Sue: 0:00

some of the skills that have been undervalued historically in software engineering are going to come at the fore. You know, you're not going to be able to just rely on writing beautiful code. Maybe we're going to need to expect people to communicate and collaborate and think about the bigger problems.

Cat: 0:22

I'm excited about today's episode, which is our very first interview. We have Sue Smith on the show and Sue has an incredible background coming in to coding through some really unique pathways and then using all of that experience and wisdom to broaden the entry points for other people.

Ashley: 0:43

We're going to talk about the myth of the lone genius. We're going to do a lot of really weird thought experiments about how we should be structuring our teams. And we're just so excited to have Sue here as our first guest.

Sue: 0:53

I was quite late coming to tech. I was in my late 20s and I was lucky enough to be able to do a master's course because at that time the Scottish government was funding any course to do with software. They talked about this high dropout rate on computer science courses as though it was just like this unavoidable fact that there was nothing they could do to perhaps figure out how to teach it more effectively. The assumption was just it's either for you or it's not. You know, tough luck if it's not. Probably the people who it turned out it was for were the ones who had perhaps had access to a computer at home. growing up as well, there's no room for that complacency anymore because there has been a ton of research that has given us tried and tested techniques to teach people coding skills that work. So I don't know what those courses are like. Now the course I was on actually had a really high teaching standard and the teaching staff were very attentive and did whatever they had to get people through it. But in, within the field in general, there just seemed to be this assumption that we were going to inevitably have this high dropout rate.

Cat: 2:05

If this is not too personal, Sue, how did that make you feel? Like you were a person changing your own life trajectory and what you were going to work on. Did you buy into that?

Sue: 2:16

I was tempted to use the word spiteful. But that would be extreme.

Cat: 2:22

go for it!

Sue: 2:23

they had this assumption that I come from an arts background, and my degree was in English and philosophy. And so because my background was in what they called a non numeric discipline, there was an assumption that I would struggle and that I would need access to all these remedial classes and things like that. Um, and not to toot my own horn, but that was an incorrect assumption. And I'm hopefully now that there's better understanding of the fact that, especially for software development, that that has a lot in common with linguistic skills, perhaps more than it does with mathematical skills. And so I was actually in a good position to make the most of it. And I was lucky because I found that Whatever an aptitude means, and I have extreme ambivalence to that term, but I did find that I took to it quite easily, um, and I had found something I was good at, which was great, as well as it giving me access to economic opportunity. But I have a lot of ambivalence about that as well, because I think that I have had the ability to make something of the opportunities that I've had, because of perhaps my being neurotypical in having access to the kind of education I had access to, whereas other people probably wouldn't have been able to make of the opportunities what I did. But I would say that that's, that's in a nutshell why I work in education now. Because it annoyed the hell out of me that other people were not getting that experience. You know, it put my life on a trajectory that I couldn't have imagined. Just opportunity, the experience of life that I have now, I would never have imagined as a kid. And it infuriates me that other people don't have that opportunity and that we gatekeep so severely in tech. Even requiring people to have degrees for, you know, Typical software engineering jobs, which is totally unnecessary. And is an example of using the education to gatekeep opportunity rather than to enable people to access it.

Cat: 4:39

The promise is real. Like the promise of an entry into power, the ability to do things. Like I remember, what code was like, I genuinely did not know. And when I was in college, realizing like, Oh, I had no idea that some people had this level of being able to create things like products and things like that. I just had no idea how any of that

Ashley: 5:04

worked.

Sue: 5:05

interesting that you used the word create there because the thing that struck me as well coming from an arts background was that if anything, once I started having access to writing code, I found it to be a more creative job. than perhaps creative writing or whatever. Um, and I think there's something in that about having constraints about how that can kind of stimulate creativity. And actually the people who struggled on the course I was on, the thing that they struggled with the most, typically from coming from science backgrounds, was the idea that there wasn't a correct answer. So they would give us a problem to solve, a set of requirements, And then it was up to you, what you built, to satisfy those requirements, but there were people who had a really hard time with the idea that there wasn't, wasn't one right answer, there wasn't a correct solution. And of course the students from the arts backgrounds didn't have an issue with that because that was normal to them.

Ashley: 6:02

That's something I see in my students too. Cause I, you know, I primarily work with biology students and they're very familiar with classes where there's one answer, they memorize something. There is like a biological pathway they're supposed to know. And that's it. And they come into my classroom and they're like, wait, you're saying I could write the loop this way, or I could write it this way, it was like, And for our purposes, they're equivalent. And I agree. That's like something people struggle with. And I think also this point about coding for creativity is something that. My students actually love, and I think is like for many of them, especially those who have some artsy inclination or creative inclination, they come into the class and I'm like, Whoa, I can like create things. And that's actually one of the reasons I would want to learn how to code. Like, great. It'll get me a job later. It helps me analyze data. That's all good. But like, I just made something and that's really, really fun. And that's not something I expected. We saw that in our research and I thought that was really, really neat. And I was like, well, I should be selling this for the creative Part of it, just as much as the career path opening part of it.

Sue: 7:09

It's a better motivator, isn't it?

Cat: 7:11

You were talking about the science of helping people stay in difficult learning, you know, there is a science to it. And part of that science is caring about motivation, right? And yeah. So I'm thinking, like, Hey, there's actually a lot of different possible goals a student might have when they're showing up or a person might have when they're showing up and paying for a bootcamp or something. And like, absolutely, there are these big goals about jobs and, you know, financial trajectories, but there are also these like immediate daily experiences. Right. And I think a lot of my work in psychology has always been around, who are we letting people be like, what version of themselves are we letting them be?

Sue: 7:50

All of these ideas are super undervalued in the industry. You know, the work I do is basically enabling people to use developer products and tooling. Um, and we have to explain this over and over again, that you can't make the learning experience about your product, that you have to make it about a goal that's meaningful to the learner. Because that's the only real motivator that they're going to have for you. to use the thing and it's especially the case with the way that we build software now because it's so modular that we plug all these little dependencies in together to create something. So if you have too heavy a focus on your little piece of the puzzle you just alienate people. You really have to center the learner um in whatever context they're in and what like you said whatever motivator they have in this that's something that's like super valuable to people who are trying it perhaps. Grow adoption for a developer product, but it's still really poorly understood in the industry.

Cat: 8:53

Yeah. why is it hard for people to see this connection?

Sue: 8:56

Economic dynamics, the systemic dynamics in a company and how certain activities are resourced would, would be a vague answer to that. Um, you know, if you have someone whose job it is to to teach people about a product that's going to be tied to the life cycle of how you build and release that product. Um, and persuading people in those kind of circumstances to think more broadly than that is really quite challenging because the way that most organizations are designed discourages that. You're meant to stay in your lane, aren't you? You're meant to just document the thing you were supposed to document and check that off the list. We have a kind of production line mentality, I think a lot of the time. Um, and it's like, I'm personally trying to find a sweet spot where I can enable people with technology learning and add value to a business wherever it is I happen to be working. I'm trying to find the, uh, the trade off there. Um, but even if all you care about is like building adoption for a product. You just can't have the mindset of focusing on your own little piece of the puzzle because in practice it's much more complex than that. You, we see it a lot, you see it in any developer product when you look at like maybe their documentation. You can tell straight away whether the thinking along those terms are not, whether they understand that they're one piece of a puzzle or not.

Cat: 10:34

Is there an example that comes to mind of like a place that's really getting this, or a tool that happened that came out that's, that really understood like developers as learners or, you know, and, and got that right?

Sue: 10:46

I think when you, when you see it done well is where someone has recognised that their tool integrates well with another one but that's, that's usually quite challenging in companies as well because there's always a kind of risk aversion around teaching something that's beyond your control. I'll give you an example from years ago because nobody's around who will care about it anymore. I worked at a startup that it was a no code mobile app development platform and it was based on the OpenAPI specification. So OpenAPI is a way of documenting an API and you can use it to automate integration. But, we found that getting people to author the specification was really challenging, but there was another start up that specialised in that. And so, one of the first things I did, rather than document our own product, was document how to use this, this other product with ours.

Cat: 11:46

Strategic.

Sue: 11:47

really cagey about that, because it's somebody else's product, and you don't know when it's going to change, or you don't know if it's going to go away and all that. Um,

Cat: 11:55

Hmm

Sue: 11:56

ignoring the reality of dependency on other technology is just, it's a dead end in, in web development now because there's no self contained technology anymore.

Ashley: 12:09

this really reminds me of like what I see happen in open science sometimes, which is like someone makes a tool to do a really specific thing. And sometimes there's a conversation about the ecosystem that the tool lives in, but a lot of times people develop the tool in isolation and then there's dependencies on even like very common. Python packages, let's say. And as soon as those things fall through, it's like, now the tool doesn't work and there's no consideration for that. So it's interesting to think about these things happening in industry too. And like, in some of these other, like what I would think of as like more professional operations, but I guess this can still happen.

Sue: 12:43

Yes.

Cat: 12:44

we're hearing out loud, like, you know, the non software person being like, surely not,

Ashley: 12:50

Surely not.

Cat: 12:51

don't break out there.

Sue: 12:53

It's probably even worse because when you look, it's going to boil down to incentivization, isn't it? And you know, what is resourced? And in industry, there's an aggressive focus on resourcing the things that are going to bring that return on the investment that the investors are looking for in the short term. And investing in anything beyond that is extremely challenging.

Cat: 13:22

Here's something I feel as a person in this world of technology, which is like to get all this good work done and to solve some of these complicated problems. We are so often. in this kind of collaborative communal culture that breaks down barriers between organizations. And that's like sometimes totally acceptable to those organizations and sometimes not like sometimes the work is out ahead of the organizational boundaries. And I think it's really interesting with software because, you know, you might have this. deeply real, tangible understanding. Like we've got guys, we've got to use this framework. You know, it's, it's just, it's going to be the one, it's going to be the one five years from now, you just can't see it yet. And I can feel like the stress and the tension of people who I talked to in my research, who are trying to advocate for that and negotiate for that with their organizations. Sometimes there's like this deep empathy that I feel for developers because they are working across boundaries in a similar way to scientists. I don't know if that resonates with you, Sue.

Sue: 14:31

It's really interesting that you say that because I was thinking earlier on about The fact that we don't do a fantastic job of creating cultures of learning there are a lot of reasons for that. We don't really have the traditional engineering practices of like apprenticeships and mentoring the way that other engineering disciplines have. Well, mentoring happens, but it's, it's sort of at the discretion of people whether to do it or not. It's not like a baseline expectation of a software engineer. And one of the things that makes it really difficult to create the conditions for people to learn and grow inside companies is also the fact that we have high attrition, that we have turnover of employees and it makes it really difficult to create communities of practice inside companies. But the conclusion that I kind of came to when I was thinking about that is that we need to create those communities beyond our organizations. You know, maybe looking for that inside a company is barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps we need to create human communities that form those, that give us that culture of learning and give us the space to support growth.

Cat: 15:41

Developers are coming through my research and they sound really lonely to me. They sound like they've had to. Form a team with people they barely know. And then that team gets reconstituted like on a, what an 18 month average cycle or something is, I mean, that's not a cycle of long term relationships and deep, like learning together. And I think that the human cost of attrition is really, and like change just is really, really very salient to people right now, you know, after like layoff cycles in tech.

Sue: 16:17

When we have learning and development programs in companies. It tends to be a kind of budgetary exercise. It's like, it will give you an amount of money off you go and spend that on a course. And it kind of puts that responsibility for learning and development on the individual rather than us having a kind of collective effort at that. And when, when you look at really any other engineering discipline that is radically different, but it's so difficult, as you said, to create those relationships. When people are in and out, or people are in the door one minute and out the next.

Ashley: 16:54

I wonder if there's like good examples of community of practice around like other things you know Python and R for example they have like conferences and you know groups associated with them like these big communities and I'm wondering like um, I don't know, are there like, cross company examples of communities of practice that either of you know of?

Sue: 17:13

Where my mind immediately goes is open source, but problematic route to go down as well because it's, It's like having a massive crisis and it's um, so much shady nonsense going on in the world of open source and also it's been one of the mechanisms for gatekeeping those opportunities, you know, if you have to have contributions to open source on your CV to get a job, then of course that's going to buy us, you know, young men primarily, who have the spare time to do unpaid labour.

Ashley: 17:47

Yeah.

Sue: 17:47

So my mind goes to open source as a potential place where that could have happened but

Ashley: 17:53

Hmm.

Sue: 17:53

hasn't.

Cat: 17:55

Yeah. I think about, you know, because I'm sort of an intersectional person who's not a developer, right? And so maybe my examples aren't, you know, quite in the niche, but, you know, I think about when people organize around problems that they really care about rather than sort of like, a jargony line on your resume about what language you know. And so I had this experience, um, When I started working, when I was doing my research consultancy, and I started working with a friend who was running a small campaign for a local office, and I was pulling some data for him, and it was like looking at road repairs, and this is like state data sets, you know, that are uploaded in a certain way in California, and This is people's whole job, and I knew nothing about it. And I remember looking at being like, there must be people who do like this sort of nonprofit civic data work out there in, you know, in R, which is the thing I knew. And so I started looking for it. And I just remember like the absolute kindest, nicest, sweetest replies from the one forum that I asked this in that were like, absolutely, you're making the classic mistake that everybody makes when they pull this data and here's someone wrote a package for it. And it was so lovely because we were all completely united around this problem, which was like, Hey, how do we help like local people running for office access and use the data that's around them?

Sue: 19:28

When we look at successful social movements where people will organize around a problem and it means that they will come together from perhaps different groups. And it's kind of taking that model and applying it to a tech community, isn't it?

Cat: 19:42

totally. I've been reading a lot about us versus them psychology, and how we form groups, and how do we decide at that kind of moment of ambiguity, are we together in this, you know, do we have like what psychologists call a shared fate, you know, or you outgroup, you're the other, you know, and I really am struck by this in my research, software developers have a lot of others. There's a lot of like, I'm a developer, you're not, and I feel safe because I'm on the ingroup side, you're

Ashley: 20:14

you're

Cat: 20:15

Sometimes I challenge people to say, you know, has a PM ever been really nice to you? Has a manager ever seen like something that you could do that you haven't, you know, seen in yourself, right? Like, what would it look like to tap into those moments and try to be that person and form those alliances? Yeah.

Sue: 20:36

The developer exceptionalism. I've heard this expression used in developer relations. This idea that developers are this kind of special species that no normal human rules apply to. a lot of people are really invested in that and being part of that little group, aren't they? Um,

Ashley: 20:58

I'm so curious, as like The non developer here, like the person's farthest from developers, like where does that come from and Who does it serve to have this idea of developer exceptionalism?

Sue: 21:10

I mean, there's tremendous economic opportunity, or has been historically, at least, in being a software engineer, so there's, that would be my first guess at why people are so invested in it. And we see, you see a lot of it in the reactions to AI assisted coding now, um, and to me that's a basic misunderstanding of what software engineering is as well, because not writing syntax. You know, that is not what a software engineer does. That's a detail, you know, but we talk about these AI assisted coding tools as if they're going to make software engineers obsolete.

Ashley: 21:47

This is a misconception I see in my students all the time, like they think being a programmer is sitting at a terminal and like hacking into the mainframe line by line, right? And as you pointed out with AI, this is changing. And you've also developed a lot of tools to help people build things like code. And so I guess my question for you is like, I don't know, is that something that's accepted in those communities as like a legitimate way to be a developer? Or are there people who feel like that's not legitimate?

Cat: 22:18

the easier things are, the less real developing, the less hardcore they are. But then we also have these technological advances, especially in like web development, right? That make things way easier than they used to be. So there's like a tension there or something.

Sue: 22:32

Oh yeah, I mean, they're always going to be the"you're not a real developer, you're not a real software engineer" people. And then other people who will self select as I'm not a real software engineer, I'm not a real developer. And, you know, the history of software engineering is these waves of increasing abstraction. And all of the tools that we're talking about are just new levels of abstraction. What I've started to do in more recent years is to stop describing what I do as developer learning and stop using the word developer you do that people will kind of self select out of the group. They'll say well that's not for me I don't really care if someone sees themselves as a developer or not. I'm trying to enable people to build with software.

Ashley: 23:17

In neuroscience, if we get a tool, like, for example, in recent years, there's these, AI models that can like map an animal moving through space and this is like really useful in a lot of experiments where normally, or I should say like 20 years ago, you might have had a college student watching a mouse move around an arena and they would sit there and like manually tag, okay, this is where the mouse's nose is and this is where its tail is. Right. And now we have AI models that do this In a second. And no one in neuroscience is saying that's not real neuroscience. You know, we're saying, Oh, my goodness, give me that tool. Let me get to the answer quicker, you know, and let's get to the next thing. And I hear this like happening really differently in some of these like developer tools that you're working on.

Sue: 24:01

Totally and I've, my kind of baseline assumption is that if something can be automated and still done effectively then there's something better for the human being to spend their time doing. is that our ability to pay the rent and have food and clothing and all that is dependent on doing some of these activities and you know there are a lot of executives who think these tools are going to reduce their dependence on employees, but in general, I feel like if something's automatable, then why would, why would a human want to waste their time on that task? You know, surely there's something more interesting for them to be doing.

Cat: 24:43

when I studied this and people's beliefs around AI obviously tapped into people's very deep beliefs about all kinds of things that would be there, whether it was AI or some other thing, some other economic change that was like the beliefs like My boss understands what I'm doing. So they're not going to make ludicrous, ridiculous decisions because they don't understand it. You know, that's a really important thing to believe. There's also the community of practice piece I saw really come in for developers because people were sort of

Ashley: 25:16

tool

Cat: 25:17

Am I supposed to be using this tool in this way? What do we all think? It's like a moment of, you know, Deep ambiguity and uncertainty because there's a lot of mixed messages and I, sorry to be the psych nerd, but like, I just kept going to the in group out group psych stuff because a lot of that gets so heightened in moments of uncertainty, You have a bunch of layoffs and you have a bunch of new tools coming in, you know, and you have massive media scrutiny of what it means to do your job. I've seen people move from a state of real paralysis And fear and into a state of being like, okay, look, I am an engineer. I can think about this like an engineering problem. I can audit the edge cases. I can bring all these skills to this moment. And that was a cool thing that we did this AI pre mortem where we just asked people surface, all the fears and the doubts and the things you feel like you're wondering if other people are thinking.

Sue: 26:14

I love it. And I mean, I think what we're going to find is that some of the skills that have been undervalued historically in software engineering are going to come at the fore. You know, you're not going to be able to just rely on writing beautiful code. Maybe we're going to need to expect people to communicate and collaborate and think about the bigger problems. You know, one of the biggest aspects of software engineering now is managing complexity. We're not gonna be able to automate that for a very long time, if ever. And so I think we're going to see that there's an emphasis on different skills. Some of them may be the ones that we call soft skills. are going to start to come to the fore as actually the more valuable skills that are required to deliver a solution to a problem.

Cat: 27:00

From my vantage point as a VP of research at a company that develops, you know, skill based learning products for technology teams, 1 million percent that is at the forefront. And I really wish we wouldn't always call it soft skills because sometimes it's like, as you know, I can see it on your face, you know, deeply, like these are very intertwined with building intertwined, twined with creation, you know, skills, but. I think about all those people who tried this stuff one time and got told they didn't have a programming brain. And now we don't have those people to meet that,

Ashley: 27:36

didn't How do you teach those skills? How do you select for those skills, especially when people came up like through software engineering in a particular way? Like what does that look like in sort of your ideal world?

Sue: 27:48

I mean I think I would unapologetically say don't hire the people who come from the traditional backgrounds, like hire people who come from the non traditional backgrounds who didn't have access to the. qualifications and who perhaps have done other jobs, maybe low paid jobs in other industries because you're probably going to find that they have a lot of those skills walking in.

Cat: 28:11

I used to think about as a kind of radical thought experiment, what if we just had a total moratorium on hiring from like, So there are like top 10 computer science programs, right, out there, especially in the U. S. They're very dominant at large tech companies. I mean, you know, I'll say in casual conversations in San Francisco, I heard people just say that's the only places they'd hire from, I used to have this thought experiment as I'd walk around that was like, what if we just made it, You could not hire from any of those degreed programs and you for three years, we could only hire non degreed software developers. What would that do? I'm not proposing that as a solution, cause that's obviously a deeply unethical human experiment,

Ashley: 28:56

maybe there's a way to think about this instead of, like, instead of cutting those people out, let's, like, try to get all the linguistics and philosophy majors, like, into programming and see how that changes how people think about some of these problems. I'll join you in

Cat: 29:10

I'll join you in the spiteful, you see, you talked about being driven by spitefulness earlier and like Sue, you know, sometimes I have this feeling of like, can we just point out computer science

Ashley: 29:21

power to

Cat: 29:21

Like if they're not meeting the needs of a holistic student population, if they're systematically failing groups in society, they're failing at the educational outcomes and goals that we've said these

Ashley: 29:32

you know,

Cat: 29:33

And we always make the problem about

Ashley: 29:35

fields

Cat: 29:35

or the people, you know, instead of the problem being, why on earth have these fields failed to desegregate? Other fields have

Ashley: 29:45

to serve.

Cat: 29:46

Other fields are making more

Ashley: 29:48

and things

Cat: 29:49

This field is really digging its heels in and that's a failure of who it's supposed to

Ashley: 29:54

is

Sue: 29:54

I think there's a strong argument that a more effective way to teach these skills would be. through a more vocational type of tradition. You know, these are practical, uh, industry skills, and the idea that you would teach that through an academic path, I think, is pretty questionable. Anyway, you know, not all a computer science degree can do for you is give you a foundation. As soon as you enter the workplace, everything's changing constantly. Probably all the technologies you've learned are obsolete already. Um, you know, it can give you the foundation and teach you how to pick up technologies. But I think that shifting to a more vocational model would probably solve a lot of those problems anyway.

Cat: 30:38

Yeah, you mentioned apprenticeships and things like that, right?

Sue: 30:41

Yeah, but then you have the, this is something that I think is really tricky. And you and I had a brief exchange about this on Social Media Cat about, you were to do an apprenticeship program,

Cat: 30:52

Mm.

Sue: 30:53

would you select for that? Yeah. in a way that minimized bias, you know, what, how would you pick, how would you fill that pipeline? You know, any kind of idea of aptitude, as soon as you start digging into that, it becomes really problematic, doesn't it?

Cat: 31:09

Okay, I have a second radical thought experiment for you. So this is something I've thought, I've made this argument before about grad school admissions and admissions for college. I think we have reasonable criteria sometimes to say someone is not set up to succeed in this program. And Ashley would say, no, say more about this, but like, you know, there is a, there is a reason to say we want to know people have certain things, you know, in place before they can benefit from this program. So there's a reason for that. that. when things are really, really competitive, you get in this situation where we have a bunch of people that we basically can't meaningfully discriminate between. Like My radical thought experiment is Do a fricking lottery and for a limited, if you have a limited number of spots, just randomly admit

Ashley: 31:57

could think

Cat: 31:58

I think it behooves us to admit when we don't know how to predict human potential. And when our efforts to do that have been really damaging. And that was the argument that people made for establishing a public school system, you what we think people deserve as like a right, like the right to education. That's something that we didn't always have. And it's actually pretty recent, you know, and we don't really have that problem solved when it comes to college. So I feel that deeply. You know, my mom didn't finish college and went back to school later in life. My grandfather was the first person in his family to go past eighth grade. Like, it's so incredibly deeply personal to me. The fact that I have a PhD feels so unlikely, you know, and, um, just like you did, I, I look around at the things that made me capable of doing that. And I'm like, a lot of this had nothing to do with whether I deserved this. It was. It was really some good luck and like I worked really hard But it was some really some really good luck and there's so many deserving people who didn't have that

Sue: 33:07

Totally. I have really ambivalent feelings about that as well. Living in a country where we don't pay tuition fees, Because there's like no shortage of over qualified people who still are under hired because they come from an under represented group or whatever. I'm really uncomfortable as someone working in education with the myth that education provides like equity of access to opportunity because it just doesn't, does it? And in a lot of ways it kind of legitimizes the fact that we don't have that equity. One of the things that What I've tried to do in companies is to use access to an education resource or whatever with a training course or a certification or whatever to maybe prioritize underrepresented groups. So one of the things we did in the past was we had this program that resulted in a certification and we just prioritized the training that I delivered. to like HBCUs or the non exploitative boot camps of which there were a few. Um, but then the, the reality that I hadn't quite fully grasped was that, that it doesn't really matter because there are like no shortage of, let's say for example, black women who are like ludicrously overqualified for jobs that they don't get hired for, but that like a white man will walk into with no relevant qualification and experience. So something that I've ended up having a bit of discomfort with is just offering education as this pathway to opportunity. You know, I think we need to find to leverage it in conjunction with measures and one of the things I've thought about doing, but I've never managed to pull it off yet. would be to maybe partner with a company that like hires for a particular skill set or technology um to co author a learning experience but as part of that have them agree that they will prioritize the people who've completed this in their hiring pipeline Maybe they're guaranteed a certain interview or whatever and then prioritize access to the education path, but in a way you're, you're sort of using the myth, you're kind of manipulating the, this lie that education provides access by cobbling all these pieces together to make it actually provide access to that

Cat: 35:40

appreciate you bringing this up, I think it speaks to like change is not easy at all. And you're like very bravely acknowledging that like it's not, it's never going to be like, Oh my gosh, everybody go to college. And then suddenly when everybody goes to college, the bar gets moved to something else, There's a paper that I always like to send people, which is called, um, A Mark of a Woman's Record is the name of this title, paper. And, um, it talks about how the same grade on a male or a female resume is interpreted

Ashley: 36:10

feel like

Cat: 36:12

you know, by the person who reads it. And you're, you're making, of course, racial bias, so many other identities come in and have this same different effect. This is something that I feel like it's really hard for people who haven't thought about it to wrap their head around, like, the same achievement does not function the same way for different people. And that's the root problem, not presence or lack of education. You know, the root problem is the bias, yeah.

Sue: 36:39

Totally. And it's the same in organizations, you know, when we talk about things like psychological safety and how learn, we have to be able to fail and make mistakes and all that. But like, if you're like a single mother or whatever, and you're the only person on your team who's not like a young man, like you better not make mistakes. You make too many mistakes. Come performance review cycle, you're more likely to get marked down for it. You're more likely to be overlooked for promotion or let go. When there's a layoff cycle, you know, the, the real factors affecting that safety are the systemic. You know, and the only way we're going to improve that is by improving representation, especially in positions of seniority and organizations. I think education can play a role in that, but like there's only so much we can do at the level of a learning experience to address that.

Ashley: 37:39

Yeah, I feel like what I hear you saying is like the systemic and structural changes are really what's needed, like building pipelines, not just building like opportunities, but really making sure people get through one stage and have a spot in the next stage. Otherwise, you allow the bias to creep in when they're trying to transition stages and move up. What do they do after that? And how do you guarantee that they're going to succeed after that? And there's a lot of work by like the national institutes of health in the U S to try to build pipelines for people to move through, which is I think a better direction to go in. Yeah, we're not going to fix everybody's bias, but we can build some supports to make sure those students get catapulted to the next stage.

Cat: 38:23

It's so easy to be like, oh my gosh, it's so beautiful to have all of these people learning to code who wouldn't have learned to code. But then you're like, well, okay, the flip side is do the managers know how to treat those people? Are they getting fair performance reviews? You know, if you have this dinosaur, everybody walks around and treats like carefully, you know, and oh, everybody knows that this person's, you know, just really harsh on all the women on the software team, who's going to do something about that? And what message does it send? I think a lot about this because I've done some work on learning cultures. And I think a lot about the fact that if you encounter that hypocrisy, if you get one message that you can learn and you get another message that, Yeah, but we're not going to protect learning at the expense of hurting this one guy's feelings. What message do we walk away from with, you know? Of course we walk away with the message that is like learning is not as important as protecting this guy's feelings.

Sue: 39:20

And if only we had the evidence to show the impact that that one genius that tanks the entire team's productivity. You know, we wouldn't even have to make those arguments, but we still have this genius software engineer mentality that like one person can possibly contribute enough to a problem or an organization that makes it worthwhile that they make everybody else less successful.

Cat: 39:51

you know, I'll just say over and over again, we have that evidence. we do. Like there was just an HBR article just published that summarized it. That

Ashley: 39:59

it. It

Cat: 40:00

toxic productive person costs businesses, like an enormous amount. We do have that evidence. I think we need in engineering circles, like the will to use that evidence. This is not remotely towards someone like you, who is obviously out there on the front line fighting this. This is maybe to somebody listening to this, who's a little bit like, you know, scared to raise that inside of their team or their organization. We really do have that evidence and I would encourage people to try to use it.

Sue: 40:32

Is anybody using it?

Cat: 40:33

I think so. I, I hear people talk to me about their sort of middle of the road startup that is at a point where they might go one way or the other way, culturally speaking, and that they've walked into a room and said, I want us to think about. How we're doing hiring, you know, or I want us to think about whether we're actually going to partner with this org that everybody says has this person, you know, at it and what message would that send to like our female users, for instance, you know, so I do think these battles are being fought. I really do, because I get a lot of emails about this kind of thing.

Ashley: 41:14

I mean, I, I sort of wanted to come back to something Sue was getting at earlier, which was like, The difference between having the focus be on people trying to be really good developers versus the focus being, we're here to solve a problem all together and we'll do whatever it takes to solve that problem. And it feels like, you know, this gets at the in group, out group thing, right? Because it's like, if you're all in the in group trying to solve a problem together and coming back to the social movements thing, it's like, Is that a, an orienting principle that we can use on our teams to get people to like, just kind of like detach from themselves a little bit, like get out of the, the insecurity and the like questions about their own identity and focus on a bigger thing, like something bigger than themselves. I don't know. Is that, is that a knob we can turn? Yeah.

Sue: 42:03

when I did that course that I found something I was good at. And the fact that I went through school, primary school, secondary school, and didn't find anything that I was good at, it shows that that was pretty much a failed experiment. And I think most people probably have that experience. But when we're able to do more shared learning like that, more kind of, more project based groups, group learning where people are bringing their own contribution to a shared pursuit. I feel like we're probably better able to create the conditions for people to find out what kind of contribution they, they do like to make.

Ashley: 42:42

Yeah, I agree with you that doing this early is really important. And I think like the, the thing I often grapple with when we do this in the classroom at university is like, it's tied to grades as well. And so students, you know, don't, they, they do the group work, but they're maybe predominantly concerned about the grade that they're getting. Something I think about is creating low stakes group work opportunities where maybe it's like not tied to your grade and you can actually learn what it feels like to be in a group setting without that kind of thing at stake. And then maybe you can take that into the workplace afterwards. But yeah, I think a lot about how do you teach people some of these things, like what it means to work in a group and actually to get value out of group work in the same way you might get value out of an individual contribution that you might have made.

Sue: 43:31

I think we have the same problem in industry because people are wanting to get the good performance review score, get a higher salary or whatever, and it really is similar to grading.

Ashley: 43:45

What if we like leveled up teams instead of individuals?

Cat: 43:48

you, know, a couple, a year ago or so when everyone on social media was going, having a breakdown about what developer productivity is, was like, so if you so deeply don't believe in believe this individual performance model is failing us, you know, you don't think we should even talk about it. Are you going to advocate for teams to be promoted together? Like holistically, are you going to share a promotion with somebody? You know, how about, let's say your promotion? Will you walk into work and say, listen, um, yes, I'm the software developer, but also this 25 year old, you know, PM who's on this other team, um, I think she should get a promotion with us as well. And by the way, I took a look at the fact that we have different bonus ratios The fact that I have a higher bonus percentage, just cause I'm a developer, even though this person's sitting next to my team, again, radical thought

Ashley: 44:39

experiments.

Sue: 44:40

And like you're describing the kind of people who have the most positive impact on the success of an organisation. That, like, that's how they do it, they do it by, like, we win together, we lift other people up. Even, like, the idea of developer productivity is such a red flag to me because, when I look back at my own career, the times when I've had the most impact are typically the times when I've not been the most productive I've had the space to think and reflect and to be targeted in where I dedicated my efforts instead of being like on this production line trying to churn out as much output as possible and getting nowhere and not actually contributing to the success of the organisation I was working for in the way that I have. When I have been able to have that time and space to not be productive.

Cat: 45:33

Yeah. It sounds like that's a very particular version of productivity. Like you weren't like production productive, but you were were effective, right?

Sue: 45:41

I suppose it would depend on what we mean, why we even use that term. It's like, it's not, we're not churning out cars. Like it's more, it's a creative pursuit. It's more complex. You're trying to create a certain outcome the amount of hours worked or whatever is just, really has no bearing on success.

Ashley: 46:04

Like maybe we need to value creative as much as we value productive, right?