 and the resources and she's very organized and it's an important role and maybe not all projects needed but as you start getting bigger projects start needing someone who kind of manages the operations, who knows what's happening, you know, from both the infrastructure side to developer side to events and, you know, takes care of everything. There's not many resources here. Her advice to me was if you want to get into this, find someone in the project who's good at finance or who's organized and who can help, you know, take care of those kinds of things. Any questions on the careers that I covered so far? How do I contribute to open source? I think I gave a little bit of a kind of an example of what I do. I run the open source office at Sandisk and I talk about it in these bubbles. One, there's a lot of education that traditional companies like hardware companies need. Inside a lot of companies you still need a lot of education on. Why should we get involved in open source? What is the business of open source? How do we make money in open source? How should we get involved? You know, which projects should we get involved in? And so on and so forth. So I do a lot of internal education. And then I do some external education in terms of here's what Sandisk is and what projects we are interested in, what we can do and what we can contribute, you know, to the community. The second area is I encourage engineers at the company who are involved in open source projects to contribute to open source. And I always say to them code is more powerful than PowerPoint, which is what Lina says. And they say why? Why should we contribute? Because, you know, my competitors will see it, they'll use it. And we always say contribution gives you a seat at the table. You can't keep going to a lunch buffet at your uncle's house and eating from the table but never taking a dish to share with everybody. And if you're going to eat, you're going to bring something with you. But more importantly, that's how we all we consume a lot of open source at Sandisk. So we should give back. And so that's the philosophy that we've been using. And collaboration, you know, collaborating with other companies, other communities, whether it's at OpenStack or Linux Foundation or scale. I encourage that and I keep track of, you know, which organizations we should be getting involved in and how to get involved. Competency. So we are trying to also very hard to build skill sets inside the company. How do you contribute? How do you use GitHub? How do you contribute to open source? How do you work in open source? How do you conduct yourself in a community so that you are not offending people? Because there is an art to how you work with different communities. Compliance is another aspect of my job, which is making sure that at all times we are listening to the community. We are abiding by the obligations of licenses. And last but not the least, I do this a lot, which is speak at conferences. I do general communication on open source and open source offices. But I also encourage our company and team to go out and talk about what we do and what open source is about. Because if all of us evangelize, all of us communicate, the knowledge level goes up and, you know, everybody's use of open source goes up. And just to wrap it all up, then I talk to the seven women that I showcased. And the reason I showcased them also is because very often we don't really highlight the other contributions that happen in open source. And there are a lot of contributions being made by women in open source. So that was also part of my, you know, talk. And when I talk to them, they all say they love open source. They're in it because it's collaborative. It's rebellious. It's got this, you know, element of, I'll show you. And it's innovative. It's open and transparent. All these things that all of us here love about open source that you can inspect code, you can contribute code, you can, you know, manage your own destiny. But they also say that it's hard for new people to get involved because there's no one single path to get involved. Every project is different. Tools, communication tools can be intimidating IRC or Slack or whatever. And every project has their own communication tool. And until you master that tool, sometimes you feel like a newbie and you don't want to talk or you can't get a word in edge-wise. Sometimes you don't get involved because you just have a fear and you're ignorant about open source. And so until you get educated, you don't know how to. And so part of my talk was to say that there are various ways to get involved, not just in code. And then through those paths, you can start getting more and more involved in open source coding or projects so that it's also intimidating. There's a lot of projects which, you know, are either all or nothing. There's no small project you can get involved or a low-hanging fruit such as a two-day worth of, you know, documentation that you need to do. Or come and help us at this event and help us in the booth. Scale does a fantastic job, I think, of giving volunteers a chance to get involved and see the culture of open source. And Anne said to me, you know, there's no real good training for open source except attending conferences, I think, like this, which says to you, this is the way you start contributing a patch or this is the way you get on IRC or this is the way you market open source. And so it becomes very intimidating. So I asked them, you know, what's the best way for people to get involved? I think you saw a number of examples throughout those seven stories that I told you. The best way I got involved was attending conferences. And most conferences, like Scale, do a beginner session. And it's a great way for beginners to kind of understand what to do and which project to pick. The other thing people say is, pick a project that interests you and then get involved. So if you're a legal person, maybe join Open Chain. If you are a documentation person, maybe, you know, there's a project that badly needs help. Or you've used the project and so you know how it works and so maybe you can contribute documentation there. You can volunteer and share your strengths with them. Someone once said, design a t-shirt. And if you're a designer, say, hey, can I design a t-shirt for you guys? It's free of charge. You know, I want to get involved or write a blog or write a grant for them so that they can submit money. This one is something that people, everywhere I went to said, could people please submit bug reports? We would love to get bug reports from people and you know, to fix a documentation or a bug and present at a conference. If you're a user of a technology, if you use Drupal or if you use Python or something, write, talk about it as a user. Get involved. One of the questions I think Andrea has asked me also, she said, aren't these conferences very technical? So do I have to be technical in order to give a talk? And I said, no. There are always tracks for mentoring. There are tracks for business of open source. There are beginner tracks. Get involved. Give a talk at some of those talks, tracks. So you don't have to be, you know, an expert at that particular project to give a talk. You can give a talk on all of these different areas. And seek a mentor. You can always, people are so helpful. You can reach out and say, can you please help me? How do I get involved in this? Or how do I make a contribution? Or how do I write a patch? But I think people also want you to have done your homework and checked out what to do before you just, you know, go out and say, can you help me? Right? At least form your question and ask it in a way that people are willing to help you. Some ideas for those who are running projects so that you can welcome new people. Appreciate people. I think this came from Deb. Deb sitting in the audience. And show them that they're important. Sometimes we don't stop and thank people who have helped us or who made a patch contribution or who have done some documentation work for us. Every project, I think, should make time to bring in new people with varying capacities and time. And maybe you have projects which require one day of time. Or there's another project which requires one day a week for the next six months. So if you have that kind of a classification, then it's easier to bring in new people who say, hey, I have one day a week. I can contribute to open source. What can I do? Make projects friendly. Make the communication tools friendly. Have starter projects or low-hanging fruit projects. I started getting involved in OpenStack recently and I was intimidated by IRC and other tools that they were using. I had to go learn a wiki. I had to go do this. I had to go do that. And it kind of stopped me from really getting involved. And then someone said, hey, we'll do a class on basics of IRC or basics of this and basics of that. And that was huge because that made me feel so much more comfortable and I started getting more and more involved and I was able to contribute. Make a special effort to have a section of the conference for new people and offer scholarships like Outreach does. And I think this conference does a great job of having a kids track and lots of other new people track. And project members at the booth itself. We used to do this a lot with Yachto. If you have engineers at the booth, if you have people who have been working on the project, very often people feel less intimidated about the project. So they kind of associate the face with the person. And it's not just an IRC handle. You can actually go talk to them. You can understand the project and you feel more compelled to contribute to the project. The bottom line is we really need to do more open source education in schools. And I've been talking to a couple of mentors here who work with schools. And it's such a great way for students to get involved in learning coding and getting involved in projects and contributing because companies like Facebook, companies like Google, look at your GitHub repository, look at your resume as Git. And what kind of projects do you have there? And that's how they recruit. Have you contributed to the projects that they've been working on? Have you made, you know, because that's, the proof is in the code and in other areas as well, you know, whether it's community management, et cetera. So students, there's no barrier to entry that can get involved in that area. But I think they need a lot of mentors and people who can explain how to get involved. So I'm glad to see the students here. I've got some resources here. Open Hatch does a fantastic job of educating students and getting involved. Open Innovation Network, which Deb is a part of. Open Stack, Linux Foundation, open source.org, which is the group that publishes a lot of articles. You can self-publish there. Linux.com is also another place for how-to's and articles. Outreachy gives scholarships to people to get involved in Linux and Linux Open Source and the magazine. I'll add some more to this and the organization will publish some of this as well. So just want to wrap it up and say, you know, open source, we need to grow. It was interesting that Shettlewood said, you know, our kids will use machines to code. I don't think so. I think it will continue to be, you know, we need coders. We need people who document. We need people who are engaged and who help people come on board and work with the community. We need to recognize the contributions of noncoders. Do you guys all agree that these roles are really important for the success of an open source project? Did I miss any other role that we should outline and we should include? Great question. So testing is a very, very important role as well. And in fact, you can volunteer as a tester. You can write test scripts. You can, you know, submit bugs. So testing is also an important role. And I need to do more research in that area and kind of put a page together. I think correct. Yeah, I think it's somewhere between, the question was where does it fit in? You know, is it in development? Is it in ops? I think it's somewhere in between. It's some of the developers do their own testing, but then you can have some independent testers do some testing as well. And yeah, that's an important role. And create an environment. If each and every one of us in all the projects that we work in and in open source in general create an environment to involve new people, then I think open source will continue to be vibrant and active and move on. Thank you. And I can take questions. The question was what are the opportunities for translating documentation into, or, you know, project information into other languages? And that's a huge, huge area of help. When I put this together, someone came to me and said we really, really need help in localizing and translating documentation as well as websites and other things into other languages. So I think there's a huge opportunity, I would say, approach a project that you're interested in and say is there any way I can help, I can do this language or I can do this language. Anyone else have an answer for that? Yes. Yeah. P-O-O-T-L-E dot com or dot org. Thank you. So Deb's answer was P-O-O-T-L-E dot org is a site that helps you contribute from a translation perspective and makes it easier to do translation for projects. And the question was is there a way to convert users into contributors and to get them more involved in projects and not just to be a user and kind of depend upon the project for everything? The best examples I heard from the talks, the people that I talked to was give them a chance to talk about the project and how they use it and what works for them. So make them a hero and give them a first as an opportunity to talk. And then maybe to submit bug reports and patches. Bug reports are easy because everybody can submit that. And then maybe get them involved in. So how would you solve this problem? And make them a part of the solution so they can submit a patch for that bug instead of just doing the bug. I know some of the groups we are involved in like Ceph, the Ceph community asks users to be part of their advisory board and gets them involved in roadmap planning and in features and functions that need to come next. So they become part of the solution rather than being just in the audience as a user only. Any other suggestions from the audience? Yes. Exactly right. Ask them to verify the documentation ask them to submit reports on the documentation on the bugs on new features. Ask them to speak at your event. Most of us are very ego driven. We love being on the stage. So if someone says can you come speak, we'll go speak. Oh yeah, I'm an Uber user so I can go talk about how I use it or my use case. Does that make sense? Any other suggestions on how to convert users into contributors to become more active in the project? Yes. That's a great idea Deb. And I think most websites don't kind of make it easy for you to understand what role you can play. So if there's even a page where you can say we're looking for this, this and this and this. If you have so many hours or if you have this skill set can you please get involved. Make it dead simple to get involved is what you're saying. And so that people can start contributing. Otherwise we look at websites and then you say what can I do here? And you just don't know what role you can play. Yeah meetups, the question is do people do meetups and invite people to come through? Yeah, yeah. To get users more involved. I think that's a great idea. What we as a user of CEPH do is we often volunteer our facility for a CEPH meetup or CEPH group. So your users can also you can assign them the task to your point of organizing a meetup or doing it on their facility so that they can get involved and they can be part of the project from that perspective. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you so much for coming and I appreciate your time. Session in the Mentoring Track at day 3 of scale. Welcome. I am delighted to introduce Jen Greenway who is going to be talking today about mentoring and open source. Jen works on our diversity committee at scale and her day job is a teacher so please give me a warm welcome in which for Jen. Thank you Hannah. Can you guys hear me okay? I can hear myself loud and clear so I think we're good. Thank you for coming. People in the back feel free to move closer to the front unless you're a back sitter. I like to sit in the back myself so no pressure I don't mean to single you out. We're here to put a dent in the universe. I wondered if it was a good idea to start a presentation at an open source conference with a Steve Jobs quote. I felt like it could go either way but I thought maybe if the quote's good enough and I think this one is and it's very relevant to what I'm talking about. This is what Steve Jobs said. Hopefully everyone in this room can agree that helping other people is a good thing. If you don't agree with that you probably shouldn't be in this particular track but it's still time for you to get to another talk. One of the ways I have found in my life to be helped and help others is through mentoring so I'm excited to talk about the subject with you guys. I presume if you're here today you either have a little bit of interest in the subject as well or you're related to me in some way or are being paid by me. I'm going to start off by sharing a story about mentoring that's also about teaching because I make my living as a teacher and that's where I come from. This past semester through the mentoring program that I work with I had the opportunity to mentor a woman who had previously worked in the classroom of a friend of mine and she came to me to be mentored and shared a story from that classroom that I thought was relevant to mentoring. During that time in the classroom she had observed a student who had very significant challenges emotional challenges, behavioral challenges. It was his first time meeting his parents and going to preschool. He was a second language learner he was four years old but developmentally he was about two so he just had a lot going on so due to his behaviors a series of meetings was held meetings with his parents, meetings with the administration, teachers basically everyone and the big question was when we keep this boy in our program. At age four he was already at risk of being kicked out so the woman that I mentored recalled speaking to the teacher about this she was there in the classroom doing observations and saw what was going on and she spoke to the teacher and said what do you think is going to happen and what are you going to do? Are you advocating for him to be removed? And the teacher said no absolutely not and the woman was surprised by that answer because she saw firsthand how this child was in the classroom and so she asked the teacher why would you not want him to be removed? It would make your day so much easier and the teacher said what if I'm all that he has? What if I'm the only consistency that he has? What if this is his only safe place in the world? She likely was the only consistency he had and spoiler alert he made a big difference for him and he graduated and went to kindergarten but here's where this teacher my friend really dented the universe. The woman who was in her classroom doing those observations came to my classroom and she shared that story with me and I saw it reflected in all of her interactions with the children in my program. Now I've shared that story with you and I'm sure that it's making you think about people that you've impacted in your life and things that you've observed. She went on to get hired by our school district and now she has her own classroom so she's sharing out all those things that she learned. So raise your hand if you've ever thought about being a mentor. Humor me for a second. I have a group activity. Take a moment to think about something that you know a lot about. Something that you're not necessarily an expert in but something that you really care about. That you love doing, that you can't stop talking about. If you're sitting next to someone else turn to that person and tell them what you're thinking about. If you were able to think of something that you know a lot about, love, care about or something that you can't stop talking about, something that maybe you're really curious about, you could wear one of two hats by the time you leave today. Being a mentor or being mentored by someone else. So these are a few of the hats that I wear to make my dent in the universe. In my day job I'm an early care teacher for the Kaneo Valley Unified School District here in Southern California. I work with infants and toddlers age six weeks to two years. I'm excited that we have a very young child in the audience because I feel much more at home. I'm a scale volunteer as Hannah mentioned this year I became part of the scale diversity committee which I'm really excited to be a part of. It's the best committee at scale. I'm an avid reader so that's my default when I want to learn more about something I get actual books and find out what's going on with it. I'm a student all the time learning new things. I'm just looking at beginning a master's program in human development which is both really exciting and incredibly daunting depending on the day. And I'm a mentor. So I'm going to talk to you about my experiences being mentored and being a mentor. When I look at the open source community I see a lot of groundwork that's been made for successful mentoring. But I also see a lot of holes and a lot of chances that are maybe being missed by misunderstandings. So I'm just going to share some ideas with you today that you can take with you, do with them what you wish. This is a photo of me as a college student working in the classroom of my mentor teacher who obviously was instrumental in my life and development. My time in the classroom with her helped me to learn how to be a teacher in the real world. So things that I learned from my mentor weren't things that I learned in the classroom as a student learning about teaching. For my mentor teacher I learned it's really important to have a plan and a backup plan and be ready to get rid of that plan any second. I also learned to not listen to the little voice in my head that was always like maybe this isn't the right job for me, maybe I'm not in the right field. She gave me confidence in myself. So like a lot of people who have been purposefully mentored, I wanted to mentor others. So now I'm a member of the mentor teacher program in the state of California which is a fairly structured program which is one of the things I'm going to talk to you about today. I mentor a college and university students who are training to be early educators in the future. My role is to guide them towards increased competence and confidence in the classroom and my relationship with each one of them is unique and different depending on where they're at in their development and what they need from me. Among the people that I have mentored have been a future pediatrician and occupational therapist, an elementary school teacher, a special education teacher and even an exotic dancer who wanted to become an educator. Some of the things I taught them were specific skills that were relevant to our job but most of them needed something more general, less quantifiable. This less quantifiable mentoring is what mentoring is really all about. Mentoring is entirely relationship based. So just like open source is all community based which kind of makes it sound like open source might be relationship based as well although this can be difficult for some people to embrace. This makes the open source community ideal for building mentoring programs and partnerships because it's just about constant growth and improvement and tweaking things until they work just right. Making things better it's all about transparency and honesty. So in my mind when I think about these things I think the correlation between mentoring and open source is very clear and hopefully by the time you leave here today you will feel the same way. Mentoring is how open source will succeed. So let's talk a little bit about what mentoring looks like. We'll start by talking about what mentoring is not. A mentor is not a coach. Although they may coach you sometimes. A mentor is not a role model although they could be looked at as a role model to others. A mentor is not your boss. Although they may have been a mentor to you in the past or they could be in the future a mentor is not necessarily an expert. A mentor is not a sponsor and a mentor is not your best friend although your friendship may involve as your relationship goes on. People often confuse the concepts of mentoring and coaching and trying to untangle the differences between the two things sounds like semantics until you really think about it. So coaching is performance driven mentoring is development driven. Coaching is very task oriented, very specific while mentoring is relationship oriented and people can have or develop relationships with a coach and people confuse the two things and overlap the two things all the time and it's probably not a huge deal. But the point is your mentor could coach you but they won't always coach you. Mentoring is not about tasks. A coach would make you better at really specific things but a mentor supports you at being better in general. This is me with a mentor and a role model. So my role model is the woman on the right here. She wrote a lot of textbooks that I read in school. She was an idol to me. I've admired her for years. I studied her, memorized her theories, taught her theories to other people. She was totally on a pedestal to me and I had the opportunity to meet her this year at a conference that we were both speaking at and we talked really briefly about her work and I tried not to be too much of a geek and shower her with my adoration and then we talked really extensively about our cats which I thought was a pretty good balance. So I left our encounter thinking more of her as an actual human being in person but she's still definitely a role model to me because she's up on a pedestal. My mentor who's pictured on the left is someone that I interact with at least once a month. She's in charge of the mentor program that I work with as well as being a professor in my field and she's a real person with real strengths and flaws that I know and a phone number that's programmed into my phone. A mentor is a person who's always reachable to you, not just a person that you observe from a distance. So it's possible that you have a warm and wonderful boss who feels like a mentor. I've had those bosses before and they can be very beneficial to your development within a specific organization and as a person but it's really important if you're serious about being a mentor that your mentor is not currently your direct supervisor or manager because that's not what's best for you or for the organization that you work for. Conflicts can develop there really easily. It makes the relationships just a bit stickier in general. A mentor does not need to be an expert in their field but they need to be more of an expert than you are. To be effective they need to have been where you are now, at least roughly. They need to have experience that's relevant to your goals and their experience should be relatively recent so that it's applicable to what's happening right now in the community or organization. Most of all they need to be willing to honestly and openly share with you about those experiences, the mistakes that they made, the successes they had what they would do differently. If you keep up with what's hot in women business circles, which I'm sure that all of you do you've probably heard about the subject of sponsorship which is a pretty hot subject right now there was even a study done on the subject by a woman named Sylvia Hewlett she's the president and CEO of the think tank center for talent innovation and a book was written about her study that's called forget a mentor find a sponsor. Has anybody heard about that? One person. So when it comes to sponsors like with coaches it can be difficult to untangle the web of which is which and does it even matter? It matters to me because I think that mentoring is really important and that sponsorship is different and I think that mentoring has a real value. Cheryl Sanberg Facebook COO and author of Lean In has famously said that being asked to be a mentor is a total mood killer. She says that of women we need to stop telling them get a mentor and you will excel instead we need to tell them excel and you will get a mentor and I think that's a fantastic sound bite I can't see how it's useful advice for people who feel like they need or want a mentor. The way that Hewlett who conducted that study on sponsorship talks about sponsorship reminds me of that quote from Sanberg and she says a sponsorship relationship has much more stake for both parties it's an investment that must be earned and that's where she kind of lost me on sponsorship because that's where you turn back to mentoring. Relationships that really matter don't have to be earned. You're worthy of it right now as you are with all your nerves and insecurities and everything that you have yet to learn so that being said sponsors could be fabulous for you at a certain point in your career. I think of sponsors as a person who kind of markets your brand. They can talk about you they may not talk extensively with you but they could be important and finally your mentor is not your best friend I'm sure your best friend is a wonderful person and there are many wonderful things to you but when it comes to mentoring you need to have someone in your life who might be a bit more objective about you. So let's talk a little bit about what mentoring actually is. Mentoring is generally a formalized partnership but there is also informal mentoring relationships that form so for purposes of this talk what I mean by informal is that it's an agreement between two parties with specific expectations and sometimes informal mentoring ships just happen between two people and they may not even realize that oftentimes I'll talk to people and ask them about mentors that they've had and they have to think for a minute and they say you know I had this person years ago who helped me so much with this one thing and they were really kind of a mentor to me and they didn't necessarily have a formalized partnership but that can be a benefit Mentoring is centered on guidance a mentor is defined as a guide and a guide who will help you towards the goal that you have decided on. Mentoring is generally long term, relatively long term meaning that it will last for longer than a few weeks. Sometimes it could last for years. Mentoring is supportive and it's mutually beneficial. Mentors get as much from the partnership if not more than their prodigies. There's been extensive studies done on how mentoring is a value to corporations because when people perform as mentors they're more invested in the work that they're doing and I can speak to that from my own experience. When I joined the Mentor Teacher Program it really made me step up my game and think about everything that I was doing and kind of reaffirmed that I love my job and I want to help other people be able to enjoy the same thing. It's also important to note I think that mentoring is not gender specific so men can mentor a woman and women can mentor a man younger people can mentor older people and vice versa it's just about finding the right match for you. This is Rita Pearson who was an educator who gave a fantastic head talk and she was a really outspoken advocate for education and she said this when she applied to mentoring I would change it to every person deserves a champion, someone who won't give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists they become the best they can possibly be. A mentor is the person who believes that you can reach the next level and knows how they can guide you there and they believe in the power of connection because they understand that relationships are the foundation of success. The first meeting that I ever had with my mentor, the one that was a few minutes ago, she kind of laid out what my life could be for the next 5 to 10 years and she was so confident about it that I was completely convinced that I could do everything that she thought I could do and I have done many of the things that she said that I could do which I wouldn't have thought of doing if I hadn't had that conversation with her. So even though the conversation made me want to go home and immediately go to bed, it was a really good thing. This is where I'm going to put on my child development hat for a little bit and talk about a theory that was developed by Lev Vygotsky. So in child development and education circles, we often talk about his theory as scaffolding, which is what mentoring is all about. You can see in these little circles over here in the purple section it says current understanding can work unassisted. In the teal section that's the zone of proximal development. That's where you learn through scaffolding. And the green area is what is out of reach to you right now. So the zone of proximal development, that teal area there, has been defined as the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. Vygotsky viewed interactions with peers as an effective way of developing skills and strategies. What children can do with the assistance of others in some sense be even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone. This seems very relevant to what we're doing with mentors. Our work with our mentors is indicative of our mental development. We need other people to reach our full potential. When I describe ZPD to early childhood people, I use the example of doing a puzzle. And so I say imagine a child is working on a puzzle and they can't quite get the piece to fit. They know where it's supposed to go, but maybe they don't know that they need to turn it a little bit and keep trying. So say you're sitting there with them as they're doing the puzzle and you say, oh, if you turned it a little bit, it might fit. And then they're able to be successful. And they've learned how to do it. And maybe next time they'll try to do it too. So I haven't done that much coding in my life, but I've done a little bit. And for me, it seems that that very easily applies to working on code. Years ago, there was a Seidenfeld episode that included a bit about mentoring. Has anybody seen it? So the character of George had a protege. And George also had a topic, risk management, that he needed to learn about for his job. So when his protege said that she was not familiar with the topic, he handed her this giant textbook and said, you read about it and then teach it to me. To be clear, this was just George being lazy. Mentoring is not exactly about being lazy, but every mentor has their own style. So it's important that their style match yours in some way. Some people learn very well in this way. Some people would need a more hands-on mentor. But ideally, you would have some combination of both, a combination of trying and failing and flying. One of the biggest mistakes I made early on as a mentor was doing too much of the work that was needed by my protege. I had one student who really took advantage of me knowing that I would be willing to do the work rather than see her fail. So with that particular student, I could have really helped her with time management and responsibility, but I was not a very good mentor to her because I basically took over where she left off and we were not a good match. That's just to highlight the point that each mentoring relationship is unique and it's a learning process on both sides. So some people have the idea that because they learn things the hard way and on their own, say they first joined a community and they got flamed and then they learned, ooh, that's probably not the best way to start an email. It was good enough for them, so that's the best way to learn things. It'll be good enough for you too. Only the strong survive an open source. Survival of the fittest. And they think that this is how we can create the best code and build the best communities because if you can't handle it, you should just leave. When I was putting together some pieces for this presentation I came across a blog post that was written by a developer in the open source community. Can the post address the topic of whether or not he would mentor someone because apparently people ask him all the time and Chris, it wasn't you. So he wrote this blog post where he gave the short answer, no. And also the long answer which was all about how he had to learn things for himself. He had to get involved on his own. He had to read the documentation himself, make all those mistakes. So everyone else should have to do that too. And I believe he also walked uphill in the snow both ways to and from school without shoes. So this attitude goes against what mentoring is all about because mentoring is the idea that your experiences both positive and negative can be shared and passed on so that our collective wisdom grows. And we can become better as we go. Communities become better and stronger this way rather than increasingly divisive. Even when someone is being mentored they're going to go through hard things and they're going to have to learn things for themselves. It's also worth noting that everyone learns in different ways. And what one person found to be motivating another person may find to be completely discouraging. And that's not to say that protégés should be coddled. Mentoring is about guiding or scaffolding, not about explicitly teaching specific skills. And it's about relationships that benefit all parties. Open source communities have a long history of valuing self-reliance because do-it-yourself is the Linux way. But let's all note that truly effective mentoring is a way of fostering self-reliance. So my advice to open source mentors is to warn your protégé if they're about to do something that's going to get them flamed because that's not an effective way to learn. But maybe let them see for themselves that there's a bug in their code because that is an effective way to learn. This is from the Fedora IRC Helpers Code of Conduct. The Fedora IRC channel has assigned helpers who work specific shifts to welcome newbies to their community. One of the things that they tell them is to practice the same method used by a surgeon. Do no harm and advise the user on a course of action that makes minimal changes to effective fix. This is a great example of the kind of groundwork that's being made for mentoring in open source. It sets the right tone, less of the read the manual tone and more of the hey, we're glad you're here tone. Google Summer of Code may be one of the best known examples of mentoring in open source. This is a link to their manual which is so comprehensive and beneficial that everyone should just read it for themselves. As fantastic as their overall program is, the documentation of their program may be even more admirable just based on how specific and extensive it is. It's an awesome comprehensive resource for anyone who's wanting to be a mentor or develop a mentoring program. If you don't know about Google Summer of Code it's a global program that's open to college and university students where they're paired with a mentor, a coding mentor from a participating open source project and they're paid a stipend to write code for that project. From their website I found that since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together over 8,500 successful student participants from 101 countries and over 8,300 mentors from over 109 countries worldwide to produce over 50 million lines of code. Both mentors and protégés enter the relationship with expectations. It can be a really good thing to have the expectations agreed upon and even signed on or at least reviewed by both parties together. If you're going to be a mentor you need to take a moment to think about these things and whether or not you can give them to your protégé. These are some examples that I came up with. Things like full and undivided attention during meeting times, which can be surprisingly difficult to accomplish. You may need to close your laptop and set aside your phone. An openness and willingness to try new things, to give and receive feedback and to actively work together on agreed upon goals. To do what you say you will do. To ask questions and gather information. To be patient to allow for the opportunity to make choices. So like I said these are just examples and you could expand upon them if you decided to have a contract. So I mentioned earlier that there's formal and informal mentoring and then there's the kind that kind of falls somewhere in the middle. But a lot of time formal mentoring will come when someone who's volunteered to mentor is assigned a protégé. So you might join a program and say here's a person who needs a mentor. There you go. And usually in those cases the two parties have already agreed to certain guidelines or rules as part of the project. And that might be enough. But you might want to think about some of these things moving forward. Just simple things like when and where were you going to meet? For how long? Who will be responsible for scheduling the meetings? What is the aim of your partnership? And what's the best way to contact one another? If you're the kind of person who doesn't like to get calls after a certain time that would be a good thing to share with each other going in. Goals and objectives. So let's apply this to open source. One of the common examples of mentoring in open source is when a new person joins a project and they want to commit some code. So some projects including Apache and Fedora actually assign a mentor to a newbie. And the mentor will work with them on their code before it gets submitted. And this is a benefit to both sides. It's an opportunity to learn about communication as much as it is an opportunity to learn about code. Ideally it gives the person being mentored the opportunity to understand how that unique community works and how they can best fit in there. So let's say the goal in this case would be submitting a piece of code or fixing a bug or adding a feature. The objectives to that goal might look like figuring out exactly what part of the code you're going to work on. And the mentor may break that down even further for you. You might agree to have certain pieces done by a certain date to submit to your mentor who will then check them for bugs and report back to you. And after that the objectives would be to further debug it, test it again and finally submit it following the steps laid out by the mentor. If you want to find a mentor, I have some advice for you. Sometimes mentors will come to you out of the blue. But more often if you're intentional about it you need to actually seek them out yourself. So remember that a mentor is a person who's further along than you on the same journey. Think about your expectations and what you want a mentor to be to you. Before you go looking for them you should know exactly what you're looking for. Maybe you know what project you want to work on, what company you'd like to work for, or what job in general you would like to have. Who are those people who are already there? You want to network with some of those people. So conferences like this are a great opportunity for that. Some of you may be here for that very reason. And in that case you have to be willing to go up and actually talk to people. You can ask someone else to introduce you, which might make that conversation a little bit easier. The in-person aspect can be really helpful and that's a wonderful way to network. But something to watch out for in those cases is the post-conference leg. So you go up to someone and you take the risk and talk to them and you have a wonderful conversation and you feel really engaged with them. And then you both go home and you kind of forget about it. So it can be really helpful if you meet someone at a conference with the goal of networking with that person that when you take their business card you commit to a follow-up. Whether you say it to them or it's just to yourself, make a little note like on Tuesday and a follow-up with this person at noon. If you don't have the opportunity to attend a conference like this or you don't find a mentor at a conference like this, there's a lot of other ways that you can go about it. You can look at working at school through friends, online, business associations, nonprofit organizations, maybe even within your family. Someone knows someone who has a shared interest. Community groups, business chambers of commerce, and that can be a great resource and I'm going to talk more specifically about them in a minute. So how do you ask someone to be your mentor? It can be kind of an awkward conversation. So you want to engage with them a little bit first so you can get to know each other a little bit better. You want to be sure that it's the right fit. So you want to learn some things about them before you commit to having them be your mentor. So you're going to want to be really specific. You want to think things like I need to advance my career. You need to think specifically like I would like to know more about public speaking, or I need help in conquering imposter syndrome, or I want to be able to confidently join this project because I want to develop this new feature. Why are you asking this specific person to be your mentor? It really doesn't hurt to give them an example of how they have already helped or influenced you and what prompted you to choose them first place. You have an equal responsibility as a protégé in the mentoring relationship, and maybe you've heard about the benefits of mentoring and you think, yes, I want to mentor, but there's a lot more to it than that. In order to reap the benefits of the partnership, to be that person who's five times more likely to be promoted, you need to be a person who's open and engaged in the process. You need to do the work. I have some tips from Diane Schumacher Craig, who's the global head of research economics and strategy at Wells Fargo. These are some of the things that she says help you to be someone who's great to mentor. So be great at what you do. At least be excited about what you do. Ask for more responsibility. Don't be a wallflower. Build your support network. And most of all, help to promote the success of others because you're joining a network of people. Sometimes the person that you ask to mentor you is going to say no. Short answer, no. If that happens, it's probably not about you. And it's going to be okay because there's a lot of other people out there who are going to say yes. So you could ask them if they know anyone else who might be willing to take on that role, or you can move on yourself to the next candidate. If you don't have another candidate, you can revisit the list of places where you could find one. Here's the list of ideas where you might encounter your next mentor. So Linux user groups can be a good place to find a mentor. And I say this with some caveats because the climate of the user group is going to be dependent upon that particular population. Here's how I found out about Linux user groups. I met my husband in 1998, and the year before, he had founded the CME Kineho Linux user group in CME Valley, California with his friend Dan. So I learned about Linux user groups through him. Because sometimes he would ask me to go to the lug with him. And I actually loved going to the lug because it was such a fascinating population of people to think about. It was a very diverse population. Women have obviously always been a minority there, but I was surprised at the enormous range of ages and interests, and people came from such diverse backgrounds. So that group that he founded was one of the groups that led to the beginning of scale. And I remember being at one of these meetings long ago and meeting a high school student named Elon. Does anyone know Elon? He's Scales Conference chair now. So Elon started attending the meetings and participating in the events that were called Lugfest. And it's safe to say that he was the lucky recipient of some pretty solid, informal mentoring in those years. I observed a lot of mentoring via the lugs. And my experience has been that they can be a pretty welcoming place, although each group will have their own flavor. So these are some resources that you can use in this immediate area. But the groups are all across the country. Last night at the Bad Voltage show, they asked the audience about how new users are coming into Linux. And Jon O'Bacon mentioned that he was introduced to Linux via a lug group. So if you're someone who's active in the open source community, you might want to think about how you're introducing Linux to new users. I'm going to share some links of the projects I found that seem to have pretty well established, well documented, and robust mentoring programs. Most of these programs are geared at coding specifically, but not all of them. So here's a few to start with. The Apache Software Foundation, the Fedora Project, Google Summer of Code, One Two Women. OpenStack actually includes a list of available mentors and their timelines on their website. So what that means is how much time they can devote each week to mentoring, what time zone they're in, what their area of expertise is, and what their IRC handle is. Railgirls does their own Summer of Code program. And Drupal actually holds mentoring office hours on IRC. You can follow Drupal mentoring on Twitter for reminders of the hours and other mentoring events that they'll be offering. The Open Hatch group is based in Boston and it's a really friendly way for people to get involved in open source. Their goals as an organization are lowering the entry barriers and increasing diversity. They have training missions and outreach events. If you're someone looking for mentoring in open source, it seems like they would be a great organization to look into and get in touch with. One of the things I really like about the Open Hatch group is that it's not just about code. So while it's wonderful to see so many projects are seeing the benefit of adding mentoring to contributing code, there are many more areas in the open source community where mentoring could be a great match. So I would encourage all of you to think about where mentoring could be of use within the communities that you're a part of. Yoda demonstrates, as the mentor to mentors, how to give support to a promising individual, how to offer challenges that will permit one to learn and grow, and how to provide vision so that your protégé will gain confidence and eventually independence. The thing about mentoring is that not everyone can do it because not everyone wants to do it. Not everyone has the right temperament for it. If you're someone who thinks you might want to be a mentor, chances are pretty good that if you're thinking that, you may have the right temperament. You could be someone who's going to become a great mentor. You might want to be someone who's already been planted. In my experience, you don't always start off as a great mentor. Years from now, you're going to want to go back to some of those people and apologize to them for the things that you said or did or more likely did not do. But that's all part of the process. So one of the things that I read that inspired me to put together this presentation was an article that Rich Bowen of Apache and Red Hat wrote for opensource.com called My Life in Open Source and the Mentors Who Led the Way. If you're at all interested in mentoring, I recommend that you take a look at it because Rich talks a little bit about the mentors that he identifies he's had along the way and he talks about easy ways that you can incorporate mentoring into your life and why you would want to do that. Like leaving a legacy that actually matters. Every moment that you invest in another person will extend your impact a little further past your own direct influence. And one of the things that he also talked about is how to assign to the people that you would like to mentor. This is interesting because a lot of mentoring in open source as structured by projects happens at random. If you want to be a mentor, you tell the project that that's something that you would like to do and then when someone comes along who needs mentoring, that's the person who will be assigned to you. But what if you took it a step further on your own and just kept an eye out for the specific individual that you could mentor on a higher level. Keep your antenna tuned. Talk to people. Talk to people about what lights them up. Talk to them about their goals. You'll pretty quickly find a way that you can dent the universe. So if there's one thing I want you to leave with today, it's the knowledge that you can be a mentor. You can do it. You can make a difference. It feels really good to do that. But you also really need to think about it. Think about what it will require of you. Get yourself prepared. It's a relationship that you're committing to. And you're not necessarily going to be able to do it in a big way in every phase of your life. Josh Burkeus did an interview in 2009 with IT World and he said being a good mentor requires a lot of time. Frequently more time than it would take you to do the development yourself. For this reason, most open source software developers are not temperamentally suited to be mentors. These are some universal qualities that mentors ought to have, like patience. A good mentor is going to be patient with you. They're going to be easy to talk to because they're going to want to talk to you. And they'll be the kind of person who honors their commitments. They'll be effective communicators. I once read, a mentor must believe in their mentee, both personally and professionally. Mentors help fill your knowledge gaps and seek opportunities to help you grow and excel. A mentor is someone with whom you can let down your guard, share your insecurities, and ask the stupid questions that we all have sometimes. You want a mentor who knows people, people that you might want to know too. For example, my mentor introduced me to my role model. I didn't know that she knew her, but I knew that she knew a lot more super smart and creative people in our field than I do. Because she's a lot more outgoing than I am and also a lot older and she's been in the field a lot longer. So she's the kind of person who's just really good at making connections. And that's the kind of mentor that you want to have. Let's talk a little bit about communication in mentoring relationships. Communication is everything, but what is the best way to do it? I recently read Sherry Terkel's book, Reclaiming Conversation. And I read about Ben Waver, who's a graduate of the MIT Media Lab. And he developed this tool called the Sociometric Badge. What the badge does is it tracks employees' movements through an office. And it measures and analyzes the whole range of things in their conversations, who they were talking to, how long they talked, what the pace of their speech was, their tone, and on. Using that information, Waver was able to quantify that face-to-face conversation leads to higher productivity. For example, software teams produce fewer bugs when they talk more, face-to-face. Waver's study indicates that the same is not true of online encounters. So that's something to keep in mind when you're in a mentoring relationship. There are a lot of collaboration tools that we all know and love that make it possible for mentoring relationships to develop over distance. But there's still something to be said for face-to-face relationships. It's just something to keep in the back of your head. The best approach may be the hybrid approach, so use a little bit of things for different purposes. For quick changes or status updates, you might use texting or Twitter. You may use Slack. For a long explanation of something, email might be the best because both parties will have the time to read it and reflect upon it before responding. Video chat can work for a regular check-in if you can't make it happen face-to-face, and IRC could be a good solution if you're stuck on something. The point is to make sure that you're communicating often over-communicate rather than under-communicate. If you're going to be a mentor or mentor, you're going to get a lot of experience giving and receiving feedback. The learning curve on this can be really steep, so I wanted to talk a little bit about feedback and some common approaches. Does anybody know what the sandwich approach to feedback is? The sandwich approach is to start with something positive before going into something negative and then coming back to something positive. An example would be, Jen, your presentation ran smoothly. I didn't agree with most of what you said, but I really like the pictures. Some people have objected to the sandwich approach as being disingenuous and undermining your negative feedback. This assumes that the main point you would want remembered from your feedback is the negative part. Namely, you didn't want to talk about my pictures. You wanted to talk about how you didn't agree with what I said. So, as a teacher, my opinion is that if the point you want carried off in the end is negative, you probably shouldn't be mentoring. The point of giving feedback is not to come from a negative place. It's to say, good news! I pinpointed our next objective. I watched what you did there and I saw you really understood this, this and this. Now we know that what we should focus on next is this. So, if you're not able to go into a feedback session with a growth mindset, you're probably not going to be super successful as a mentor. It doesn't mean that when your protege does something wrong, you shouldn't tell them that it was wrong. It means that you can let them know they should do something differently without making them feel like a horrible human being. So, some of the people who objected to the sandwich approach as being disingenuous, with their point being that people know going in that you're just trying to tell them something negative in a nice way, they prefer to use the transparent approach. So, the transparent approach works like this. Jen, I wanted to let you know that I didn't really care for your talk. I want to tell you what I didn't like so you can think about it next time. You had told me you were going to talk about open source, but all I remember you saying is something about sandwiches. The value in the transparent approach is that right from the start the receiver knows that they're going to hear something honest and maybe uncomfortable. And people need to hear these things sometimes. But I want to emphasize that it's probably more productive to give feedback that encourages people towards reachable goals. Nine times out of ten they already know something that went wrong. They have a mentor in the first place to help them understand how it could be fixed and how it could go right and how they could do better. So, if you believe that it can be fixed too, you're automatically going to comment them with a gross mindset and you're going to be able to make it a learning session. So, raise your hand if you've given any thought to what mentoring means in your life. Okay, pretty good. Do you remember what you said to the person beside you at the beginning about what you were passionate about? Maybe you're ready to follow up on that. January is National Mentoring Month. The initiative was initially developed to encourage adults to mentor youth. But hopefully what you've heard today will help you fully understand how mentoring can support anyone regardless of their age. If you need or want a mentor, I hope you'll be more capable of finding the right one. And if you want to be a mentor, I hope you'll know where to get started. So, I would love to hear about the mentoring process in your life. This is how you can contact me and I spelled out my name there because people often forget the second A in my last name. So, you can send me an email if you'd like to. If you'd like links to the resources that I mentioned, you can email me and I'll send them out to you. I believe we have some time for questions. Anybody? Hold on. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Awesome. For the video recording, I want to repeat that she was plugging that outreach.program outreach.org. Everyone should check that out. I did that myself for the first time this morning. Any other questions? I'm going to turn off my audio now. Hannah asked, what advice do you have for winding down a mentoring relationship? Do you mean if you're a mentor or a protege or either one? Both. Probably at that point both people are becoming aware that they're not as much in mutual need of one another. Some signs of that maybe that you're finding it longer between your meetings or you don't feel excited about going to meetings, you don't feel excited when you hear from them. That would be a really good conversation to have with them. Sometimes that means that it's time for you to develop some new goals and sometimes that means moving on to a new person. Sometimes it means revisiting what you've already done. But you probably are going to have to have a conversation where you say, I think we've done some great things here. I don't want to schedule another meeting, that kind of thing. I know that you could think of some incredibly nice ways to say that. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to start with disclaimer. If you don't like some of the things I say, I'm sorry, I'm just telling you how the world works. And if you have a problem with that, you've got to complain to whoever you think made it, be that Zeus, Poseidon, Thor, Ram, Yahweh, or the Judeo on the mountain. Or be content that evolution definitely did the best it could. Don't shoot the messenger, all in all. Now I'm going to start with some images that you're probably familiar with. By the way, the part where I introduced myself, I just skipped. My name is your Sportslead. I work as community manager on cloud, and I hope I won't insult you all too much. Back to the image. So I don't know, how many of you have seen this? So you know that A and B are exactly the same shades of color. Even though it must, certainly doesn't look like that. And again, these lines are horizontal and they don't look like it. And this is not a GIF. It's a JPEG file. If you look closely, you can see the JPEG artifacts. So we call these visual illusions. And really that's a misnomer. Because there's nothing illusionary about them. They're just images. Just stuff that you look at all day. And it's not the image that has anything funky going on about it. It's our brain that is screwing up. It's this gray matter here that's making a mess out of what you're looking at. The image is fine. There's no lying there. It's not a mirror trick or anything like that. So I think this should worry you. I'm going to get to a couple of things you might not want to know, but then again you must have read the description of the talk so I hope you know. So this is a picture of our brain. And by the way if you're a neurosurgeon, you're going to hate me because I'm simplifying here quite criminally much. But I hope you all get a point. So the green part, both the light green and the dark green, that's the part that does this messing up of the images you look at. I mean it's a visual cortex. It's been either evolved over millions of years carefully designed by one deity or another. It's quite a complicated piece of machinery. But then again, it's designed to do what it does. Look at stuff. You get input from your eyes and it gets processed in multiple stages. It's really quite interesting if you're interested in this kind of stuff. A lot of this has been emulated in computers. It does like edge detection with algorithms. You can quite easily emulate that. I mean in theory if you would lose a part of that brain we could probably actually replace it with a computer. I mean there's a lot of connection issues but the processing we can do pretty well. So it's reason we want to understand how it works but it makes mistakes. Now you have to realize you've been looking at stuff your entire life. I mean you do it about 16 hours a day you've been doing that since you were born. And you have a brain that's specifically designed to look at stuff all the time. Now I'm going to talk about what you do with the front part of your brain. It's roughly equally big. It's a frontal lobe there. And it's where among many other things, you know, logical thinking is supposed to be unlike the part on the back. It wasn't exactly designed to do that. Not at all. You have to learn it. You might remember math classes. That's fun, right? It takes years to learn how to read and write and all this stuff. And you don't do this a lot. Actually researchers in this area depends on who you ask but if you would ask them how many times a day do you really, seriously, consciously, deliberately make a decision. They will say either once or twice a day, once or twice a week depends on who you talk to. Some believe it's even less. Some say you never really consciously make a decision. It's your subconscious that does it all the time. So this might be a surprise for many of you. You think you make decisions all the time. Let me tell you about a little experiment they did which I find fascinating. And it's been replicated thousands of times. Probably more than dozens of times. So it works like this. You put a person in a room and you put a button in front of them and you tell them look you can press the button whenever you want. You can do it in 5 minutes, you go out in 10 minutes you can do it in an hour. Your only task is to decide autonomously when to press the button. There are no screens in the room. There is no subconscious machinery trying to make you do anything nothing. You do get one of these funny hats on with all the wires they're checking what's happening in your brain but that's it. Now before you do something, your brain prepares for that. The red part, that's the primary motor cortex it prepares the movement. It's quite interesting how that works too by the way because when you think of a movement roughly the same activity takes place and when you actually execute a movement. But that's a different thing. This is an activity that happens before you move. Now with these devices, you can measure this activity happening approximately 600, 400 to 600 milliseconds before the movement takes place. So if you're looking at a brain wave, you can about half a second before someone does something, you can say oh he's going to click on the button. Now what they've done is they started to interrupt people in that time. So the moment they saw the activity, they said oh stop, stop. Did you already decide to click? You know what the answer was? Nope. But they can reliably predict that you will click. But you don't know it yet. So what does that tell you? Well your consciousness clearly didn't decide to click yet. Your brain already was going to click. So you didn't make the decision consciously. This was quite interesting to discover as you can imagine. And since then a lot of research has been done in these areas and that's where you get to the point where some researchers believe you don't make conscious decisions at all and consciousness is just watching what's going on and makes you think you're in charge. Big conversation. The point of all of it is that we've been doing pretty amazing stuff I admit. But at the same time this is not primarily what we do and what our brains do. On one hand we all think we're very smart and these guys they were quite brilliant in their own ways. Yes. But at the same time they were very flawed. I mean take Mr. Newton on the bottom right here. He himself believed that his research into alchemy had far greater relevance than the stuff he did related to the apple and gravity. I mean right now you think yes seriously. He thought that alchemy was the thing. He tried to find the philosopher's stone during stuff into golf. He tried to find the Alexor of life. Seriously. He did. So you might argue there might have been something a little off here with this very very intelligent man. So was this just a lack of knowledge? I mean how is this possible that people that smart spend so much of the time on stuff except are silly. I mean the guy on the bottom left I'm pretty sure really did believe Zeus lived on Olympus. Right. It's fascinating sometimes. So let's talk about math for a second. I'll make my point don't worry. So throwing dice gambling is pretty old. This stone was found in Egypt and not recent but well it was found recently but it's the Egyptians were using this. So if I ask all of you how big is the chance to throw a six on a die with 20 sides like this. How big is that chance? Anyone? One on 20. Exactly Minto. So let's say I throw again. How big is my chance on a six? One on 20. So we know that right and we also know that if you throw dice the chance to get a six two times in a row is one out of 20 times one out of 20. So well let's say we're all very smart as humans. I'm not talking about any of you in particular just in general. We must have figured that out quite a while ago. Did the Egyptians know it? Who thinks that the Babylonians discovered this? Hence, Egyptians who thinks the Greeks discovered this? Come on 300 before Christ? They were smart guys. One hand, two hands, three, four. Alright, alright, alright. The Romans. Somewhere 300 after Christ. Let's go a little later then. How about the great Muslim philosophers in the year 1200? No? Yeah you're right. It took until 1565 until an Italian no less figured it out. And he only, well he didn't publish it ever as a matter of fact. It was only published after his death. And he didn't even know this multiplication rule. The only thing he knew was there was something with multiplying the chances but he didn't really get the how or what. So we've only known this for 400 years. Which for something as common as gambling can you imagine if you would have come back in time with the knowledge you have today of this one thing, you could have won the entire ancient world by just playing dice. Because I love playing dice. Because you understood chance. It's not like they didn't think about it. They did. So just to get an idea how long it took for us to get a clue. But now we know. Now we've learned that if you throw a dice twice the second throw is not related to the first. Or not. Why the heck does this still exist? It makes no sense if we were even half rational with our big heads this would not exist. But it does. In the middle of the desert no less. So why? Well for the same reason you can't count the black dots. And the same reason that this still is not a gift. Your brain is just not very good at this stuff. You think you are. But we have countless limitations. We are just not that terribly clever. So well I mean if psychologists do anything one of the major things I guess they should be doing is of course studying this. What's wrong in our head. Now they call it cognitive biases. And they are fundamental consistent biases. So mistakes we make consistently reliably. You can absolutely count on people making certain mistakes again and again and again. Because it's wired, hardwired in our brain. It'll come back again and again. I mean Wikipedia actually notes that it's often studied in psychology and behavioral economies. Yeah no shit. That's what they should be doing. So let's talk about statistics a bit. Because I was just talking about dice. How does our brain deal with math and statistics? Think how did you learn that 9 times 9 is 81? You know that all. Do you calculate that last 9 times 9? You remember it right? Your brain is not that good at calculations. Your memory is pretty pay-ish. I mean lots of issues with that one. We'll get to that. But memory is used a lot by your brain to determine chances. Now there are issues with that. Let's say you have a key ring and there are two keys on it that look very similar. We all know, statistically speaking, that the chance that you grabbed the wrong key is 50%. But we also all know that in reality you grabbed the wrong key about 70-80% right? That's how it works right? So why do we think this? This is because if your brain asks itself gosh how often do I grab the wrong key? It doesn't calculate it. It looks in your memory. Now it happens to be the case that the way memory stores stuff is influenced by a lot of things including emotions. And we tend to get a little more emotional when something goes wrong than when it goes right. So that's what you remember. That's why you think it goes wrong. And this is also why people are afraid of flying. Because every time a plane crashes it's in the news. We won't forget. So when you have to decide whether to drive or fly you ask yourself gosh, is flying dangerous? Your brain says well I can think of a couple of cases when it went wrong. Yes, it's dangerous. Let's not fly. And this is pretty hard to get over even if you recently know that it's not dangerous. Lots of people still need bloody therapy to get over their fear of flying. So this isn't just a thing that influences how much you think something happens. But it goes a lot deeper. It's really a belief in your brain that flying is dangerous because it makes this mistake. It really makes you afraid. It's not a superficial little effect. But it's more of a belief. It goes really deep. Because it's the way your brain works. And your brain tends to rely on these heuristics, these biases and make these mistakes again and again and again. I mean we know this one. I mean I'll give you a couple of seconds to read it. We know that correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation. But there's another exquisite strip where he plots out the incidence of cancer and the use of cell funds. The conclusion inevitably will have to be that cancer causes cell funds. It's pretty interesting because that's what the numbers say. When I studied psychology they, in my first statistics class, they gave a really beautiful example of how people can misunderstand or can misunderstand statistics. It's not directly about causation. Did you know that there's a relationship, a correlation between cancer and handbags? Everybody was like what? Yeah, yeah. If you have a handbag, you're more likely to get cancer. This is true. You can look it up. This is a physical fact. Well, it's called a spurious correlation. It's caused by something else. Yeah, there happens to be a correlation between something else and handbags and that something else and cancer as being female. If you're a woman, you're more likely to get cancer than a man. You're also more likely to have a handbag. There comes a relationship between handbags and cancer. But we are bestowed by this. We automatically think that this comes with death and that has to be a cause of a relationship. No, there isn't. And the fact that you walk over a certain path and the tiger attacks you is not that path that makes it or the holy tree that made the tiger go away after death. That might have helped that you climbed in it. So we make a lot of mistakes. And this goes in many different directions. Another thing I really like, I'm going to give you a scenario. You're going to tell me what you do. Let's say you're going to buy a television. An expensive one, $5,000. So, well, you pick the TV and you're about to check out, pay for it. And somebody behind you in the line says, hey, dude, across the street they're selling the same TV for $4,995. Are you going to cross the street for that? How many of you would cross the street? Two. Yeah, I guess so. Alright. Different scenario. You suddenly are in need of a pen. So you walk into a store and they sell a pen, but it's crazy expensive. It's going to be $5. Somebody behind you in line says, hey, you crossed the street, sell the same pen for only one. Who's going to cross the street? Uh-huh. I know. Is there any kind of sense, actually speaking? No, it does not. Don't we know that? This is us. We're not logical. We're not rational. Heck no. There's a massive list of these things. Illusion of superiority. More than half of us think they're smarter than average. We all know that's not the case. They've done a study and they ask from people a bunch of trivial questions. Who's the current president of the United States and stuff like that? Who's the rights chancellor of Germany during World War II? Most people know that stuff. And then at the end, they say, look, after each question, if you were really, really, really sure that you're right, like 100%, no doubt about it, you would bet your house on it, then check this box. What percentage of those questions does that people get wrong? 20. Good luck. That would cost you a house, right? We are a little overconfident. And this is not only in the direction of confidence, by the way. It can also go the other way. If people do a difficult task and you ask them to estimate whether they do, compared to the average, they will actually go the other way around and they will think, gosh, this was so hard, it went worse than average. And you might probably know this other thing. If you studied for something and you learned something that was really complicated from then on, you will believe it's simple. Anyone can do it because I can. Again, we're not good at estimating stuff. So this is a list of biases from Wikipedia. As you see it long, there are some really fun ones. The well-traveled road effect. If you travel a certain route from home to work, the more often you've traveled the route, the shorter you'll think it is. There you go. Many more. One of the fun ones actually brings us back to an earlier image. Not this one though, the ones that are so weird. And it's the naive realism effect. I'm going to quote it completely. It is the belief that we see reality as it really is objectively and without bias. That effects are plain for all to see. That rational people will agree with us. And that those who don't agree with us are either uninformed, lazy, irrational or biased. Because of course, we aren't biased. Again, there are countless more. And the thing is, these have an effect on us, on our behavior on our society in general. And there's the Dunning-Kruger effect. Unskilled people overestimate their ability in something while skilled people underestimate their ability. This means that if you're in a room with experts and people who don't know shit about something the experts will think, gosh, I'm not entirely sure about this. I'll shut up. But the people who don't know what they're talking about don't have that problem. We must have had this experience at birthday parties, right? So a lot of these effects can be played. And they are being played. And there's the endowment effect. People require more pay to give something up than they would pay to acquire it. So you can give something to people and then offer them money or offer them something to give it back. But they don't want to do that. They will want to keep it more than that they would have paid for it in the first place. It's a nice trick, right? You can use if you want to sell stuff. There's also the decoy effect and supermarkets love this. A choice between A and B is going to be influenced by an entirely unrelated object C. For example if C is similar but not better than either A or B that's a funny thing, right? So if you have two bottles of wine in the store that you can buy and there's a $30 bottle and a $40 bottle and a lot of people will go for the $30 bottle so then you introduce a $60 bottle because then they're all going to buy the $40 bottle. This really works. That's why you always have an extra expensive item in the store. They don't sell it. They don't want to sell it. They just want you to buy a more expensive product that's just below it. It's called the decoy effect. And there's a lot of stuff like this and there's the mere exposure effect. The more you've seen something the more you'll like it. It's as simple as that. Again, there's a massive list. I have a whole bunch more of these and you know I'm going to save you guys from it. The thing is some of these, I mean look the wine bottle thing, okay they try to get you to buy more. It's not cool but hey we all don't believe any of this nonsense anyway so we all think we're rational. We're not influenced by the bottle so you don't have a problem. This one is a little more scary. So we think that our opinions influence our behavior. They do less than you think but they do. And we also think that our opinions are based on what we know about the world. Experiences we had, things we read, newspapers, etc. In reality, your opinion is much entirely predictable by simply asking for the opinion of your friends and family. Sorry to say it and in some cases it's not the family but it's really your social circle that defines your opinion about stuff. I'm talking about stuff like who should be the president of the next United States. If you would have had very different friends you would have liked the guy on the other side of the aisle and I know a lot of you would go like no way but really seriously as much as you would have crossed the street for the three bucks and not for the five. Believe me. So let me ask you a question. It's 2016. How do you get the opinion of your friends these days? How does it come to you? How do you know what your friend thinks about political stuff? Through them, right? They would change their algorithms a little bit because the timeline, who knows how they construct it, right? That's magic. It's not purely based on time, right? It's not based on anything simple. It's a complicated thing or they think you will find interesting so they can change it a little bit. Just a little bit. Just make stuff about a certain presidential candidate that's positive and more likely to be higher up, negative stuff a little down and do the other for the other candidate. They can change the elections. And no one will ever know and you will never be able to prove it unless you really catch the people who wrote the code and can see the code. Which you can't because you know the MCA and 50 other laws and rules and reasons, right? This is the scary stuff because you see, you might have heard of these experiments with subliminal messages. You know you're sitting in a movie theater and you know there's a lot of Coca-Cola's. You'll buy more Cola. Does it work? Yes, it does. It's true. This stuff works. The reason they're not using it that much is because it's not so strong. Yes, it influences you, but if you don't like a Cola, you really aren't going to buy Coca-Cola because of that. Your brain kind of classifies this information and it will immediately discard it if like information from a higher value comes in. You know what information of the highest value is? What your friends think. Any other information will be discarded because of what your friends think about something. And again, that's how you get that. I'm not even talking about the information axis that could rectify the whole problem because that's these days controlled by a search engine. Now in all of this that I've been talking about has been assuming that your brain, healthy, well educated and not drunk or stoned or anything else. If you go out in the desert for a couple of weeks too fast and think about beautiful things, you'll go hallucinate and come up with even more interesting conclusions. It's not difficult to hallucinate. You can just dance for a few hours or as I said, go into the desert and fast. And of course there are lots of interesting mushrooms as that person should know and do. So I hope I've convinced you that there is a bit of an issue here. We are not as rational as we think and that's bad. It can be abused but it is being abused. Now honestly I don't think Facebook is doing this stuff right now by the way. They're a very big company they have so much money that if you would want to buy them in the sense of making them do this by money you would have to come with a lot more money than even US presidential campaigns are wasting on advertising. So I'm not terribly worried that it's happening now but we are working really, really hard at building a surveillance state as you might have noticed. We're spending hundreds of millions on storing all our information and building an infrastructure both legal and technical to do this stuff on a scale that's insane. China is actually doing some really interesting stuff. They're trying to gamify politics and try to incentivize people via their friends. Fascinatingly they've been watching this talk except that I haven't given it before. They're trying to basically give people a score based on their behavior. Do they do sports, healthy stuff but also what political opinions they have often they talk about politics. In China the rule is don't so it's a simple one. And then this score can have effects on your life, right? I mean whether you can buy a house with a certain mortgage or not. But your score affects that of your friends. So they will put pressure on you to behave. That's very clever and I do think if we're not careful stuff like this is going to come here too. But back to us. So a lot of these biases they've been studied because of course people think, okay how can we deal with this? Can we compensate for these? I've got good news and bad news. For some of them, yes. We can compensate for them if you're aware of them and have the mental energy to deal with it. So especially things like preconceptions like racism and sexism you can't compensate for quite well. But you need to be aware of it in the moment. You need to have like the mental energy. So if you're tired you're going to be more racist and you're going to be more sexist. Because you don't have the mental capacity. It takes energy. And that means when you're angry when you're afraid or tired you will again be well, less nice than you should have been. But we can do something. There's training to be done. It's limited. Now the thing is you're all highly educated. I'm guessing. Most of you are pretty smart. You get paid for using your brains all day. So you think these biases for me, they're less bad than for other people, right? Well, it's actually the other way around. The thing is our brains are smarter. So they're better at stuff in general. And one of the things that many of these biases rely on is your brain lying to you, as I mentioned at the beginning. Well, when you're smarter your brain happens to be better at lying to you. Seriously. You will notice that people who believe in alien abduction still after everybody walking around with a cellphone that can make pretty good pictures those people are usually well educated. And they're not stupid. And that's the thing. Because if they were stupid they would have been convinced by the facts by now. It sounds silly but this is really the case. The higher educated, the smarter people are the better they are at finding cognitive strategies to make themselves believe stuff that is just nonsense. So you can't solve all of this. And we probably have it worse than a lot of other people actually. I can't really help you solve it. But I can help you with a couple of social skills that will at least make a couple of things a little better. Now I have to say Ex-Cassidy Rocks, I've taken for this part of the talk I've taken a bunch of his pictures. You should really look it up. If you have questions you can now ask them at any time or now before I'm going to go into this or during. But I'm going to try and talk a little bit about social interaction. So I'm not going to get too many much into the biases because the problem with them is you can't really do much about them. What you can do is try and be nice to other people. You'll be surprised how much that helps with a lot of these. So I'll talk about communication AFK as they call it. Now I'm going to talk about three points. I'm going to talk about opening and having conversations, giving and receiving feedback, and working with other people. So let's talk about having conversations. Now a lot of you are probably aware that in real life the communication is not abstracted from the hardware layer. So it matters what you look like, whether you dress and whether you have a nice hat or not. I like the one over there by the way. So the protocol is not abstracted away so you have to care about this stuff. The problem with communication itself, there's no proper RFC process. It's not standardized. It's totally under documented. There's a lot of redundant elements. Now usually when you have a conversation with people, it goes a little bit like this. Hi, how are you? Fine, thank you. Which by the way is redundant. It doesn't have to be true. You just say it. And then you go back and you say I'm fine, thank you. How are you? Now here it gets interesting. The local differences are massive. The conversation I just described which is utterly normal for the vast majority of you irritates Germans beyond belief. And this is true. They think it is dishonest to ask people how they are when you're not interested in it. Doesn't that make sense in a German way? It does, right? This is true. So my wife, she's from Brazil and she moved to Germany about five years ago. And the difference was amazing to her. The thing is when you get a new job in Germany, it's totally different from Brazil. In Brazil on the first day somebody would show you around the office and then you would shake hands with every new colleague and as soon as the guy or girl who shows you around is gone, they will probably come to your desk at one point or another, talk to you, have social chat, how many kids do you have, where do you live and how's the weather and everything else. In the evening you all go out to a pub somewhere, get drunk together, get to know each other a little better, and you'll probably have a bunch of new Facebook friends at the end of the evening. That's how it works in Brazil. In Germany, it's slightly different. You come in the office, somebody points you to where is what, they'll put you behind the desk, nobody will talk to you the rest of the day. Nor the next day, nor the rest of the week. And the first time you get a first Facebook friend is probably after half a year at minimum. Now the thing is, they're both being polite in their own way. So in Brazil, people think it's polite to come and introduce you and tell you that they're all there for you and they want to help you, etc. You're part of the family. In Germany, they think it's polite to let people figure out their own way, don't bother them too much, don't flop them with all the social nonsense, just let them find out their ways and then of course whenever they have questions they can come. They're both being polite, they're both being nice. How do you deal with this? Well first of all, be extra nice yourself. Because that never really goes wrong, although it does sometimes upset the Germans. I'm not joking about that. If I go in a supermarket here and I'm checking out and people say hi, how are you, I mean it's a live in Berlin, I'm Dutch but I live in Berlin and I love it. But it's still weird that people say hi, how are you and I'm, oh shit, I have to answer. Yeah, I'm fine thank you, how are you? This is still weird for me, but in Germany people just genuinely find this insulting. I'm not joking. It's none of your business. You are asking someone you don't know how they are. You force people to talk to a stranger about how they are. This is seriously considered a violation of privacy. You're laughing, but this is serious. People in Germany they don't like Americans. This is one of the reasons. They think it's all this stuff. Weird people. So don't assume bad intentions. People are usually being polite in their own way. My wife really thought they all hated her at work. She thought, oh my god, what have I done wrong? Nobody came and talked to me. I mean she's now been working at different companies and she's used to it now, but that really took some time and effort. This is not easy. She's not terribly communicative herself, so this was quite tough on her in the beginning. So it's different. I always tell Europeans be extra extra extra nice because then you'll still be a dick. I think in my experience, Americans are usually very friendly. You might still, I'm sure, have your own opinions about people from there or there or there, but believe me, compared to Europe you're doing just fine. But for you, I can definitely recommend a slightly thicker skin because you do get upset rather easily and try to be a little more direct, especially to the Northern Europeans, because they don't want to get subtle hints. They really won't. And also, you won't be able to insult them that easily and don't compliment too much. Really. It's like I had my job interview with my boss at SUZE for SUZE Community Manager about seven years ago. And in this first conversation he started to say, guys, for the beautiful resume and he went on and on. And at some point I said, okay, can I please interrupt? This is making me feel really uncomfortable. I mean, more than two compliments in one phone call? It doesn't work for me. I'm Dutch. I come from an island where they basically look at the world this way. If you're doing your job really well, that's a very minimum, so don't expect any compliments for that. If you go above and beyond it, we'll consider. So I had trouble with taking compliments. I still do, by the way. Starting with applause, I still find weird. It's a little too much. So these differences are bad. I'm not even talking about Asia, right? Japan, China. I mean, these gaps. I mean, we're talking here, US, Europe, right? I mean, well, first of all, let's be honest. A lot of you are European genetically speaking. But there's a massive gap there. So keep that in mind. Now this was starting up. And the key you need to understand is when you say hi, how are you? I'm fine. Thank you very much. This is essentially handshake protocol, and there's no data transfer. I mean, for you again, this is all familiar. But for Europeans, when I say it that way, everybody goes like, ah! Ah! Now I get it. This is just a handshake protocol. No data transfer. It's a key. But after the handshake protocol, that's where data transfer starts. Now, often, in a social setting, you start with small talk. This is not a programming language. It's the other one. Now, a good way of looking at small talk is that it is about decreasing your page rank. Now, I know a lot of you are probably not a big fan of SEO, but on a personal level, you need to do a little bit of that too. It's not about the content, but it's about your reputation. So keep the conversation light. It could be fun to talk about the kid who looked at a birthday party or something, but don't talk about family member who died. That's too heavy, really. And when you talk about the weather, just stay away from too many telemetry details. Just keep it generic. You know, like, it was good or bad. The amount of participation is not really terribly relevant. As in most people don't care. Now, I want to help you a little bit with some issues, and I'll give you a second to one, because I think it's rather common for people. Again, accessibility understands us, I think. It's good, right? What you need to understand is that this is very normal. Pretty much everybody has it. As a matter of fact, there is a bias here. It's called a spotlight effect. We think everybody else gives a shit about us. In reality, they don't. Now, some people have this more than others. I mean, I personally want to work past a group of people. Oh, my God. I really think that they're looking at me always. I hate that. I feel so, oh, shit, am I walking right? Some people have it a lot. Some people don't have it. But the fact that you always think that they're judging you, almost everybody has it. And in reality, believe me, people are way too busy with themselves. They don't judge you much. They don't have time for that. They're both thinking this. That's a thing. I mean, there's this fancy term that goes around the bits called the imposter syndrome. I don't think it's officially a syndrome, but I think it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of people have this kind of anxiety. And I think you should look at it a little bit different. It means, as long as you're uncertain, it means you're still open to learning. You want to get better. If you wouldn't, you'd be a psychopath. See, that's a good thing. And if you don't have it, maybe you should be worried. Now, there are multiple causes for this. As I said, it's a bias. It's something that's built into our brains. And again, it completely helps you with that one. But being aware of it helps. And one thing you need to realize is part of it is that we only see the outside and the finished work. If you see a programmer who wrote something and you see the code and you think, oh, my God, this is fucking brilliant. I can never do this. You don't know how much time I spend on it. You don't know how many other people they asked. How many times they were up late at night looking on the Internet trying to find out the right snippet of code to do something. You only see the finished work. But when you do it yourself, you're painfully aware of all the steps that are needed to get there. That's why you tend to underestimate yourself in this regard. I compare to other people. It's the same in having a conversation. I mean, you think it goes easy for other people? Well, ask them if you look as uncomfortable as you feel. You probably don't. Which means they might feel just as uncomfortable as you do, you're just thinking that they don't just like what they're thinking about you. This is something a lot more of us have in common than you think. So, when you have this thing called a networking session, I know a lot of geeks really go like, oh, oh, no, no. A networking session. No, thanks. That's horrible. I mean, you're basically there to be judged, right? Well, if you look at it that way, you'll definitely never have a fun time. You'll never understand why there are people who for some crazy reason actually don't mind being at a networking session. But the key here is that you need to find something that genuinely interests you about the other person you're talking about. And this is a very plain and simple tip. If you're in a networking session, you don't find the other person interesting. Walk away. Seriously, try to find someone you find genuinely interesting and ask after the stuff that, you know, they do, that you do find interesting and you'll be just fine. Because at that point you're listening and, you know, you're asking the right questions and you don't need to think about all this stuff. Because you have found something you find genuinely interesting. If you start to worry like this, clearly, the other person is interesting enough, you should move on. And this is a very simple key. I mean, I know in reality, of course, it's a lot harder to actually do, but try to keep that in mind. If you have one of these things where you need to be social to people, especially, of course, if it's at a kind of birthday party setting where you can't ask them, you know, whether they've recently upgraded their kernel, that makes life a lot harder, right? Because then you don't have anything to talk about. But, you know, there are other things in life you can talk about. I personally, for example, I find it interesting to figure out what people do. And not in the sense of, oh, you're a neurosurgeon, uh-huh. But in the sense of like, okay, well, you're a neurosurgeon, but what do you do? I mean, you're not cutting in people's brains all the time, right? I mean, what do these people really do? I mean, okay, spend a lot of time behind the desk doing paperwork, I guess. I mean, do you have a conversation with a patient, and then you try to figure out, you know, what happened to them, and then you try to find out based on their behavior, what's wrong with their brain? I mean, how does it work? I mean, this is fascinating stuff. And believe me, almost everybody, when you really dig into what they do, it's quite interesting. A lot of them will be like, I work. But if you really start to dig, most people are interesting. They don't think they are, so they won't talk about it too much, although there are people think they're way too interesting. That's a whole different story. But when you dig a bit, most people are interesting, especially the ones who don't really want to talk about themselves, in my experience, who do actually interesting stuff that just don't really get it. I mean, they think it's interesting, but they don't think anybody else would notice that it's interesting. But again, this is how we work, a lot of us at least. So this is starting a conversation, even in the most horrible situation where you call the networking session. I want to talk a little bit about this thing of getting feedback. I mean, this is another thing that you will encounter at work and that most people hate. You don't have to be a geek to hate having to give feedback to colleagues or having to get it. So on the other hand, feedback is core to learning. You can't really learn if you don't get feedback on your performance. So you need it. You need it. Other people need it. So it is useful to be able to give feedback in the right way. I mean, we've all heard that they don't construct their feedback. I'll try to make it a little more concrete. Because there are three elements to basically giving feedback in a way that people can actually use it. This is the key. It's about giving feedback that's useful. Now, first of all, it needs to be timely. Second of all, there's a question of where you do it. And there's a question of what things to give feedback on. So the first one is about time and place. And this one is actually simple. Do it quick. Do it private. Because if you wait too long, the thing is you might have noticed that somebody did something really stupid. But they probably wouldn't have done it if they thought it was stupid. So they will have forgotten it a lot sooner than you did. So if you come complain about it a week later, they barely remember. And they most certainly won't be happy with getting feedback on something they barely remember. Because it makes it pretty hard to do something with it. So if you see something do something that you think they shouldn't and they should be aware of, first of all, realize you would do them a courtesy to tell them that. If you do it properly, they won't be angry at you. Really, most people take it quite well if you do it in the right way. It's really important to do it in time. If you wait to the next day, that's usually already way too late. Wait to the next break. Catch them at the toilet or something. Private place, not other people around. That's really important. The second key is the markup of it. So how do you do it? Now, we all know that if you start by, that was stupid, you won't earn a lot of cookies. Now, the key is to really describe what the other person did. Without using any judging words, you don't have to say, you know, you did something stupid. You just describe what they did. And then you shouldn't try to describe and judge that, nor try to tell them what they should have done. The only thing you should do is tell them what effect it had on you. So make it personal. Now, obviously, when we're talking about code, that's a bit tough. I do get that. When we're talking about personal stuff, it's a lot easier, right? If someone was very loud in a meeting, you just say it made me feel very uncomfortable or try to be as concrete as possible. If you scared the shit out of me, it could work. But try to make it about you. Because the fact is that it's then about you and how you took it. And from their perspective, doing something about it is doing you a favor. And people are often a lot more willing to do you a favor than to fix something that you were whining about, right? So it's a much more friendly way. Now, when it's about code, again, don't say your pet sucks. Try to be concrete. If you do X, then Y happens, and Z breaks. That's the kind of stuff people can deal with. And also, don't try to immediately give them a solution. Let them just first soak it in. Don't start with a solution. Always be specific. That's the key. And never say always or never. Why? The reason is it needs to be reasonable and real, otherwise people can't really deal with it. Now, the third important thing in feedback is that you have to seek balance. Don't overdo it. So effectively, you need to allow error codes. Introduce the fact that you're going to give feedback. And then the trick is to sandwich it. So sandwiching means that you give a positive thing. I mean, you must have heard this perhaps at one meeting or another. You give a positive thing. You give the negative thing. And you answer the positive thing. I mean, it's a bit, it makes it feel a bit, you know, artificial perhaps. But it really does work. As long as you're concrete and all three. So complement needs to be as concrete as a piece of criticism. If you say, guys, you're awesome. Yes, it's nice to hear. But if the other person can't really tell you why, it doesn't mean half as much as when they can. You know what I mean? Same with applause, by the way. It's way too generic. So, and then you need to give people time for feedback. As I said, you know, you need to let it soak. If they need to complain, if they need to say, well, I see it different, just let them vent. I mean, this is, you need to give people time to process it. And, you know, also don't expect too much, by the way. I mean, you should not give feedback on things that they can't fix. I mean, if you give feedback and say, look, you know, you drove too hard that something people can fix, right? Or you drove so hard that it scared the shit out of me, right, in the proper way. First of all, you had a beautiful car, and then you drove too hard because it scared the shit out of me. But I really like your eyes. Might be a little too specific, but you catch my drift. This is okay. But not if you never drive with them again. Because, I mean, they can't fix it, at least not for you, maybe for someone else. So try not to give feedback on things that they won't do again. One-time things. It just frustrates people. You basically say, hey, you failed. And, by the way, there's nothing you can do about it. That's not nice. Try to be nice, as I said earlier. That's much better than that. More karma. The other thing is you have to realize, this is a pretty interesting thing that you see in a lot of self-help books. You know, how long it takes to break a habit. Does anyone know the magic number? I've heard four weeks, but hey. A month, approximately. But this is self-help book knowledge, not psychology knowledge. You know, I don't think anybody really did the test. In my personal experience, it's roughly right. But if you think about this, that means you can change about 12 things that you don't like about yourself at best per year. I don't know about you, but I can make a list that's quite a bit longer than 12 things that I'd like to change about myself. And the fact that you try to change three or four of them at a time probably explains why you don't change any of them. So if you're giving feedback, and you expect someone else to immediately stop talking so loud in the meeting the next day, and from then on forever, well, you might be expecting a little too much. So don't give them feedback on 12 things that are wrong in the last hour. Don't expect them to change right away, and be gentle in their mind. Give them time, and tell them that you give them time. You know, I get you want to immediately stop talking loud because you always do it, and I get it. It takes time to change that, try to help people and give them room for it, and also for yourself. Don't be angry at yourself if you still haven't done X, Y, Z. Because these things take time. I mean, really, these ingrained behaviors can take a long time to fix. I mean, 90 days might just be right, although I really hope you can do multiple at the same time, because my God, that's for a year. How am I on time, by the way? We're almost there, right? I have a few more things on negotiation. I'm going to talk about Orange for a couple of minutes. Now, yeah. All right, you can read this later. I'm going to tell you all a story. It's about negotiation, and I'm going to do that as last slide. I will skip the other parts on it. So when I started it again, we got this really cool story in negotiation theory. So if you're trying to fix a problem that you have with someone else, trying to find the common ground, you need to keep this story in mind. So there's Alice, Eve, and an Orange. I'm talking about the fruit, not the color. Sorry for that one. So Alice and Eve, they both wanted an Orange. Now, how are we going to deal with this? Well, they can find it out. One of them will have the Orange, and a little bit of blood, and the other one will have a lot more blood, you know, crying in the corner, and no Orange. That's one negotiation tactic. A lot of people love it. It's not particularly effective, but yeah, it works. Now, the other way is to compromise. So you cut the Orange in half. Both have half an Orange. In many cases, it means both are unhappy, but at least, you know, you're compromised and you avoided all the blood. Now, the goal of negotiation that you need to keep in mind is to find a really better solution. And believe me, that often exists. You know, if Alice and Eve would have talked to each other, and just have tried to figure out why the heck they both want an Orange, they would have discovered that one of them wants to have a glass of Orange juice, and the other one wants to make an Orange pie. If you're a little bit at home in the kitchen, you will know that for an Orange pie, you need to peel. For Orange juice, you just need the inside. So they would have talked to each other. They could have both had everything they wanted. So the next time you need to negotiate something with someone, try not to think about the blood and the cutting stuff in half. The Bible has another one, more beautiful story, right, on the cutting in half. This is not the optimal way, and this is not the optimal outcome. Most negotiations have an outcome that might not always get to 100% for both parties, but definitely more than 50%. And there are even situations where you can get more than 100% for both the people if you just figure out what you want. Again, the key here is to just be nice and be aware of the fact that you're all idiots. I'll keep it at that. Thank you very much. Any questions? Thank you very much. Yeah. Maybe no. Well, that's enough. Hello. Good. Yes. Check. Check one, two. Does the room automatically record itself? You're going to do awesome. None of these matter other than making sure to repeat the questions. And then afterwards, I will come up and get a copy of your slides on this USB stick I've got in my pocket. We just spent five minutes figuring that out. Easily transition it into a kind of around-table discussion thing, and either make sure to repeat the questions or I'll run around with the mic so people raise their hands. However, you'd rather do that. I'm surprised there are so many people because there's like a Kubernetes talk going on. Okay, welcome everybody. We've got about two minutes until we kick off the last track of the mentoring session of the day. The mentoring track will continue tomorrow in the same room. After this, at 7 p.m., there will be the AWS boss here in this room. So if you stay here, that's what you'll be hearing about. And now I would like to introduce Jeremy Kitchen. Here's a tell us about imposter syndrome. Hi, folks. I'm Jeremy Kitchen. I'm on the engineering team at Stripe. My first experience with Stripe was as a customer of a U.K. hosting provider who was using Stripe Checkout for their U.S. credit card processing. I was on the website paying my bill. The Stripe Checkout form pops up. And if you've never seen it before, it has really well polished. It has very nice transitions between screens. There's auto-advancing on form fields, all sorts of fun, happy things. This was my first experience with it. So I was like, wow, this is really cool. By the time I was done paying, I was like, wow, this is a fun thing to do. A couple months later, I was paying my bill again, and it had forgotten about me, so I had to punch in my information again. But the first thing I asked you for is your email address. So I typed in my email address, and as I finished typing it out, it switches the form. It says, hey, check your phone. We just sent you a text message. My phone dings. I got a text message. It gave me this code to type in. I type in the code, and suddenly it's like, okay, here we've got all your information again. Just click and pay, and again. So I didn't have to retype all of my information. And that was kind of mind-blowing. I was like, that was a really great experience. And that's when I knew that I wanted to work for Stripe. Because the attention to detail, the thought that went into that user experience, I have to know who wrote that. I have to learn from them. So fast forward a little bit later, and I'm looking for a job. And Stripe has always kind of been in the back of my mind, and I'm like, okay, Stripe's over there. I'll throw out some resumes, talk to some people. Finally, I work up the courage to just say, you know what, hey, I'm going to give them my resume. I guess that can happen, right? Just say no. So I give them the resume, and suddenly I'm getting called in for an interview, and then I'm getting an offer, and then the next thing you know, I'm working there. And this is the... I haven't been so excited about something for a long time to start working for Stripe. I was really, really happy. So I get there on my first day, I'm getting her to do the process, and getting your laptop, getting your HR, filling out your forms and all that sort of thing. On my second day, I had a little bit of free time between all the spin-up sessions to talk with my mentor to kind of figure out like first projects, what I was going to be working on for the first couple of days, first couple of weeks. By the end of the week, I had a lot of free time and not a whole lot of guidance. Meanwhile, everything around me is still going on, and there are lots of emails happening. Stripe has a very active Slack channel, or a very active list of Slack channels, so there's lots of communication going on. And people are talking in a language that is very different from anything I've heard, not only because Stripe has kind of their own internal... some of their own internal words, but there's a lot of academic people who work at Stripe, like a lot of MIT grads and stuff, so they're talking very academic things. And I don't come from an academic background, so I kind of felt a little overwhelmed by it all. And I wasn't feeling super confident. In the past, my job has basically been keep everything running. From an ops background, that's what I do. And so there's always been this pressure to know a little bit about everything so that you can fix it. So when it breaks, you get it back up and running quickly. But what that really means is you actually have to know everything about everything, because you need to not only be able to fix it, but you need to be able to do it at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're tired and the site's down and customers are going crazy and support's going crazy, and people want everything to get back up. So there's this internal pressure of like, okay, well I need to really get up and running quickly because I need to learn all this stuff. Stripe is the biggest company I've ever worked for, and there's just too much to try to take on. And that's not a failure of Stripe, it's simply just a fact that there's just more than one person can take on and definitely not on their first day or their first week. But since I've got all this pressure from my history, I start having a lot of anxiety. I really feel like I'm not picking up things as quickly as I should. I've done a couple of things, and one of them broke, and they had to get reverted, and so I'm like, okay, that's a huge failure, but the person who reverted it was just like, okay, it was kind of annoying, but to me it was like this giant, massive failure. Right, because what if it was something big? And especially because it was my first week, like I want to prove myself. I want to be able to show that I know what I'm doing. And so there's a lot more things that I'm finding out during this first week, first couple of weeks that I don't know because there's just still so much more that I can possibly know. Also in the past I've been on an on-call rotation. So when you're on call, you're the person who's getting woken up at 3 in the morning. But also, I've generally been on a small team and coming in and getting on call is kind of relieving somebody else from having to, not necessarily a single person, but relieving the rest of the team. It takes a little pressure off because there's one more person in the rotation. So I've always felt like I needed to get up and running quickly so that I can get on call quickly so I can get in there and start contributing to the team. But since I'm having all these struggles with trying to get up and running, my brain starts thinking, you know, maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Maybe I can't do this. Maybe I'm not good enough. And that, right there, is imposter syndrome. When you feel like you don't belong somewhere or that you're not good enough or that you aren't there because you deserve it because you worked hard but because you got lucky or you deceived somebody, somehow you managed to sneak through the interview process and nobody noticed that, like, hey, he doesn't really know what he's doing, write a for loop or whatever. You can do fizzbuzz. And that feeling can really take a huge toll on a person because it snaps away your confidence. Everything about modern software development is automated testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment. And what that does is it instills confidence in your work. You can very, and with that confidence, you can then rapidly iterate on processes. You know that the work you're doing is doing what you want it to do and you know that it's not breaking something else. But when you don't have that confidence, you have to second-guess everything you're doing because it's like, okay, well, is this going to break something for somebody? Or who's doing this? Who's thinking about this? And without that confidence, or when the imposter syndrome is taking that confidence away from you, then you have a lot of trouble getting any work done. It also instills every decision you make with fear and doubt. Is this the right approach? Am I doing this properly? If I screw this up, is it going to shine light? Because remember, you're still feeling like you're just kind of hiding and hopefully nobody finds you. So it's even more risky to do something because then it will just kind of point out very directly. I don't belong here. It also makes it really hard to take new risks. You have to see something all the way through to the end as a success before you're willing to take it on. So you end up just hopping from one possible solution to another without really trying to do anything without trying to take any steps toward it because there's this doubt that it's not the right approach. So you have to know quickly whether it's going to work or not. And so all of this reinforces the notion that you don't belong, that you're not good enough. Because people who are good enough wouldn't struggle with this. They would just have gotten it done. So it can also make it really difficult to recognize your own accomplishments. And anything you can recognize as an accomplishment will simply get chalked up as luck or someone else did most of the work or it wasn't even really that hard. So if you can't accomplish anything, then all that's left is failure. And since anything you perceive as a failure serves to reinforce the idea that you're an imposter, it just kind of starts feeding on itself. And eventually, everything kind of comes to halt and you can't really do anything. Now, how many of you have felt this way in the past? Take a look around the room and look at all the hands that are in the air. So what can we do about this? The hardest part about imposter syndrome is there's no magic wand that you can wave to make it all go away. There's no Buzzfeed article with the one trick they don't want you to know, right? Because it's rooted in this natural risk aversion that serves as a great survival trait, the whole look-before-you-leap thing. But imposter syndrome will take that and turn it up to 11. And there's a huge difference between being careful and being completely paralyzed by fear and especially fear that is self-reinforcing. That's when it becomes a problem and that's when it becomes imposter syndrome. So if you're feeling imposter syndrome, what can you do about it? If you're experiencing it, the first thing to do is recognize it. And this was actually touched on a little bit during the last talk. And, yeah, this was touched on during the last talk. So the first thing is to recognize it because if you call it out, if you notice it, you can give it a name if you need to. That helps you start noticing it more and you can start recognizing it. You can start dealing with it. From there, I think one of the best things about it is talking to your manager or coworker or friend, someone who will listen to you who can validate your feelings and your thoughts. Of course, that's way easier said than done. Because if you're experiencing imposter syndrome, the last thing you want to do is go to your manager and be like, hey, I'm having struggles. Is this imposter syndrome? Your manager's like, no, you actually kind of suck. Sorry. And so that's the worst possible scenario and that's all you see, so you can't ask. And this also feeds on itself because the more you push off asking for help, you start seeing that, like, oh, yeah, last week I was feeling this way, I wanted to get some help and I forgot, or I didn't, and so that's a failure. And so the next time it happens, it's another failure and it starts adding to these piles of failures. So as part of working on this talk, I thought about how can we make this step easier? Because really, talking to someone is really helpful. And one of the things I thought of was instead of saying, hey, I need some help, maybe say, hey, I can help. Try to offer assistance to others who might be experiencing imposter syndrome. Just kind of as a, you know, hey, I'm here as a resource. Because if, um, I guarantee someone will come up to you and say, hey, you know, I've been having these problems. And what that does is it can help, it can give you someone that you can now talk to about your own imposter syndrome, about your struggles. But it also, even if you don't necessarily want to immediately talk to them about your struggles, just hearing their story can help validate your own feelings, which can in itself help a lot and lower some of the anxiety around it. Because then now it's like, okay, well, there's somebody else doing this, right? And if there are a bunch of people in the community or in their, like on the team of people at work or something like that who all offer themselves up as, as available to help, then you kind of blend into the crowd. You don't stand out as the person who's like, hey, I'm willing to help with imposter syndrome and everybody's like, what, do you have it or something? So it can make it, it can make it easier to, to start talking about it. And when more people start talking about imposter syndrome, then it just becomes normal to talk about it. And what that does is then it lowers the vulnerability required to speak up, to ask for help, to have that conversation with someone. And hopefully, or my hope is that if enough people, if the barrier to entry gets so low that people can start talking about it early, that they can get the help they need before it becomes a serious problem. So when I give this talk back, it's straight back in December, this was pretty much the end of the talk. Obviously I needed to grow it a little bit more. But what happened after that is the microphone went around the room and like not completely unexpected, just kind of like someone had a question, I threw out the mic and then it just kind of went around. Everybody shared their experiences, strategies they've had, stories they've heard. Obviously that was a much smaller audience and we also had a much more, a much stronger shared bond in that we'd all gone through the same experience of starting at Stripe and then continuing to work there. So having that happen here is not, I don't know how that would work. So I'm not going to try to like do anything like that. But I do encourage you to, to like after this or when you go back to work or in your communities, try to have these discussions. So in that spirit, I'd like to share with you some of the things that I've been doing with the hope that doing so will help you with your own struggles. I don't expect what I say to be applicable to everybody in the room and that's why I encourage you to do your own research and have your own discussions. Since I was struggling with imposter syndrome primarily at work, I thought the first, or the person who could help me the most would be my manager. Of course, getting the courage to ask my manager was very difficult, but once I did, it actually became just really like not a big deal and now we talk about it on a regular basis. And one of the things I would do is bring up during our weekly one-on-ones kind of like a level, like what's my imposter syndrome level this week? And I think the first time I did that it was at a 12. And what that does is it gives us something to talk about. Like why is it at a 12? Because there was a bad interaction with a co-worker? Or is there a problem that I'm struggling with that I can't... that I can't seem to get past and I'm kind of afraid to ask for help? Or is there something else going on? But when it's not a 12, when it's like a three or a four, we still talk about it because we want to know what's working. Either is there... the work that I'm doing is more... is easier or more fulfilling or I'm collaborating more with people so that we can try to figure out what works best for me both to deal with the imposter syndrome and also how to just get more productivity out of me. It does really help that I have a manager that I can trust that I can talk about or talk to about things. And I realize that not everybody has that. Unfortunately, I don't know exactly the best approach to talk to your manager or to bring the subject up with your manager, but I bet that there's people in this room who would be willing to help you if you had questions or if you had some concerns and I'm one of them. I'm willing to try, but I don't have the right answer. Also, I've done a lot of research just to give this talk and it's kind of interesting that just doing that research, there were solutions that worked for me and some that didn't. Not solutions, I don't want to say that, but ideas and strategies that worked for me and some that didn't. So just doing the research for this talk was really powerful. Also, since I've been talking to a lot of people about the talk, both here at work when I announced that I was doing the talk at work, I immediately got tons of people who were saying, like, oh, well, that's a really great idea. I'm very interested in your talk and then they started, we just broke the ice, we just had this conversation. And in fact, the whole idea for this conversation came out or for this talk came out of a conversation with a coworker over Burritos in San Francisco during my last week onboarding a Stripe. We were talking about ways that Stripe could make this easier for new people because it's actually a very prevalent problem at Stripe and experts have come in and said, like, wow, you guys have it really bad. And so we were like, well, how can we make that better? And one of the things she said was, well, why don't we just do a training session for new Stripes and we'll talk about, like, hey, this is what imposter syndrome looks like and this is how it might affect you and we're here to help and let's kind of, you know, we'll try to tackle the problem early. And so at the same time, I was getting nagged on Twitter about, hey, submit a talk for scale and I was like, okay, well, what do I want to talk about at scale? Because I've always wanted to talk at scale but I never quite had an idea and it took me a little while and I realized that, wait a minute, I could talk about imposter syndrome at scale. And then I immediately shot it down because I'm like, you know, I'm not qualified to talk about imposter syndrome. I don't have the answers. How can I get up in front of you and talk about imposter syndrome? I'm not good enough to give that talk. And then I had a title and I was like, okay, now I have to do it. Because why not, right? Another thing I've been doing is there's a book from Ming Tan from Google called Search Inside Yourself. It's about mindful meditation and also talks a lot about living mindfully, which I kind of interpret as equal parts, acting with absolute intent and being fully aware of your emotions. And it's really, really hard to do, both like the sitting thing and also just kind of like, as you're out in the world, as you're living your life, just being aware of the things, feeling and how your mood is. One of the effects this has had, though, is I do tend to notice my emotions a lot more. And if I'm having a negative emotion, I try to stop to analyze, like where is this coming from? Why am I having this? And imposter syndrome is generally manifests for me as like anxiety. So I'll be like, okay, what is this? Is this imposter syndrome? Or is this like something, like I'm about to like push a button on my servers, or maybe it'll work just fine, who knows? So where this has really come in handy is after I started talking about doing this talk amongst my coworkers, I immediately started receiving feedback. One of those things was a link from a coworker about a talk by Allison Capture called Effective Learning for Programmers. In this talk, she brings up research by Carol Dweck about fixed and growth mindsets. She even mentions imposter syndrome as like very related to this. So the idea with fixed and growth mindsets is with a fixed mindset, it's very like you're smart and therefore you're able to do things. Whereas with a growth mindset, you've worked very hard so you're able to do things. And the main difference is with a fixed mindset, you can't get better. But with a growth mindset, it's just a matter of just working harder, or not necessarily harder, but working at it, just continue, perseverance. And that really, really registered with me. I thought, wow, this is really fascinating. Unfortunately, I didn't finish watching the talk because I was, I started, as I was watching it, I was like, okay, well my talk is basically, or what I want to say is basically this now, and I don't want to just get up here and go like, go watch this talk, go read this book, because, you know, but I also didn't want to just repeat her whole talk. So I kind of put it off to the side for a little bit and see if there's maybe something else, because maybe there's, you know, that's just one of the things and it just happened to be the first one I ran across and there might be some other things. So fast forward about a month, I'm having a particularly rough day in the self-confidence realm, and I remembered that mindset thing. And I think it was something like, I thought the word, like, I'm not good enough or I'm not smart enough, and that took me back to that talk and then I was like, wait, there was a book. And so immediately, immediately I went and bought the book and started reading it, and it has been really, really amazing almost to the point where I thought about trusting this talk, because I'm like, I'm not talking about imposter syndrome, I'm talking about mindset, but I don't know if that's completely true or whatever, and it's still relevant because because it's the, it's still relevant because the journey is still there, you know, like I can say, read this book, but if you don't know the whole story behind it, maybe you can't relate to it as much or it might be harder to... Yes. I'm gonna skip that. So there are passages in the book which are nearly word for word thoughts that I've had, so it really resonated with me and that's where I'm currently at with my progress. I have a lot of time at work to put these... put the techniques and the thoughts or the things from the book to good use at work because I've been traveling for two weeks and there's like a whole Christmas break thing before that, so there's about a week, but I have been putting some of it to good use here, and I've gotten a lot more out of my interactions with people here since reading that book, and so I highly recommend that book. The BLDR version of that is still go watch this video, go read this book, but I feel like without the other stuff you wouldn't necessarily have the context to understand why it registered or why it had so much impact. Yes. It's called Mindset, the New Psychology of Success. Yeah. I was thinking about having a slide with a bunch of stuff, but I'll post it later just because I wasn't sure how to... like, do I just have the whole thing and without knowing about the other parts of my journey, you may not have the context to know why it registered so much with me. Because I really do feel like I heard that message a month prior to actually receiving, like internalizing it. So as always, your miles may vary and the important thing is to recognize imposter syndrome to call it out because you can't fix a problem you don't know you have. And if you're struggling with it, ask for help. If you notice someone else struggling with it, offer to help them, try to reach out to them, do what you can to help them. As a community, we can help by making this normal to talk about. By reducing the vulnerability required to ask for help to discuss this, we can... people will hopefully start asking for help sooner and when they ask for help sooner they'll be able to get the help they need much more easily than when they have a lot more impact. Do you have any questions or if you want to share some of your own experiences or strategies, just kind of opening it up for this. Okay. I will bring a mic around people who want to talk. Whatever you want to do. I'll sit on that. I'm a fellow imposter syndrome poster child. I went through most of high school being very, very into computers and then I decided that I just really wasn't good enough to be a software engineer because I wasn't that good at math. And so I went to school and got a double major in philosophy in the history of math and science, which really good degree. I've really enjoyed and I've learned a lot and I've grown a lot, but you know, looking back I'm like, wow, I lost an opportunity to do really good comps I education, which is a little sad, but but the number one thing that happened was I got out into the world and I realized that I was never going to stop loving and wanting to work in computers. So I started working in computers and the more I worked with people, the more I realized that I was better than I thought but I was definitely not really good. Like they're those really good people and I had an epiphany moment and I think my epiphany moment and the way I reached my epiphany moment is what might help some people. It was the first time I wanted to make a modification to someone's code who I really idolized and that was anyone here familiar with Moxie Marlin Spike? He writes really good code and he wrote a piece of software called Knock Knock which is a port knocking implementation that's really, really good and this last year I decided that the thing it really needed was system d support because it doesn't have it so I decided to go and write system d support and the first thing I did was I popped over the source code and there are no comments. There's nothing. I was absolutely adrift and I'm like, oh well it's just because he's really, really smart and he really knows what he does and everyone will occasionally just throw something out there and it might not be their best work, it's still good. I mean Knock Knock's a really good piece of software but it was the moment when I realized that, you know, I can write a piece of software and modify a piece of software like this guy who's just amazing so I encourage you, find one of the lesser projects of someone you absolutely idolize, you know, maybe not their Magnum Opus, you know, maybe if I looked at maybe if I looked at Signal right now I would feel a little bit worse but find something and look at it and you try and modify it and see if you can't do better than them because you probably can so that's my story. Thanks. While I'm walking the mic over I'd just like to echo that one of the things that I've found the most helpful has been I noticed that my own imposter syndrome comes out as comparing myself to others going wow, such and so is just better at this than I'll ever be and then when you talk to them enough about it you sometimes realize they've got it too they're comparing themselves to somebody else and then you go wait maybe this doesn't make sense anyways, who am I handing the mic to? You. Hi, is there anything that you changed at work like what you worked on? Did you have anything like can I help boost your ego other than just talking to co-workers and your boss but actually did you change anything that you worked on? That's a really good question so the question is did I change anything I worked on to try to get like an ego boost or something like that? I think I'd flail around to try to find some projects that I could get easy wins on or maybe not easy wins but I could just start making some progress on and I think there's there was just a lot of resistance to that internally or in my own self about that so I didn't have a whole lot of success with that after reading the mindset book I think I would actually try to find something that was a lot more challenging and try to tackle that because then it's a really big win but I just haven't had the opportunity yet because it's been kind of a crazy month just because I've been traveling and working stuff like that. Hey. So I started working with Jeremy like a year ago at a different company and I want to say that like the first three four weeks there I had like massive imposter syndrome compared to him but one of the things that helped me the most was there were so many things that I felt like I should know that like I had just been hired at this job and there are these things that like oh I'm just supposed to know that. I don't want to ask the question of something I don't know because then I'm going to look dumb and simply just getting like forcing myself to just whether or not whether or not I look dumb I'm going to ask the question anyways nobody ever cared but that was such like an improvement to my ability to work and then you know get over these feelings. That was my share. And one thing that you can do to help the people around you who might suffer from imposter syndrome is give them positive feedback when they do something you think is awesome. It can be really easy to just not say anything but then they can imagine that maybe you're like criticizing it and just too polite so give people that feedback. So I think this might be more of a comment than a question but I do some studying in the more mental aspect of things and hearing about this and from kind of researching imposter syndrome it kind of reminds me of BPD in the sense of like borderline personality disorder so this is the question then so my question is when researching did that kind of come up like in a search sort of you know BPD or imposter syndrome? You're on a mic though so I don't know. The question is during my research did BPD ever come up about this and the answer is no. I'll take a look at that though and see if there's anything that kind of resonates with me about that. Now borderline personality disorder. Well just from what people were saying how it was you kind of feel like everyone else is doing better than you even when you're doing something really good or you feel like oh I'm worthless I shouldn't deserve this job with BPD people do still feel that on a level like that. Thank you that sounds really interesting I'm definitely going to take a look at that. I'll go ahead and give a try at sharing a little bit about imposter syndrome too so about three years ago I got out of the Navy what I did was I built bombs and I decided I didn't want to blow people up anymore so I need to get a real job so trying to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life and it has to come with a career switch right so my skill set is really really different now than it was then so I get hired by a major corporation in management because managing people is kind of the same whether you're building bombs or putting food in cans as it turns out and I remember my first week being just terrified because I was like they're going to know I don't know about this industry they're going to know, they're going to know and then slowly I realized well actually I think I kind of know a little bit more than I realized this is working out and once you start getting those little victories, those little pieces that start coming together and it's hard to recognize them because you're like overcome with fear the whole time and it's really important to stop and catch those and I remember like my specific imposter syndrome moment with technology was the first time one of my bosses found out that I had this huge interest in like software development so he's like I got a project for you, you're going to be the product manager for our business application and suddenly I'm sitting in the room with people that I want to be doing their jobs I want to be part of their team like this is the stepping stone for me right now and I'm terrified because they're going to know, they're going to know that I want to be where they're at but I don't have their skill set, they're going to know I'm going to say something wrong and look like an idiot kind of like I'm the IRC the first time you get on IRC and you ask a dumb question and everyone's been in that one so there's hope out there for you even if you feel that way after two months of that project that same place they offered me a job immediately they said we want you to come work for us as a project manager just based on what was going on there so I just wanted to share that with the group and say there is actually even though you're terrified the whole time there is light at the end of the tunnel and it's not a train they're probably also just as terrified by the way oh god so I guess I'll do sharing first and then a strategy that I actually learned from my company so at my last company student fresh out of college like nothing was expected of me, no problem and I got lucky and ended up reducing incident time by 80% for 20% of incidents which is like hardcore metric like yes this is awesome, measurable success, woo and then leverage that to get hired at a video game company, lifelong dream awesome, sweet and going through the interview process like there is no way I'm going to get this oh god I'm working here and kind of the whole basically at that point you've already had one job you're no longer a student fresh out of college first job you got your two years of experience and then you're sitting across from an engineer who's been doing this about the same time and they contribute to five open source projects and basically define part of the engine it's like oh shit so for me personally one thing that helped was kind of and this might sound terrible it just worked for me may not work for everyone else I'm now considering myself a software engineer training right I'm not part of the official engineering organization technically data analyst even though I write software like this is where I'm at and I am going towards that growth and yes I'm not as good as that guy but that's okay they've had different experiences than I have and I'll be damned if I'm not going to get there and then strategies that we were taught by funny the head of project management at the company was like I'm dealing with software syndrome this is how I deal with it she mentioned tracking what you've done and what you've accomplished and sharing that with your manager and be like is this good and the manager would be like um yes and doing that for myself that she had taught me is like yes super so just a couple strategies so thank you hi so I guess I'm truly an imposter in here because I'm an English teacher and not in the tech field of any sort but I want to let you know that even as an English teacher and this is my first year teaching I am going through the same struggles the same type of imposter symptoms and syndrome and feeling like an outsider within my own department and there was a couple of things and I guess I'll sort of do it now but Amy Cuddy who did this wonderful TED talk about how body language shapes and I can even feel it right now because a minute ago I was sort of recluse up and closed off and feeling very nervous but now as I stand and as I stand with a better posture I get more confident and I feel more confident and you said earlier exactly the Peter Pan victory so um all of that and so earlier you were talking about being aware of your emotions well it's the same with your body language being aware of your body language and how you portray yourself to the world because how you portray yourself is also how people react to you so if I were to sit here and stand with myself closed off it's unlikely that anybody would want to approach and even talk to me and talk to me about their troubles so if I were to of course you know become more aware of my body and as you can see my voice isn't as shaky as I stand and as I talk to you and you're standing up there with your victory Peter Pan pose and many times in front of my class it's something that I would really encourage you and encourage this audience to look into would be Amy Cuddy's How Body Language Shades Us which is a wonderful TED talk and you can find it on you know TED.com or something like that but yeah there you go thank you so I've been dealing with imposter syndrome for years and it wasn't until I actually found an open source project where I felt like I had a mentorship I actually part of the finance project which is a very large python project that has a huge umbrella of applications underneath it and I found mentorship there under a bunch of other people that have the exact same syndrome that felt the exact same way and they helped me guide through it I'm now the maintainer of one of the largest request response libraries in python called Webob you've probably touched it without knowing and if you've used OpenStack, you've used Reddit you've touched it and it's scary but that's what helped me get over my imposter syndrome it's helped me grow because I see people using my source code I see people using my stuff and I'm getting out there and you know this to me is still scary I'm standing in a room full of people as you can probably tell but to me that is a big thing is the open source community as a whole has helped me tremendously grow and I think it can do a lot for other people too find a project where you're interested where your interests lie that you believe that you can make a difference and make a difference even if it's not an English teacher find something you're interested in there's got to be projects out there to make education better for the world there you go so that to me was a huge help yes, there's other people out there who are successful Chris McDonald made Supervisor which many of you probably run in Docker he's helped he's been through this too he's helped me get those contributions out he's told me my code sucks and helped me make it better and get it there so now it is good and now I can help make other people successful too so please go do open source I think it will help I was thinking back earlier and I think imposter syndrome is quite common and I think as you get farther along what I've determined is the companies I haven't had it at are companies that after a while I regretted being there because I felt like when I showed up and I had imposter syndrome there was a very high bar of talent and I had a bunch to learn so you start getting that muscle you're comfortable to it and it's not something you totally fear because if you move into a company and you immediately have no imposter syndrome that's what you'll be at so that's my perspective Jeremy will you share some of the ways that we talked about when you are talking to somebody who you're star struck by they're like oh my gosh I can't believe this person is talking to me how do you handle that I think someone else actually touched on that pretty well I've tried to listen more than talk because you don't need to necessarily prove your worth to them just ask questions show interest in their conversation I'm actually it's very difficult for me to talk to somebody who I find I am very star struck by just because I feel imposter syndrome myself it's something I've been working on but listening helps a lot and before I hand off the mic just to add on to that just remember that they're people just if it helps when you're having conversations with just random strangers really famous in some subculture that you've never heard of and go yeah I can talk to people who might or might not be famous and just treat them treat them like the people that they are rather than some glorified thing up on a pedestal that doesn't have any flaws I would like to say that you know everybody in this it's a very competitive world out there and everybody faces imposter syndrome at some time or the other and while it's very good to be open to feedback from your colleagues it's also important to filter it out so sometimes when people that you work with on a daily basis give you feedback it's very easy to assume that they're right and if they give you feedback and say oh you're not good at this you're automatically assuming that you've done something wrong and you're going back and trying to fix it so it's important to step back not react to it immediately I felt that it's helped me out I used to react very quickly to whatever people said and say oh something's wrong I have to go fix it but now I take a step back and I see that sometimes they may not be right all the time so it is important to do that to make sure that your confidence is not low can you hear me actually I want to take it back on what you were saying here like everybody else of myself had the impasse syndrome I've had a few careers and it's always there I think a lot of it sometimes is how we were raised parents don't go to school to learn to be parents some of it is learned some of it too I think we're in the tech industry and it's an awesome industry I'm slowly learning to program and do some of the stuff that engineers do but in the years that I've worked with teams it always amazes me that some of the most brilliant people that I work with have such what people say it's low self-esteem and of course a lot of people in the tech industry are introverts so maybe there's a connection there but what I have noticed a lot and I think this is not only LA it's really across the country there's there's a culture of in many places you'll find a culture of putting on a pedestal certain very brilliant people and that's great, they're brilliant it's awesome but I think that all of us sometimes without taking away our own accountability to work towards whatever we need to work at we also need to help ourselves in really managing that culture that is really kind of unreasonable because I see people who have worked really really hard at what they know and they're really really good but because they're not that that person getting the attention they're pushed to the side and if they're the kind of person that's having this imposter syndrome you can imagine how that builds on so I think as a community we all need to work at managing that aspect of where we all just are star struck but there's really there's really so much more to it so to your point you don't want to always just believe whatever feedback you have you got to learn to give yourself credit for where you came from and what you've done and everyone is so different everyone has something so different to offer I'm glad to be here with everyone tonight because I feel like I've been dealing with this most of my life because I keep going to I've worked in a lot of small businesses and even a few bigger ones and it's always seemed like you go there and you know what you're doing and then you go there and you try to fit into the culture you try to mold yourself and at some point you finally get it and you're like okay I finally get the I finally get what's going on it's another place and it starts all over again and that can be a little personally jarring at times so I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that if anyone's got input on that more recent case of something going on is I've been dealing with the posture syndrome where I'm at now and I've been dealing with it for a couple of years and I've been trying to get over it and now I find that like there's a competing goal of dealing with the posture syndrome versus changing priorities and changing goals it's like okay I was good at something or at least I was being told hey I'm great at this, don't worry so much now I'm being told I'm not as good so I was like what do you deal with that what do you deal with that shift and expectations in that situation so that I really connect with that because when I was at my last job there were a lot of new people coming in and they were bringing in these new ideas of new technologies and that sort of thing and I felt like I was just struggling to keep up with what I was already doing and they want to come in and bring some new things and since I'm an ops person I have to know all these new things so I started feeling a posture syndrome even later on like after I had already established myself and so I really feel that there have been a lot of changes lately so it's, yeah I can totally handle that I just want to piggyback on what you said about the book Mindset I was actually gifted that book from a CEO that I met on a plane and I was going to a conference I was on my way to the conference and we were having a great conversation he asked me about what I was doing at the time and I remember saying I wasn't really completely fulfilled because I'm just not that kind of person and that kind of person was to be able to explain or teach technical things over email in tech support and I think our whole conversation was going really great until I said I'm just not that type of person and he asked for my we traded the info and two weeks later I got Mindset and he said you're kicking ass, you're doing a great job read this book it's going to help and it took me a while to get through it because there's a lot of examples of different growth like growth mindsets and fixed mindsets and it explains a lot how you can be a growth mindset in a lot of things and a fixed mindset in a lot of things and how you also have people around you that have growth mindsets and fixed mindsets and I was able to distinguish when I feel that I'm naturally good at things and when I'm not naturally good at things or at least I haven't been put in that situation enough times to feel like I'm a natural I really like the fact that you mentioned that book because now I've given that book to my younger brother who now lives with me in San Francisco who often times says I can't do that because it's just not me and he's pushing through that book too but it really really helped a lot I think to read that book and then you start to kind of see how people themselves are either growth mindset or fixed mindset with that certain topic or situation and then you can try to teach them and help them in a growth mindset way as well so I think we've got enough time for I guess these three last questions or comments that I've seen people's hands for and pretty soon we're going to have to hand over the room to the AWS boss but anyways here it goes just one really useful resource I've had is it's an interview of Ira Glass it's him talking about how he got to where he is and it's just Google search Ira Glass taste and it's just about you not being as good as your ambitions and you seeing the gap between where you are currently and what you want to be doing and it's really really helpful I just put that on I kind of put it on repeat and it's like his voice is so nice anyways so I can't like it's not bad so it's really useful if you don't if you're feeling this really really good oh Ira Glass taste just Google that it's the first video I R A G L A S S and then space taste or space between iron glass too I had a small idea but in all small ideas maybe it's helpful I find that I hope it's okay to plug stack overflow during my lunch hours I'm a C++ guy I find people that have questions that I can answer you get feedback you know you know it you gave the answer it's in a sense casually peer reviewed and that's great to say nope I really do know it I'm giving answers and they're helpful to others that was my two cents I definitely started well I've been dealing with this for a long time and it came to a head in the last six months at the company that I work for and I saw this talk in my CTO it was like you need to go to that I talked about this very recently but yeah so I I work at a very small company I'm the lead developer and very small we have four programmers so there's a CTO, me and two junior devs that picked up programming last year or two so I'm very high up on the spectrum of skill at our company but constantly feeling just like I'm not good enough and part of it is the CTO is straight genius like insanely brilliant guy but yeah I started having this issue and for me in the last year I didn't recognize it initially which made it more of an issue in it and naturally spirals and it got to the point of like I've never really struggled with a lot of anxiety things like that in my life and like six months ago I started having like crushing anxiety the point of like having panic attacks struggling with depression and things I'd really never seen before and talking through that with him I started recognizing some of these like distortions that I was putting on things where I was talking about a situation and then he would be like that's not at all how it is like that's no that's not true and the thing that was really dangerous that moment was he's dependent on my performance and you know for the company to succeed for him to succeed in his job so in my mind I added a distortion of he's just lying to me to make me feel better so I can perform which is really dangerous because all of a sudden I added a distortion so he couldn't help me and he said that was positive in my mind I was like oh he's just trying to make me feel better so I can get past this and continue performing but yeah one of the things that was really helpful was like one of the things that talking through it with him I mean I'm blessed with he's very open minded and very helpful and very you know listened as well but he pointed out that I wasn't recognizing any wins which I think is a common thing you don't recognize your own wins you don't see those things as successes and you're always thinking about the failures what we did is in our quarterly reviews he started pointing out wins and that was something that was really helpful for me like the first time after we had initially talked about it the next time we had a review and we sat down and talked he was like alright so what were your wins tell me about what your wins were and I was like I don't know like I worked most of the time I didn't really have anything and then he started pulling things out and he did something like but even that and I don't know a formalized way but as a strategy that was something very helpful for me is like ask somebody that you know ask somebody that you work with like I don't think it would be viewed as super prideful but like legitimately tell them like in your mind what have I won recently what are things where I have experienced wins recently and you might be really surprised with what comes back and I found that super helpful to spin the thing that feels like fishing for compliments into just being a good employee by asking what do you think my most meaningful win for your priorities has been and just spin it around just a little so that you're being good you're doing what you should be doing but still ask what they think their successes are so I'm sure that you'll have a chance to keep talking about this if you want to give us an atrium there but I think we do need to hand over the room thank you so much thank you I'm kitchen on twitter so if you want to talk about this please hit me up and thank you Emily for sharpening the mic around that was awesome the boss is back there AWS people you are recommended to go to where the chairs are in a circle to find the other AWS people