 Can anyone hear me in the back? Can you tell us that? Okay, cool, all right. These microphones are kind of awkward for me because I usually hold it right here and start talking in that direction so it gets a little bit weird. But like I said, I'm Major Hayden, I'm from Rackspace, and today I'm kind of bringing a slightly less technical topic and talking about imposter syndrome. So the title of presentation is Be an Inspiration Non-Imposter. So hopefully by the end of it you can be an inspiration to other people and yourself. So we'll go through it in detail. So if I can get my clicker working again, I wonder if Till had my clicker yesterday. All right, we'll just use a keyboard. Maybe. Let's make sure it didn't lock up, hold on. Okay, so a bit about me. I work at Rackspace. We work in a very quirky place. We took over a shopping mall in San Antonio, Texas. And so we had a big food court sign and they spent a little budget on making a neon sign with our logo and some Star Wars stuff all over the building. So we've still got some food court stuff laying around and I'd say the one thing if I was gonna tell you something about Rackspace, I would say it's we believe in this notion of financial support. We believe in a notion that every customer should have support as if we worked for their company. So we not only go and fix problems for them on their server, but we give them advice on what they should do. Sometimes advice about how they should handle things within their business, more than just technical things. And in our company, we have this quirky award called the Straight Jacket Award. And if you do, yeah, I know it's a little bit weird. So if you do amazing work and you go above and beyond for customers, you end up being awarded this jacket by our CEO and they take a picture of you on stage and they wrap you up in it. Sometimes they let you out. And so that's something we're famous for. We're also famous for those cupcakes that were here yesterday, which I had way too many of those. So I'm told we have to redeem the snack space after that and work on it. So like I said, I'm from San Antonio. What is the first thing people think of when they think of San Antonio, Texas? Alamo. Yeah, of course. Okay, so I've got the Alamo in there. A whole bunch of tourists come through that every year. If you're not from the States, you don't know about it. There was a big battle back in 1836 and it's very famous, even though we lost. And so this is a picture of me riding to work in Texas. That's a good one. In San Antonio, we're really proud of our Spurs, our basketball team. And also the Houston Texans just down the road and we've got UTSA in town amongst some other colleges, so Go Roadrunners, I don't know if we've got any Roadrunners in here, probably not. All right. So a little bit about me. Some of the things I do at Rackspace that work on our virtualization products and our public cloud. So a lot of the work is Ansible, Python. We do a whole lot of Zen, a whole lot of KBM. Some of the other things we do that we're getting into is containers, obviously. And then I've done some work around information security. So on the Fedora side, I'm on the Fedora security team, which is a lot of fun and a lot of work. I maintain a few packages. I do quite a bit of blogging and I was on the board at one point. And so I'm also the guy who's responsible for this site that I used to harass Dan every once in a while. And the Dan puts it in his presentation to harass me. So if you're running SE Linux, not in enforcing mode, come see Dan or myself and we'll secure the pants off of you. And I also maintain a blog. So if you like reading about technical stuff and sometimes non-technical stuff and hearing about me trying to lose weight, it's all on that site. So go to major.io. And I also run these strange sites. So if you ever are trying to get your IP address from wherever you are in the world and you don't want to advertise them, just go to icon.mpp.com. It's kind of fun. And I have some Fabe icon stuff there. It's fun as well. All right, so getting into the talk. Mainly gonna cover three things. So we're gonna talk about what is imposter syndrome and then how we can identify it in ourselves and identify it in other people. Maybe loved ones, maybe people in our open source community, maybe our friends. And then finally talk about how the heck we overcome it and what are the strategies we can use and what are these things that we can kind of do repetitively every day to get through it. So I'll go ahead and start off and say I'm not a licensed healthcare professional, but we have some really big mental health issues in our industry. It's very challenging. It's very hard sometimes for us to explain what we do to our loved ones and our friends and things like that. As soon as I start talking about technology, my wife goes in the other room. So yeah, if you're having trouble, talk to somebody seriously. Not joking there. So imposter syndrome is complicated. It's tough. A lot of people say, oh, well this person's humble. Maybe they have imposter syndrome. Or this person, every time they get a compliment, they kind of shy away from it. Maybe that's the type of person. So what I'd like to do is kind of explain it with a story of one of my triumphs and failures and hopefully that can kind of help explain it just a little bit. So we had a security incident at the company. A phishing email went out. It wasn't one of the testing ones that some company sent out to people just to get a list of folks that have to go to training. This was one that was bad. It was not fun. There were some bad guys that were trying to take something from us. And it went to a subset of people but unfortunately it hit a lot of people in my group. And so a lot of us we looked at and it was one of the ones where you look at the email and you're like, oh they didn't even try. Like stuff's not set up right. The CSS is all and you're just like, oh come on, give me something better. So a lot of us were just delete, delete. And we get this email that says, hey, you've received a phishing email. Somebody clicked on it. So we're gonna go ahead and just reset the passwords for all these folks in the next 24 hours. You gotta go reset it. So a lot of us were like, well we just deleted it. So our password is not gonna get reset. Next day passwords get reset but it's in the middle of an outage. So we're working an outage for customers and they get reset. And we were promised that they weren't gonna be and there was some miscommunication. Something broke down. And so basically one guy in our team that had boasted about not getting the email, that guy was the only one who had access to our infrastructure. So we're all crowded around his laptop trying to figure out how to do it. And we had VP scrambling around trying to figure out how to get the access back. So, you know I was pretty upset about that because we couldn't serve our customers in the way that we wanted to. So I made a mistake. I wrote an email while I was angry. So I wrote an email to our CSO, our chief security officer. And I said, hey look, here's what happened. Detailed out all the points. Detailed out all the failures. And basically it was a little pointy in places. And I sent it. And then after I sent it, I thought, oh crap. I shouldn't have sent that email. And I thought, okay, no, we'll just figure out. We'll take it as it goes. So later that night, my phone deans and I've got a calendar invitation from the CSO. And I figured, oh, that's it. He's gonna tell me to just come in and put my stuff in a box and then take it out in the morning. So I get in the morning, I meet with him. And our CSO at the time was an amazing guy. But he was kind of, I'm from Texas. He's more of New Jersey, New York. So he talks super fast. He's got a thick accent and very direct. Like he's just very, very direct. He doesn't beat around the bush with anything. And he says, hey, I got your email yesterday. You got some good points in there. You pretty mad. And I was like, oh yeah, I'm sorry about that. Sorry, you know, I was upset about it yesterday. And he said, you know what? I like the points that you put in there. And I like the things that you're trying to do in the company. And I wanna hire you and bring you on down here to work in our corporate security team. And so I'm thinking I'm gonna get fired, but I'm actually getting promoted. And I told him I think about it. And after I thought about it, I took the job. But it was a challenge. So I never worked in information security heavy job before. It always been something over on the side. So I'm just a guy with biology degree trying to cut it on an information security team. So I'm leading three people who are awesome to know everything about information security. And I have no earthly ideas. So I go into these meetings and I'm just completely lost. I'm overloaded with work. I'm having to figure out how to hire people. And then I quickly find that it should have been a lot more careful about what I asked for. I was sitting there dealing with finance issues. I had to fire somebody. I had to deal with a P&L. I had to find ways to cut budget, find ways to add budget. So these were things that were completely new to me as someone who just sat behind the keyboard 95% of the time. And then some of the people, some of my peers looked at me and said, who's this nerd with no management experience coming on our team and trying to help us do information security better? And so for me, I was just pretty much freaking out. I felt like I didn't belong. I felt like completely a fish out of water. It felt like I was an imposter in our own group which our CSL hired me into help with. And so soon after that, I had another calendar invitation from CSL. He brings me in and it was right around we do performance reviews every six months. And so it's right around performance review time. And I go in there with my notepad and everything expecting to get just beaten up on my performance. But in actuality, he wanted to have a conversation around performance. Like he really wanted to improve it. So he asked me his question and he's got this real thing in New York accent which I can't do. I'm horrible at it. And he says, major, what do you call people who think they're the best but they're actually not? So what do you call people who think their confidence level is here but it's actually here? And I'm sitting there and thinking, okay, these are people who kind of fool themselves as people you don't really want to be around. You know, these are people who want to knock down a peg. And he's like, no major, those are assholes. Okay. I was like, absolutely sir, I'm going to write that down. So I'm sitting there on the other side of the table. I'm like, okay, he's going somewhere with this. Maybe I was being too cocky or really confused. I thought I was completely opposite. Wait, he goes on and he says, what do you call people who think they're the worst but they're actually the best? And I really stopped and thought about that one. And I kept thinking and I was like, well, okay, well, those people are kind of annoying because you never feel like they can do anything and they're always down on themselves and you always feel like you gotta give them a pat on the back and all this kind of stuff. And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I'm thinking, okay, I need to keep talking. So I kept talking and then finally he said, no, no, major, those people are assholes too. And I was like, I was like, yes, sir, I'm going to go ahead and write that one down as well. I got you. I'll put that in a sensitivity training. And so for me, I felt like I was being very humble about my capabilities. But in actuality, he was extremely frustrated because he wanted to go in meetings with his leadership and be able to say, hey, I brought in this person. This person is going to do this amazing stuff for our team. When in actuality, he went in there and he's like, I got this person that's doubting themselves. I've got this person that I brought in to go do all this work. I took a chance on this person and I'm not getting what I thought my investment was going to read. So when I saw it from his point of view that he was basically looking at me to figure it out and get it done, even though he knew my capability was not quite there yet, he expected me to make up the distance. So I was really kind of shocked. I didn't think that was going to be the reaction that I would get from him. And so this is where we get into the definition of imposter syndrome. So my CSO would have a very succinct definition for it but I won't say it again. So Wikipedia calls it a psychological phenomenon which if you look up the definition for phenomenon it's something we can observe but we're not always sure why or how it's happening. One example is like if you burn a candle when you have gravity. So if we burn a candle in this room, you know, it makes a very defined shape. Like, you know, it's kind of like that. If you go and do one in space, it almost has like a blue halo around the candle. So it's a phenomenon. It's something we can observe but it's not well understood. We understand it now but back in the day we didn't. The opposite of that is something called a non-mon apparently which is something you can't observe and it's also not well understood. So in actuality, imposter syndrome is something we conserve but you really have to understand more about the person to know why it's happening. So Dana Bauer works at Rack Space. She was helping me put together this presentation. So she put out a tweet essentially saying, hey, can someone help me like do a really short definition on imposter syndrome? And there's one follow-up in a Christopher reply and said, an inability to recognize your own confidence. So if you let that sink in for a second, that's you not acknowledging the things that you're able to do. It's very frustrating for the people around you. And it's also key to think about, you might not be capable of doing those things now but you will be in some period of time. Maybe minutes, maybe days, maybe months. And so I'm also really intrigued by, there's a lot of articles about Emma Watson and she, there's a lot of articles about her with imposter syndrome where she exhibits imposter syndrome in the article that's written about her about imposter syndrome, which is really weird. It's kind of convoluted. But she says that she feels like a fraud sometimes. I think she's a great actress. She doesn't think that she is and she feels like the things that she's received that she's not worthy of receiving them. So if we put it in context, imposter syndrome is really a form of cognitive bias. How many people have heard the term cognitive bias before? It looks like about half. So a cognitive bias is when you have this deviation in your judgment that is illogical. So when you, let's say for example, you live in a very high crime area, high crime part of town and you go to another city and you assume that's high crime as well. So you protect all your stuff. You don't have any jewelry on or anything like that. And you approach all of those situations with the things that you've been used to from where you've been. So I would say also if you've had a bad experience with someone from a certain part of the world and you're like, oh man, all the people from that part of the world are terrible and I don't like to talk to them. That's a cognitive bias. It's something you're putting in your head. It's illogical. It makes absolutely no sense. And other people around you will notice that it's illogical, but you won't. And so this is when you think you aren't competent, but you really are. And our brains can't always be logical. I've seen many discussions on mailing lists that make me believe in that one. And so sometimes understanding something is easier if you look at complete opposite side. So the opposite side of this is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Do we have anybody in here who's a pilot or ever trained to be a pilot? At least one. So I work with a guy who's working on getting his pilot license and some entertaining stories. So Dunning-Kruger is someone who believes their competence level is extremely high, but it's not, but not only in the way they think about themselves, but their actions. So these are people that actually are extremely destructive to things around them. So as an example, you have someone who's flown a small plane like this and oh yeah, I've done some touch and goes. We've gone around some airports, I've flown for a little bit. It's great. So what I'm gonna do is go take this thing out and I'm sure it's gonna do the exact same. Quite the same controls, we'll go drop some bombs. Like I know how to do this, this is fine. So obviously that's a pretty dangerous situation. And so the key thing to think about is that Dunning-Kruger, the complete opposite of imposter syndrome is just as dangerous and just as frustrating. So the question I get asked a lot is where's the happy medium? You wanna be somewhere in between. You don't wanna be, you don't wanna doubt yourself all the time, but yet you don't wanna be so completely in a different realm that you're actually causing more harm to people. And so this is completely my idea, my cognitive bias spectrum. It's really fancy when you put spectrum on the end of it. So obviously you got Dunning-Kruger at the top, you got imposter syndrome at the bottom, and in between you've got these three states. Faithfully made it just right and unsure. And getting to just right is really hard because things are constantly changing around us. Especially in open source communities, there's new commits every day, there's things that we don't know, there's things that we learn that we didn't know that now we know, and that gets kind of confusing. So like Seinfeld episode. And so if we start to break these down, the thing until you make it is when you're confident that you can do something, and so your self-assessment is higher, but your confidence is low, but you know you're gonna bridge that gap at some point. So maybe you move into a new job, and someone says, hey look, I know you've been working on the kernel forever, now I want you to work on OpenStack. You think, okay, well I've written software before, I haven't done Python, I haven't done this type of software development. But hey, guess what? Like, I can do it, yeah, let's do this thing. And then you just kind of bridge the gap. And the key thing is eventually you gotta catch up. If you can't fake it, you make it for about five years. Usually there's some kind of thing you have to do there. And on the opposite side, kind of the one step below is kind of this unsure category. And I see this happen a lot in open source communities where someone says, oh, you know, I haven't looked at that application, or I haven't thought about how that might influence what I'm doing. And then someone says, hey, guess what? Like, let me send you some docs, or let me connect you up with this person in Russia, and they know how to do it, and they'll give you some pointers and show you where to get started with development. And then that person says, oh, okay, that's cool. Like, yeah, let's see if we can do that. So it's someone who's a little bit unsure that they kind of need that push. And so I wanna show that being humble is something completely separate. So I think there's a lot of folks in our community that are very humble, and you go to them and say, oh man, you know, you did this amazing thing, or this particular piece of technology saves me 20 hours a day. And some people you'll see and they'll say, oh, that just, you know, it wasn't anything, you know. And then you'll see some people who say, yeah, and I appreciate that, but I also want you to thank the people on the mailing list. I want you to thank the people who opened the bugs, who did the QA. The second is a lot more healthier. When you accept that compliment from somebody and spread it, you're fighting the imposter syndrome yourself, and you're also helping other people around you do it. And so there's a good quote from C.S. Lewis, the true humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less, if that makes sense. So it's that whole idea of don't decrement your own contributions, but spread it. Identify all the other folks that helped you get to that point, help raise them up as well so that they can do the same thing. And so the key thing, remember, back to the story with my C.S.O., they really, leaders and managers depend on you to have that accurate self-assessment, because they really want to know what are you capable of, what can you do so that way they can go to their management and say I don't need to hire anybody, I've got the dream team right here, they can accomplish what we need to do. We'll get it done. And so if your self-assessment is not accurate, bad things can happen. So as some extreme examples, this is a photo of President Obama meeting with the Ziggintaries from Iraq, and they're talking about some of the issues with ISIS overseas. And if you think about this situation right here, if you think about the folks from Iraq, if they're coming to the table, and they're coming into it with the Dunning-Kruger effect, and they're like, oh, we got this under control, all we need is one plane, we'll go over and take care of this ISIS situation. That's pretty dangerous. And that's a bad position for Obama and his advisors to be in because they're not getting the right information, they're not playing with the full deck. If the flip side happened, if they just said, look, we have no idea how to do this, we're completely lost, we don't have the capability, that's also a problem, because then the folks on the other side of the table have no idea how to help them. They just think it's an impossible mission. And so also out on here, these are three people from the mission, Michigan National Guard, and they're training. But if you think about them on an actual mission, imagine you're the person that's in the middle. And you look at the person on your left, and you say, hey, can you take down the target? And the person on your left is like, well, I don't know, like real far, and the wind's blowing and stuff, and it's hot, and I need a sip of water real quick. That's not the answer you want. You want the answer of, yes, I can do it, or no, but I need these things. So if you're unsure about yourself and you say, hey, no, but I need to get 100 yards closer, or no, but we need to get around this little hill, or hey, I need help spotting, or something like that, then it's a completely different situation. Your leader knows that you're capable, but you need something. And so that's another way to fight imposter syndrome, is to put the butt in that sentence. And so the same goes for business, the same goes for open source communities. We won't know where we can go as a community unless we know where the people can go and what the people can do within that community. And so we can crush imposter syndrome with this thing called the Oodaloo. Anybody heard of that before? Any former military folks? Yeah, we're gonna find a few. Okay, so the Oodaloo was the idea of Colonel John Boyd who's in the Air Force, and the Oodaloo was designed for Air Force pilots who were in dogfights and planes. Obviously you're in a situation where you're flying a very expensive piece of material. Normally if you're up in the air and defending something or attacking something, it's very important that you perform well and you don't have a lot of time to do it. And so the Oodaloo is designed for the situations where you're flying, everything's fine, and then all of a sudden you look behind you and there's somebody on your tail and they're perfectly positioned to shoot something at you or take you down or radio your position, something like that. And so he developed this loop which is a little bit complicated, but I'm gonna break it down into something simpler. And the whole idea is you move in one direction through the loop, you make your decision and you act, but you act on the best information that you have at that moment and you just gotta go. And then you take the feedback from every part of the loop and throw it back in at the beginning so your next decision is better than the one you just made. So if I make this a little bit simpler, it really is observe, orient, decide, and act. And I go through these four things and how you can attack and posture syndrome with each one. And you'll notice the arrows only go in one direction. You don't go back. So once you've made an observation and you start orienting yourself, you don't go back and make more observations. That's go time, you've gotta go figure it out. The same thing happens in business, the same thing happens in open source communities. So if we start at the top with observe, the first thing is look for the body language of other people when you talk. So if you're in a meeting with folks and someone says, hey, what's your opinion? And you start talking and people at the table lean up or maybe they put their elbows on the table or maybe they kind of take their glasses off or something like that. And they do that while you're talking. They're interested in what you're talking about. And they also know that you're capable of doing the things that you're talking about. If you begin talking and people stay slouched or they look at their phones or they look somewhere else or they look like they're about to fall asleep. A lot of times this is when your self assessment of your capability is way off. Either it's too high, too low and the people in the room doubt you and they're not interested in what you're trying to say. And sometimes it also helps if you write your opinions and thoughts down and share them with someone that you trust. So let's say for example, you're going into a meeting that you know is gonna be controversial or maybe it's a meeting that could cost your company to spend a whole bunch of money that it hadn't spent before. Write those thoughts down, go to a friend and say, hey, look, I wanna go in this meeting. I wanna propose these things. Give me your feedback. And if your friend looks at you and says, geez, okay, the five things you wanna go say, if I went in there, I'd say the same things. Then you know, okay, look, I'm on target. Like my self assessment is great, we're doing fine. If you go in there and that person says, man, where did you come up with these things? These are terrible. Then you know you have to do a reassessment and kind of figure out where you are. And then finally, make sure you're getting that direct feedback from leaders, managers, friends. If you find that your friends are always like, oh yeah, dude, you're great, you're fantastic. You're not getting the feedback. Something's not there. Either you're not doing something right or you need to take them out of the situation. You need to go to a bar, you need to go have some lunch. You need to go out hunting or fishing or whatever people like to do on the weekends. For some people it's a LAN party, I don't know. But find ways to get outside the work environment, get outside the normal environment and just say, hey, you're a good friend of mine. Give me some feedback. What do I do well? What do I not do well? I'm not gonna hate you. Just tell me. So these are things you can work on. So once you get through the observed part, you start orienting yourself. And this is where based on the observations that you got, try to figure out what your self-assessment was like. So if you went and talked to that friend and thought, man, I got these five ideas, but I think I'm totally an idiot for suggesting this. And your friend says, man, these are great ideas. Then you were off. This is your time that you adjust. This is your time that says, okay, wait a minute, I'm really on target. Let's go forward with this and I'll get more feedback and come back around to the loop. And then this really is the most important step. If you do this step wrong, you're not oriented right when you go do the rest of the thing. And the same thing with fighter pilots. If your observations were incorrect and then you didn't orient yourself right, you're probably gonna get hit with some bullets from the plane behind you. And so then you get down to make a decision. And this is the point where you're going to decide what you're gonna do, how you're gonna do it. This is when you have finished that conversation with your friend and said, I'm gonna go in there, I'm gonna propose these things. I know they're gonna be controversial, but I've got numbers to back it up. I've got data to back it up. I have 15 people over there that agree with me. You have something, you're going into it. And you can't go back on your decision. Once you make it, do it. Even if you start to see that it's gonna crash and burn, that's a great time to get feedback. That's an awesome time to get feedback. You gotta make yourself vulnerable. You gotta stick yourself out there. And so our CSO kind of had a thing where if you didn't suggest something that he shot down on a regular basis, he was really concerned about you. Because he wanted us to come up with things that were a little bit out of the ordinary, a little bit strange. And so like I said, this is the point of no return. When you finally get into act, this is kind of what I like to call go time. Because this is where you get in that meeting. You take everything you've learned so far. You take everything about yourself, your capabilities. And this is where you bring it to bear. This is where you go into that meeting. You have the conversation, you present your ideas. You send an email to a mailing list. You propose a patch. And this is where you say, I'm gonna do this. I'm not gonna back down. But every bit of feedback I get, I'm gonna pour into the observations for the next time. So anybody do OpenStack commits pretty regularly in here? How many people have been gutted when they've tried to submit a patch where someone looks at it and says you're crazy? It'll OpenStack or other projects too. I can't tell you how many times I've submitted a patch if you were like, are you crazy? You know, I don't think it will. No, actually I'm not. There's a lot of people who like this. So that's where you can pour that feedback back in front side and try and make better decision next time. And so that's the loop. It's one that you have to be very disciplined about and remember it when you're taking those actions. And so the key part of this is you have to go through that loop thinking only about yourself. So don't compare yourself to the person next to you. Don't compare yourself to someone at your company that has done this job for 20 years and you're just getting started. And so that's where I get into the last slide. Matt, I believe his last name is Chavon and I'm a good French picker. I'll need some help on that one. His website is livewithoutpants.com. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's totally safe for work. He's got a bunch of great stuff on there. So he's got this paragraph where he says, wherever you are in life with whatever you're doing, you're gonna be ahead of something behind others and that's okay. Own where you are. Take time to embrace and celebrate that. Continue moving forward. The last part is the most important. Never compare your beginning to someone else's middle. That is the most critical part. Never look at somebody else and say, wow, I'm not worthy because I can't code like they do or I can't be eloquent on a mailing list like they are or I can't propose awesome new things for our open source community like they do. I'll say a good example for me is I've been trying to get into kernel development for a while and it's not easy. And so I find myself talking with people who do it on a regular basis and I used to have that feeling of that Wayne's world, like I'm not worthy type thing. And even when I saw those tour balls, I was like, I just don't want to get too close. Feel like I'm gonna get zapped or something, but it's one of those situations where when you're talking with folks like that, they know that there's novices everywhere and they know that there's new people who want to go and contribute to these projects all the time. And so that's an opportunity for you to say, hey, guess what? I'm at stage one of 15. They may be at stage 10 of 15. I don't care. I'm gonna stand here and have this conversation. And when I hear something I don't understand, I'm gonna ask about it. Someone says, hey, look, let's talk about spin locks. Okay, well, what's a spin lock? Oh, that's what it is, fantastic. And then people identify you and say, hey, do you want to know more about that? Like I can send you some docs or I can show you where this cryptic code is inside the kernel. And then you start kind of building those relationships. And so that's where I think that last sentence comes into play very importantly. Compare yourself only to yourself. If you're moving in a good direction and you're moving slower than the person next to you, so what? If you're moving in a good direction and you're moving faster than the person next to you, so what? Take the opportunity to really understand what you're doing and how you're improving. And so with that, that's the end of the presentation you find me on Twitter, it's Major Hayden and I'm a website's major.io. Feel free to email me any comments, questions or anything like that. And if you have any questions now, I'll be glad to answer them. Okay, I thought I'd get heckled at least once over here, but it didn't happen. Oh cool, if there's no questions, I guess we're done. Thank you all very much. Yeah, and it's odd because, yes. So the question was getting on the corporate security team was it more technical work? Was it more organizational work? Was it more get out and talking to people kind of things? And I would say it was yes on all of those. And that's the one part I never really factored in because I thought information security was kind of what you see at Black Hat and Dev Con and stuff like that. Oh yeah, we're gonna be hacking stuff, fantastic. And then I found out a lot of it is PCI compliance and other types of government compliance and going to people and saying, hey, guess what? You're running SSLB2, can we have a conversation around that? And they're like, but yeah, but if we turn it off, it might break something. And I'm like, dude, you're breaking a lot of stuff right now, so. A lot of it was having conversations like that. And I found that the actual technical work was very small and that was really surprising. And then after working on the Fedora security team for a while, I found it's a lot of the same. There is some of the technical stuff of, okay, how do we wedge this patch in or does this patch solve the problem? Or how do we get this package out on time? Or how do we do these things? But a lot of it is going into Godzilla and going to people and saying, man, you've got a package that's got 15 CVEs on it. Can we get this thing bumped? Like, can we get to the latest version? You know, can I help you? Can I co-maintain it? Can I do these things? So I'll say it's been a challenge. And I'll say anyone who's worked in, like a corporate security team in a large company would probably say that it's about an 80, 20 split of 80% pounding the pavement and talking to people and convincing people that there's good things to do and show them the past. And about 20% of it is doing the technical stuff. You know, doing the assessments, doing the pin testing, figuring out hardening standards, you know, going through and doing all that kind of stuff. Yeah, getting a pound on the pavement and shaking hands and stuff like that seems to be the number one thing. Yeah, I can hear you. Okay, so let me see if I could summarize that real quick. So I guess depending on factors, your background, your age, your gender, all these kinds of things, people may have different reactions to it that may cause you to think differently about your self-assessment of your capabilities, well, the great thing is working information security. Everyone rolls their eyes at you anyway no matter what you look like or where you come from. So it's actually a really great career option. Oh, I'm gonna get healed when I get back to the office. So I would say that is a challenge. And if there's a book you wanna read, I would say it's a book called Winning with People. I'm trying to get rid of the bell, John Maxwell wrote it. It's a really good book and he talks about in the book a lot about how people react to when you do things and sometimes the reaction has absolutely nothing to do with what you're talking about. Like you're saying it has something totally, totally different. I'd say with that, and what I've seen most people do within my group is they've gone and just plowed through it. They know that there's some people that are just gonna doubt it. Like I'll say for example, when I came into our corporate security team of my peers who were directors and senior directors, they were all, most of them had done some business school maybe. They've managed people for a long time. They weren't technical or technical for many years. And I was this nerd who was from behind the keyboard joining in this stuff with budget conversations and all this and they were like, well, Major's not gonna get it so we'll leave him out. And I got left out of the conversations. Not because they were being mean, but they just assumed, okay, Major's behind the keyboard. He doesn't care about the P&L and all that kind of thing. And then after a while I was like, wait a minute, hold on, quit leaving me out. I wanna learn these things. So I'll say, I guess the shortest answer would be, it's something you gotta plow through and just keep demonstrating performance. And that's what I had to do. So for me, I went to our HR department had an agreement with a local college and they had a two day crash course on accounting and finance. So I went and did that and it was amazing. I mean, it just blew my mind. But then when I went back I had to have these conversations. So I'm like, okay guys, we're gonna amortize this over three years because if we are, we can do this and we can spend a little bit more and everyone around the table will be like, where did this guy come from? And for me, it was, I finally was confident. I was like, I know these topics and it took several meetings but finally I broke through this group that like, hey, I actually can talk finance. So I say, winning with people by John Maxwell, amazing book, absolutely amazing book. It can help you get over in posture syndrome as well. You can cut up into five pieces that help you understand yourself and your interactions with others. But yeah, I would say you just gotta plop through it and just demonstrate performance and eventually they'll open. So the question is, do I think more programmers would be in posture syndrome level or done in Krueger level? So it depends on what mailing list I'm on. I would say it's strange because a lot of times, I'm sure other people have seen this too, you get on a mailing list thread and someone will just rain fire on the mailing list thread and you're like, man, what did he wake up thinking about this morning? And then you'll get in person and that person will be completely timid. And you're like, wait, is that the person from the mailing list? No, wait a minute, it can't be that, that person. So I think a lot of times when we're in person and we're having discussions like these or we're proposing something in person, I think we sometimes, I would say, technical people as a collective usually go for the in posture syndrome but sometimes when we are, when we know we're not directly seen by other folks, and we know we can kind of send that email or respond to a pull request, sometimes we usually come out a little higher on that. I would say the vast majority of folks that I work with would probably be a little lower on the spectrum, maybe the unsure level or kind of borderline in posture syndrome. And like I said, I think part of it is being humble and I think the other part of it is that we're all at different stages. Like everyone knows more about something than somebody else. Like I may, you know, you may pull two people from the open stack community and one person knows the client tools really well, the other person knows the server side and you get them in a room and realize, wow, together we can go and attack a whole bunch of problems. And so I think that's the thing to understand is that everyone's in a different phase and everyone has a different base of knowledge to work from and we just got to embrace that and just say that's cool, that's what makes us diverse. As I have a quick observation and a separate question, observation is sometimes the imposter syndrome man does itself as asshole behavior, not in the being too timid but being too brash and it's not somebody who has actual overconfidence but if they get to make it, things gone a little bit too far and people act really strongly out of insecurity. So that's another way to the same thing, man does. And I guess the question is how can we organizationally and so the Uda loop kind of helps with personal the way to deal with the imposter syndrome. How can we structure Vador and other organizations to better help our community deal with this? Okay, so the question was how do we kind of work as a larger community to fight imposter syndrome? So the Uda loop helps with the personal side but how do we do it on a larger scale? Yeah. Okay, so I think, I would say, I think Vador has a lot of good examples of that. I think one is, you know, kind of the getting sponsored by a packager for me was like my experience. Is Nick about me or someone else? No? Okay. So I mean, when Nick sponsored me, you know, I said, look, I don't know how to do packaging. He's like, can you write spec files? I was like, yeah, I can write a spec file. He's like, can you maintain it? I said, well, yeah. And he's like, do you use the package that you're gonna package up? And I was like, yeah, he said like every day. He's like, you're perfect. And I was like, well, wait, but then there's that coji thing and there's that B-O-D-H-I that I can't pronounce. And then there's this other stuff. He's like, oh, dude, let's do this thing. And he kind of showed me the docs and kind of walked into the process. And when I came out the other side, I was like, oh, that was awesome. And then someone came by and said, man, I love your RPM, I'm glad you packaged it. It was so great. I was like, oh, thanks, you know, that was really cool. And I was like, oh, damn, I'm gonna package something else. Like, they're gonna go find something else I wanna package. And so then I started going through that stuff and then that's, you know, and then finally that point and I guess another point to that too is Robin grabbed me and said, hey, why don't you be on the Fedora board? And I said, well, that's cool. I have no idea what to do there. And so once I got on it, that was also a really good experience. So I'd say the mentorship, getting better on documentation, I think the coper stuff that you brought up yesterday, I think that's a great way. It's like an informal way for people to get involved with there's not a whole lot of rules and process, you know, some basic rules, but I've done stuff like that with folks in my company, the guy who sits behind me, traditional Debian guy. And I worked with him and showed him how to use Cobra and how to set up an account and all this stuff. And now he's building packages and he enjoys it. And he's like, now do you think I could probably like submit this for review? I was like, sure, let's do it. So getting paired up with somebody, finding ways to get involved more informally and then good documentation that just kind of gets you through and then explains the reason behind some of the process. I'll say the page on the wiki that talks to you about how to become a packageer is great because it takes you through every step and then explains you in detail. Here's why you're doing this. Like here's the benefit for the community of doing this thing and doing it right. So that's kind of my three things. I think we have two minutes. I don't know if there's any other questions. Okay, so the last question is, last question was when is OpenStack not gonna suck? I don't know, we'll figure that one out. No, yeah, no comment. Do you think OpenStack thinks it's better than that? Yeah, there's some discussions on the OpenStack dev list that are pretty entertaining. All right, anything else? All right, well, thank you all so much. Appreciate it. We just had 15 minutes, but like yesterday, we need everybody to leave so they can.