 excited to be here and talk to you all today. This is just a fabulous crowd and a bunch of really cool people I've been happy to talk with today. So today we're going to talk about how to be everything. You're going to learn how to do it. It will be great and you'll be everything and we'll be done. Bam. All right. My name is Lauren Scott. I'm a software engineer in Chicago. I'm a co-leader of RailsBridge in Chicago Deb Bootcamp graduate. I want to talk to you today about this. The being a programmer is hard. Now, by which I don't mean that programming is hard and I'm not saying that it's easy, but I mean being a programmer is hard. So the act of being a programmer, all of the different things that you have to think about in terms of your career and in terms of like, am I doing this right? Am I reaching my full potential as a programmer? But people are awesome, which is great. People are supportive. They're caring. They're kind. Things like this exist, like open source and feelings. This is a conference and that is so cool. And because people are so great, this means that they give a lot of advice and they do this because they care, which is also awesome and we honestly want to help each other. But there can come a point where advice can stop being helpful and can be even harmful. And not long after I started programming, I started noticing these two different pieces of advice that I heard constantly that when trying to think of them together would leave me really frustrated, conflicted and confused. So the first one is own your ignorance. And people might also say things like, oh, don't be afraid to say what you don't know, like squash your ego and have a learning mindset and make yourself open to learning new things by not already saying that you know everything. And this can be great advice, right? It was really helpful to me when I was starting out. It gave me permission to be a beginner. It gave me permission to leave myself open to learning. And then there's this piece of advice, own your expertise. People might also say something like, oh, just be confident in your skills. And don't be afraid to say you're a programmer. Don't be afraid to say that you know something. And this can also be really good advice. I started hearing this a lot at like women in tech events and would hear it and be like, yeah, hell yeah, girlfriend. This is amazing. But the more that I heard this, I just started wondering like, wait, what am I supposed to do? Like, I'm being told to be everything to be a novice and an expert to be humble and confident and be handful. So it's like, am I supposed to do them both at once? Do I alternate? What if I do the wrong one at the wrong time? What will happen? What do you want me to do? It's impossible. And this started out as a talk about what to do with this advice. I was like, yeah, you know what, I'm going to make a talk that's going to tell people how they can internalize both of these things and balance them. The more that I started thinking about it, the less comfortable that I felt. And there are some things that I noticed that really bothered me. Like, how come the only people that I've heard talking about this are like other women in tech or people in disadvantaged groups. Why are we giving these two pieces of seemingly impossible to reconcile advice in the first place? And instead of coming here and giving you all more advice on how to handle the first two pieces of advice that you got, I decided, nah, screw that. Let's let's break this down. I want to get to the root of it. I want to try and figure out why we're giving these two pieces of advice and why it sucks so much. So I think of it as the clash of the syndromes. You have imposter syndrome and entitlement syndrome. So imposter syndrome, the feeling that at any minute people are going to find you out, they're going to realize you're a fraud. It's a belief that your successes are flukes. An entitlement syndrome is a belief that your failures are flukes. So if you fail, it's like, oh, well, something was totally wrong with the, like, the computer is messing up. It's not my code. It's whatever. I'm fine. I'm fabulous. So the two pieces of advice that I'm talking about today, these are directly addressing these two different syndromes, right? They're opposite forces that are trying to bring these imbalances back to the center. We got some problems with that. So first off, we give specific advice generally. And so we have this tendency to paint with a wide brush. We give advice before we know that the recipient needs it. We tell things to large groups of people being like, well, this is clearly the advice that you need to follow, even though it's probably not right for everybody. And our idea is, is that we want to reach everybody for whom the advice could be helpful. But we're still passing it on to others who aren't in need of it. And then we have this privilege factors into the way that we view ourselves. So by privilege, I mean benefits that people get based off of things like race, gender, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, sorry, age, I mean, these are just some things. And members of privileged groups are way more likely to be confident, because by default, they're not having the world tell them that they are less than for who they are. And entitlement syndrome is then going to kind of skew a little bit more privileged. So like a white straight cis male is probably it's, it would be more likely to have to be a part of this cohort than somebody who doesn't have those privileges. And advice for the privileged we see as default. So privilege grants you the ability to be considered normal, right? So like a neutral voice is considered to be somebody who like, again, like, oh, wait, this straight guy, like, when you're reading something, people tend to sort of assume that unless there's anything else said that would signify somebody's being like other. And when we treat the privileged as default, we build systems for them. And when we speak to groups, then we're really speaking to them. And disadvantage groups end up getting that normal, general advice, along with everybody else. And this advice is going to benefit the privileged. So this means that disadvantage groups are more frequently bringing conflicting advice. Because if we're giving some advice to everybody, but then other advice, like advice that skews helpful for disadvantage groups, it seems like a minority issue, right? Regardless of whether or not the group is an actual minority. So it's not given out as generally. And because of this, people who are in these disadvantage groups are more likely to hear both pieces of advice, which leads us to we tell the oppressed to change because of problems fueled by the oppressor. So this is a big conversation one that we could talk about for a long time. So I'm only going to scratch the surface here. But you know, bigotry, misogyny, discrimination, blatant offenses to microaggressions that these things can really drastically contribute to feelings of inadequacy among disadvantage groups. So it's like we're we're tripping people and then being like, you just have to want to get up, like you're probably on the ground because you don't believe in yourself. And it can be argued that it's good to know how to like, yeah, it's good to know how to work within the system, right that we have. It's the system that we have and we got to learn how to work it. But but we can slip really easily into telling people how to fix themselves instead of attacking the problem at the source, the reason why they have the things that need to be fixed. And for these people, it's hard to separate personal shortcomings from biased and bigoted assumptions. So it can be hard for less privileged people to figure out what's actually the problem. And what's assumed or stereotyped or hoisted upon them. So like, how do you assess whether you need to change? If you can never tell why you're being received the way that you are. So if you're always thinking, well, maybe my code really wasn't something that like that idea wasn't something that should have been listened to instead of like, but I don't know, but maybe, maybe were they not listening to me because I'm a woman were they not listening to me because of blank. Like what what we talked about this morning with inclusion. And if you can't tell why you're getting that feedback, if it's because of who you are or because of like what you're doing. It's hard to then suss out like, hey, how do you get better? How do you take feedback? If you don't know which feedback is valid? And when we treat the wrong problem, we miss out on opportunities. So if you're being told always own your ignorance, you could end up undervalued, right? People might not think that you know things. If you're being being told to always be confident, you can miss out on learning opportunities. And that's even ignoring what happens when you already lack privilege. When people assume we don't know anything, we are harmed by admitting we don't know everything. When our confidence is called bitchiness and is treated like a problem, it is painful to wield it. When we aren't allowed to ask without being treated like we know nothing, we miss out on learning. And I'm sorry, I forgot a content warning earlier. I have a couple of gifts. And this is one of them. But it can kind of have you end up feeling is it happening? Yes, it's happening. This is just like, no, no. All right, I'm done. I'm out of here, flying the spaceship into the sun. No more. But no nooping today. Let's go closer. Let's figure this stuff out. And I want to do some research about this because I had a bunch of assumptions that I was making about advice that different groups of people were receiving based off of my own experience, based off of the people around me and conversations that I'd had. But I want to test out my assumptions a little bit more and see if there really is as much of a gap between like who is getting what pieces of advice and how they feel about it as I'd perceived. So I did a survey as a disclaimer. It's not a scientific study. I say this because I'm sure there are things that I have not been doing correctly in like the rigorous scientific way with the survey. It's on Survey Monkey. If you would like to help contribute to this, please, please, please. My Twitter is devdame. If you go there, the pinned tweet at the top of my profile is a link to the survey and I'm still collecting responses. I would love to get more, take it, share it with people. It would mean a lot. So the questions that I asked in the survey can be summed up like this. And then these are just rough summaries. So I asked how often have you been told to own your ignorance or something similar? How often have you been told to own your expertise or something similar? For both of these, I asked where have you heard this? So in a sort of general environment in a specific type of diversity focused environment, et cetera. And then I had an open ended question asking if respondents think that these pieces of advice are helpful. And I also asked for some demographic information at the end. So who took the survey? As of today, I have 232 responses, 146 identified as women, 72 identified as men, six identified as non binary, 22 as people of color and 38 as LGBTQA. So until I have more data, I'm focusing mostly on gender. I would love to be able to be able to make some more conclusions surrounding things. But gender splitting on gender gave me the largest kind of demographic chunks for this largest sample sizes and I didn't really feel comfortable drawing conclusions from other ones. So again, if you'd like to see more information based off of all kinds of demographics, please fill out the survey share with your friends. All right. So how often have you been told to own your ignorance? So the results that I've got here, they they're different kind of scales here. The numbers are number of respondents who replied never once or twice fairly often or all the time. But I generally I thought it was just interesting just the shape of these, right? So I've got women and non binary people on the left, and men on the right. And, and you can see they have kind of like the same shape, right? Like, kind of do it with your hand like this. So most people once or twice or fairly often, a good chunk never few all the time. You look at the actual percentage for things. So 47% of women 45 for men, 66, 50, 60. So everything is sort of hovering around the same range like late 40s to mid 60s. And then we have how often have you been told to own your expertise? And when you look at this, the shapes are very different. So we can see like, very few women and non binary people have not been told this. And for men, it's just like, yeah, mostly it's gone down to the side. Yes, that's 38% of well, well, 38% of men who responded have been have never been told to own their expertise. And just 10% of women and non binary people. It's a pretty big gap. And again, if we're looking at the respondents who reported fairly often or all the time, so people who were hearing this a bit, we're still hovering around the same numbers a little bit higher for everybody, because men are down to 29%. So a lot, a lot smaller percentage there. And when asking if women and minorities heard this in a diversity focused environment, you can see the owning your ignorance 25%, owning your expertise 63%. So we're definitely telling this piece of advice that like, that we're hearing all the time tends to sorry, the expertise advice pretend to be hearing in a in diversity focused spaces. So I then asked you, do you find these pieces of advice helpful? And so I super scientifically went through all of the results by I just read them and categorize them in terms of like, well, were they using just positive language about this? Were they just talking about it negatively? What's really kind of a mix? If I couldn't tell at all, I did not include it. So just things that I thought were pretty obvious about sort of the feelings. So for everybody, the results that I got broke down and kind of like this, it's pretty evenly split, right? Do you find these pieces of advice helpful? So like, yeah, a lot of good, a lot of mixed, a lot of bad, but it gets a lot more interesting when we break it down in terms of the gender respondents. So here we have so the tan is women and non binary, and the purple is men. And, and you can see for like, the happy one, pretty, pretty widely men. And then this is how meh and like angry about it looked, it's just like a huge breakdown. So like, we can definitely see a pretty big gap in the way that people are feeling about these pieces of advice. And I would love to share with you some responses. So I chose these blindly. Interestingly, though, what when I say blindly, I mean, without looking at the gender of the respondent first, all of the ones that I chose work and ended up when I looked at the, at the actual results were women quotes from women, which I think you can see if they're some pretty strong opinions. So anything with this little talky thing at the top is a quote. Yeah, I'd like for some of the men I work with to hear that own your ignorance bed. Sometimes I feel like they don't understand what it's like to show weakness when you're proving yourself every day. I usually receive backlash for demonstrating competence, even more so for actual expertise. I usually do it anyway. Best case scenario is that my suggestions are adopted, but I don't get credit for them. I have trouble and trouble enough as it is to own my expertise when I'm not listening to you on topics that I know well. And owning my ignorance would be detrimental and cause many on my team to take me even less seriously than they already do. It feels like a catch 22. It seems like women are put in the impossible situation of having to simultaneously project confidence and humility. Each side seems oblivious to the double bind many women are in. And this next one I really related to I'm doing everything all wrong. I it made me feel kind of like, you know, like the infomercial thing where people are just like just wildly messing everything up. And so I like, search for something like that. And I found this which I think perfectly embodies like the experience of being in a disadvantaged group in tech. You're like, hey, I'm bringing you pizza and everybody's mad at you. And this like this was even funnier to me when I realized that she had already brought them Chinese food. What do you want? One, one respondent just included a link to this comment, which I also that was pretty on point. Yeah, just, you know, just be yourself and BT what's wrong. One said, I feel like both pieces of advice annoyingly put the burden on the recipient. Like your career is not going well, because you were doing something wrong. When often I think it is more likely that the person is not in a supportive environment. One said, there is an analogy here to rape culture, the burden shouldn't be on the victim. I was really hit by this quote, not because I think the respondent was trying to equate the two things, which are clearly nowhere near the same level. But because I think that they're both symptoms of the same disease. So this idea that we are obligated to shoulder the weight of problems that we never asked for. So the gist of it is that there likely is a correlation between demographics and advice fatigue. So people are pained and confused by this advice, whether or not this correlation exists, we can see that it's frustrating. And we can see that we're putting the burden on them, and that that's felt. It's something that's really felt by a lot of people. One respondent said, it is easy to be confident in yourself, and or expose your ignorance when you feel safe, supported and encouraged. If it's hard to do that, then maybe there's a reason you need to protect yourself. So why aren't we better at this? Why aren't we better at making an environment where people feel comfortable? Why aren't we better at giving this, why are we giving these pieces of advice that a lot of us feel the conflict in this, but still give them, I still give this advice sometimes. Because they're kind of good pieces of advice sometimes. And even in the most well intentioned groups, we still don't often follow this advice ourselves. Like, we're not setting a precedent. Why aren't we doing that? It's a big question. That's one that I can't really answer today. But there was one thing in my research that really spoke to me, which is vicarious goal satiation. So I found some some interesting studies about this, which I will post my slides after this. And there's some great links to them at the bottom. And so there's this thing. So studies have found that if we watch others achieve goals, we feel like we achieve those goals. You know, like if you you see somebody like training up on a TV show, you're like, Yeah, we really like we did that. We did a great job with that today. So we we get a bit of that feeling. And yeah, we can relax. It's done. Like, when we get the feeling like we have accomplished something, you know, it's like if you've if you have a goal that you've been working on all day, and you're trying to do it super hard, you feel like you've been doing it from the end of the day, you're like, cool, just like watch TV. And it's fine. I've already done what I need to do. And the studies also find that we expect that others will follow our advice. So if if we give somebody advice, they're probably going to take it. So they're probably going to achieve something. So if we give somebody advice, we're like, Oh, cool. She's going to do so well. My work here is done. And I don't need to do anything for myself. And, like, there's this great, what one of these studies is real great. They did this thing where they had it was all about like, healthy eating. And they had this scenario where it was like, the, the people like people who come in, they tell them like, All right, so you've got this friend and they're really concerned about eating healthfully, and they want to like make a change in their diet and, and eat better and make better decisions regarding the food that they eat. And, and this friend is, it's basically something like, they're about to order either a hamburger or a salad. What do you tell them to do? And so people like they had, you know, different groups, like some people they had, they kind of like led to giving, giving this advice. So they'd be like, Yeah, it's the salad, you take the salad. And they think like, Okay, cool, my friend's going to eat well. Some people they would do like, completely different advice giving. So it would be something like, my friend needs advice on, you know, what kind of stereo to buy or, or whatnot, something completely unrelated. And then they, at the end of the experiment, they're like, Okay, cool, you're done, you can have a treat. Would you like this healthy granola bar or this tricks bar? And like, so the people in, in, in the groups who like, didn't give advice about healthy eating, they were like, Yeah, I'll take the granola bar at school. The people who gave advice about healthy eating, like overwhelmingly took the tricks. The idea here being like, they think, you know, because they would ask them, like, Do you think your friend's going to take the advice? And they're like, Oh, she's totally going to take it. So they, they, they were done, they took the tricks. So my, I kind of wonder with us not like, all being able to, to sort of embody these things that we're preaching in terms of owning ignorance in terms of owning expertise, like, is this us taking the tricks? I'm not saying it's the reason, but I think that it's interesting to talk about. Because we're not, you know, we're giving this advice, we don't necessarily follow it. We're not all like always owning our ignorance, always owning our expertise. So instead of burdening people with, with advice and not following it, maybe there are other ways we can influence people to make it easier for everybody around us. So I lied to you earlier when I said I wasn't going to give advice, because I'm totally going to give some more advice. But instead of giving it to people who are struggling with how to balance everything, I'm going to give this advice to everyone about how we can get to the problem in its root. And there are two good courses of action that we can take. The first is show by example. So as writers say, you know, show, don't tell. Think about, like, any, any kind of seniority that you have, that's influence that you have over other people, even if like, you're just learning how to code, but you've been doing it for like a month longer than one of your friends. You're still an example to them, you know. So we, we're able to like, if they see you having a good balance, having like, like not getting too down on yourself and, and, and like being able to admit things, but like also having that bit of confidence, if like, just being honest about, about your abilities and being kind to yourself. We, we can help people see that it's like a normal way to act. We can normalize honesty and openness. And it's like one of those things where, you know, in like job applications, people will totally lie on their resumes and sort of like boost their skills up and stuff and everybody like kind of embellishes everything. So then it can feel sometimes like, oh, well, if I tell the truth on this, will it not be competitive? Because everybody else is lying in a way that makes himself look really good. This way, we can just say like, hey, you know, it's, it's okay to be honest and open about what we know about what we don't know. Like if a senior engineer says that they don't know something and they're just like willing to Google it, willing to admit it, that makes juniors feel a lot less like they have to compensate in either direction. It makes other seniors feel more like that. It's not just the people who like are, have been in this field less long than us. It's, it's building this community. There's a quote from a respondent, I need to see senior people admitting their ignorance and nothing bad happening to them. When established devs show what they don't know, they give permission for everyone else to be more honest. And we can help change the culture. So if somebody doesn't know something, like don't scoff. Don't, don't laugh and be like, oh, you didn't, you weren't aware of this JavaScript framework. And like, okay, these might, might sound basic, but like, I see like enlightened developers doing this stuff all the time. I see people who like, who, you know, talk the talk, but then are sometimes like acting like everybody should already know something. It's not the language and framework and whatever wars. Like if you tell somebody like, well, if you don't use Vim, you're not a real developer. Like, you know, which people say all the time, like, how are people gonna feel like you're, you're not gonna want to admit that you don't know them. Right. And, and you're gonna be like afraid to talk about it. And, and be patient, be trusting. So like, don't quiz people, right? If you don't think this still happens, like I recently had a guy look me like dead in the eye when I was like, trying to tell him that I understood how like, the something in the programming world was and he was like, what's a race condition? Explain a race condition to me. Like, this happens, right? Don't, don't be that guy. I remember that advice is good, but we need to wield it thoughtfully. And if your goal is truly to help others, advice isn't always the answer. We can build communities we can lead by example, and help each other by building, building a tech world that we can all thrive in. Thank you.