito is. I had no idea. Um, no, but I understand what you're saying. You're under, what you're, it's, it's like. You've got to distinguish between the tools in front of you right now, the potential that someone has, the skills that they have right now, and the things, those, the future skills, you know, and I love just opening it up and letting go of the fear and being like, Hey, how about you tell me a little bit what I'm trying to find X, I'm trying to

Ashley: 31:00

Hmm,

Cat: 31:01

you tell me, where did this problem show up in your life?

Ashley: 31:05

hmm,

Cat: 31:06

And I found too when I was at UCSD and doing a lot of mentorship, you know, and helping undergrads try to apply to grad school. Um, I remember this one woman who came to one of my classes and who said, Hey, can we get coffee? Can we talk about my grad school, you know, application? Because I'm don't did not get the chance to be in research. I didn't get the chance to show these skills. I'm really concerned about it. And we met and I got her to open up. I was like, well, you tell me like, what made you excited about this? What made you think you could do this? And she shared about this whole research project that she had done by herself, come up with a study design. She, she wanted to run a survey. It was about, um, her younger brother, needed these services at school and, she didn't know what to ask for. And so she went out and did this little project and she actually asked like teachers, you know, what they provided to students. And guess what? That was not in her application

Ashley: 32:09

Oh,

Cat: 32:10

it wasn't in her application at all, because she was like, that's not real science. That was just a thing I did. That was just a, that was just, I was just. And it was like. full of fear, like, Oh my God, this was in the context of my family and our poverty and all this stuff that to her was not like a scientist. And the only thing that mattered was like, was she in a lab, you know, with a professor? And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is so important. This is such an important story. But how could she know that?

Ashley: 32:40

If you don't Like explicitly ask the question or invite that in. Yeah, people won't offer it. Not everybody is gonna be like the person you interviewed who says like, you know what I'm really good at? I'm really good at like describing a code base. Like, especially students or early career folks, like, won't really have that top of mind quite yet, right? You know, that student could have turned to you and said, you know what I'm really good at? Like, I'm really good at like coming up with an experiment with like very few resources at hand. And you know, I can actually like collect data with basically nothing, you know?

Cat: 33:14

I sometimes say like your job when you're trying to assess somebody is to put them in the best possible. Situation to show the best possible version of themselves. And that's what will get us closer to the truth.

Ashley: 33:29

I love that. So what happens when we let people be the best versions of themselves?

Cat: 33:36

Okay, have you ever hosted something like a dinner party or something, or a pot, you know, a potluck, or have you ever just had one of these moments where it's all coming together? Like our wedding was kind of like this, because we were doing everything ourselves, and then you were like, I'm gonna stock the bar, and I don't know how to stock the bar. And then it turned out one of our good friends, who was like kind of a new friend at the time, had just thrown a big party. And knew exactly like, for instance, how much ice to get, like we were doing this big thing we'd never done before, trying to throw a wedding and, and you run into these bizarre problems. I have no idea how much ice people need, but somebody knew, you know, somebody in our group knew. And because we had created this coming together space, I think really good teams that have this kind of almost like mischievous energy. Like, let's, let's find a way for your weird thing to become the star of the show right now. It just prompts this cool, different way of working. And so, you know, I've heard this from software teams saying, we discovered that somebody on our team had been secretly teaching themselves this other thing that they had no idea it would be relevant, you know, until, but it came up and, you know, it's like this big cascade of like, just welcoming different input in, or I experienced this myself a lot as a psychologist, because engineers will be like I am terrified at the idea of writing a survey question, and I'm like, let's get in, you know, let's go shopping at the mall of human behavior research, like we could do it. You don't have to invent this actually like lots and lots of people I can connect you to. And those moments have been beautiful. I had those moments with my startup team. Because they were engineers and they were like, Oh, cat, GitHub is just this pile of ridiculousness, you know, like we'll teach you this. When you're in a really interdisciplinary room, I think you feel that ability to say, I don't know this part, this part's scary for me. And then someone else has the ability to say, Oh, it's actually not scary for me at all. You know, and I have this other skill set.

Ashley: 35:56

There's this method in teaching called the jigsaw method and this is a thing where you have students like maybe you have, um, I do it with like a science Um, paper and I want students to run these like three different kinds of experiments and they're in groups of three in their lab groups and then each student in the group reads only one of the experimental protocols. So one person reads each one, but then they have to do it all together, right? And it's explicitly like, okay, you have expert, Um, you have one expert in this protocol, you have one expert in this one, and now can you share that and, and actually be better as a team because you're coming together and sharing that, right? We want people to feel ownership over their thing. So we need to like reflect back to them. What is it that they are bringing to the table? What is it that they're good at? So they have ownership over that thing. And then we create the space for all of those things to like meld and be useful and serve the big goal that we have as a, as a team.

Cat: 36:56

Yeah, I love that you like create a mini expert on the spot. You're like, you, this is, this is your, this is your turf. This is your thing, you know, but it's not competitive, right? It's like, this is your thing to bring back to the group.

Ashley: 37:11

Yes, I think the non competition is really, really important. And I hear you saying that about teams, too. And I think, like, even though we don't, like, we don't set up competitions on our teams, I mean, we, maybe Some people do.

Cat: 37:23

Some people definitely do. You and I both fall on the side of believing there's so much work to do. These little competition games that we set up are kind of fake. It's really distracting. And actually what we get at the end of working together is something much bigger than any of us would have gotten if we'd all been separate and isolated. That doesn't mean people can't do their own thing or need their own space sometimes. But We are so locked into what in my research I've called contest cultures.

Ashley: 37:52

hmm.

Cat: 37:53

the feeling that not only do you have to do that terrible whiteboarding interview that didn't make any sense to you, that was like going back to your college textbooks we'd kind of keep people stuck in that place in their tech careers sometimes. So a contest culture describes a place where you feel like you're constantly having to prove that you belong. Like, did you have the right stickers on your laptop? And are you using the right keyboard shortcuts? And did you drop exactly the jargon that's in style right now? You know, I just, I can't stand this stuff. And the reason I can't stand it is because it is fake.

Ashley: 38:36

Yeah, it's totally constructed as gatekeeping, and people may not see it as such, but it is. But it is.

Cat: 38:42

There's this great work, you know, describing field specific ability beliefs. And certain STEM fields really fall into this thing, where we say we're, we have to constantly be testing people, and asking if they were, like, born good at this thing. And that is just a negative way to be in the world, and I don't think it's the way that developers actually want to be, because I think that they really love The learning part of their job, and they love the growth mindset part of their job, but they feel like I'm trapped in this place sometimes where I have to constantly prove that I'm technical enough, prove that I'm smart enough. And you know, you're like, At the potluck where everybody's bringing their own dish, suddenly that's not the game anymore. The game is just like, oh my gosh, your thing's really good, and my thing's really good too, you know, and, and um, And look at this amazing, I mean we host Thanksgiving dinner a lot, right? And it can turn into this, our little like orphan Thanksgiving dinner that we host. And, and everybody is sort of like, Okay. Maximizing and taking their, their assigned side dish to some extreme. And that's part of the joy. It's not competition. It's just like, Ooh, you're one upping. I made this carrot dish that I'd never made before. It was like braised carrots. And then my friend was like, okay, I know you assigned me potatoes. And you were like, the potatoes could be simple, but the potatoes are not going to be simple. They're going to be very fancy potatoes.

Ashley: 40:10

When you let people come to the table with their own set of interests and their own skills, you get an amazing Thanksgiving dinner