 Great. Okay. This works. Fantastic. It's great when technology works. Good morning, Bang Bang Con. I don't know about you all, but I had so much fun and I learned so much yesterday. So I'm excited to be kicking off today. A little bit about myself. You can tweet at me at Liz the gray. It's also in the corner of every slide. And I work as a site reliability engineer, which means that when your systems break, I try to figure out how do we design them better? How do we make sure that we can fix things and make them more scalable in the future? And not only that, I don't just work on Google systems. I've now started teaching other people professionally, teaching other people at other companies who happen to use Google Cloud or you, the general public, how do you run reliable systems? And now I'm based in New York and I have a wonderful employer Google. So unfortunately, you know, we sometimes start our careers in places that are not necessarily so glamorous and awesome. Content warning, I think content warnings are important. If any of these are triggers, like please close your ears for the next minute and a half, I'm going to make some brief allusions to transphobia, psychological abuse and suicide ideation. So 14 years ago, I was not necessarily in a super happy place. I was, I had nearly come out as a trans woman. I had to run away from my abusive biological family. And I didn't have that much formal experience. And I wasn't sure what was going to happen to my career. What was going to happen to me? And I had to figure out what was I going to do, right? Like what was I going to do to earn a living? And that's where, that's where games saved me, where I was able to leverage my hobbies and my games into something that saved my life and enabled me to build a career. And yes, there was a little bit of luck there. There's a little, there's a lot of privilege involved, but thankfully games helped me pull through and I was able to leverage those skills and that saved my life. So that's what I'd like to tell you about over the next 30 minutes. So how do we get from A to B, right? Like how do we actually develop our skills and progress our careers and become happier human beings in our lives? And it turns out that our lives are very multifaceted. We all wear many hats. And the way that we grow as people is by learning skills, is by developing our skills. But where are the safe places? Where can we practice and learn our skills? What are the critical moments that help us develop as people? I argue that that doesn't come just from work, that that can come from things that you do in your personal time, in your time outside of work as well. So why am I showing you a photo of my wedding ring? I'm showing you a photo of my wedding ring because of the two motifs that are on it, the flower and the gear. Because those are kind of the two interconnected aspects of my life and of my spouse's life that I kind of feel are important to build upon. The idea that we need to think both about how do we develop kind of our interpersonal skills and how do we need to develop our skills at dealing with computers and with technology? So the skills that I rely upon today, every day in my job as a site reliability engineer, boil down to teaching and mentoring people and being tactful and diplomatic if someone does something that I disagree with, and managing and delegating things to people effectively on the kind of soft side of the fence. And then on the technical skill side of the fence, I think a lot about automation. I think about incident handling and I look at systems and figure out how do we design them better? How do I troubleshoot systems? And the thing about this is that I didn't, I wasn't born knowing these things. I learned these in part through playing games and through my hobbies. So this is how my hobbies grew my career. So 2004, Jessica kicked out of my house, right? Living with my grandparents for a while and I started playing this game called puzzle pirates. I hear that there are some puzzle pirates players in the audience. This is fun. This is fantastic. So this is what I looked like in puzzle pirates. This is me. And as you can imagine, as a trans woman who had just come out, I was like, oh my God, I want to be perceived as a woman. And you know, I'm going to pick my name, Liz, the gray. And people accepted me as who I was. And that was really, really awesome. So I gave me some confidence and that gave me some ability to start engaging with other people. And I quickly realized that there was a problem that I could figure out how to address. And that grew into my ability to mentor and teach people, aka being a senior engineer, right? Being a senior engineer is about mentoring and teaching people. It's not about how much code you can use. It's how much you can enable other people. So what was the problem I found in puzzle pirates? Every player that comes into the game that's brand new to the game has a green name floating above their head. Hey, this person is new. You know, you should maybe help them or give them some extra help. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous people, rather than seeing newbies as people to be coached and helped, saw them as a source of free labor that they could exploit. So I just, like, invite you, they'd see you wandering around and they'd invite you and say, hey, wouldn't you like to join my crew and I'm just going to put you to work. And then they wouldn't actually do anything to help you actually learn the game. And there was a lot of attrition, right? Like people left the game because they got gang pressed and invited into a crew and got yelled at and then they left, right? So the game developers camp for the solution list, which is called the greeter system, which was the idea that you could have a pink name that was visible to other, to the greenies. And the greenies would know that you were a safe person to talk to, right, that you were someone who could offer them help. Great, wonderful. But that was kind of a positive thing rather than a discouragement of the bad behavior. And it turned out that the people that were engaging with the bad behavior still are doing it. So I resolved two things. You know, one, I was going to work the social puzzle. Puzzle Pirates is about playing a whole bunch of intricate little puzzle games. But there's also the kind of meta puzzle above it, the social puzzle of influence and talking to people. So I resolved I was going to play the social puzzle. I was going to try to influence some of these people and try to persuade them to stop doing this behavior. I was going to try to become a greeter myself to model what good behavior looked like. And I started giving out rewards to people to say, hey, if you're a new player, why don't you nominate someone who did something awesome for you and I'll go ahead and give you a special trophy, right? And that worked fairly well. Like people started doing more good behavior, but it still didn't eliminate the bad behavior. Say at the end of the day, what I wound up doing was I decided I was going to PvP every single bad group that was engaging in this game pressing behavior. It was a little bit controversial at the time. But that's kind of how I started getting my feet wet with teaching and mentoring people was by being new to game, building up the skills, and then teaching other people and teaching other people to be better teachers. Here's another skill that I rely upon day to day. I'm a person who organizes movements. I believe very firmly in the power of grassroots organizing. And I've used that to sometimes my employer's chagrin, but I think that it's to the benefit of Google's users and to Google in the long term. And puzzle pirates taught me how to organize large numbers of people. How did it do that? Well, in puzzle pirates, you can own an individual island. And how do you own the island? Well, you have to declare war and blockade the island and fight the person who currently owns the island. So that requires over the course of an entire day or two days, contesting flags that are placed in the ocean. So if there are two ships that are of opposing sides, then no one owns the flag. But if you're sitting there, King of the Hill at King or Queen or Monarch of the Hill, then you are earning points for your side. But the problem is that this requires ships, lots and lots and lots of ships. And you need to have each single ship have a crew of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 people working puzzles on it. So this is starting to look a lot like the structure of a company, right? Or the structure of movement because you've got a whole bunch of teams. You've got people coordinating the teams. You've got people coordinating the coordinators. And also, you have to figure out, how do you build the resources to keep everyone happy? How do you pay people? How do you actually measure people's performance, you know, make sure that they're sabotaging your effort, right? So I learned a whole lot from distributing booty to pirates who were like, yarr, right? And that taught me a lot about like, how do you do kind of semi hierarchical organizing? How do you motivate people? How do you get people moving in the same direction, not shooting at each other with friendly fire, right? Like, that's a critical skill that I learned that way. And then finally, this is the thing that directly got me in that job, that first tech job. I started volunteering to do technical support. I learned how to debug problems. So the technical support forum of Puzzle Pirates was not really well monitored by the developers and I saw a gap and I said, look, you know what? I'm going to collect similar reports and I'm going to ask people like, hey, you know, please give me more detail on this. Show me your logs. Like, let's figure out what's going on. And over time, I started doing more and more sophisticated things. Like, I started writing tooling to actually collect data automatically from people's logs or documenting the known issues in a wiki and producing workarounds. And those skills are the thing that got me a tech job working for the makers of Puzzle Pirates. So that's how as a trans woman who is like, oh my God, I have no career prospects. That's how I wound up getting that first tech job and getting paid to do tech. And that was really, really awesome and saved my life. So as you can imagine, if you're one of the makers of a game, you can't necessarily play the game that you work on because that would be a conflict of interest. People would be like, oh my God, favoritism. So I started playing World of Warcraft. And unfortunately, I couldn't quite get the perfect permissions to show a picture of my World of Warcraft character, sorry. But I started playing Adolf Rogue. I joined a bunch of my real life friends and they were like, hey, you should come and raid with us. And I was like, but wait, I'm brand new. I don't, you know, what is gear? What is skills? So I had to learn pretty quickly, how do I work as a team? How do I participate in an existing team? Not necessarily lead it, right? Because I was brand new, I was in the ropes. And I learned a whole bunch of things from participating in raiding, such as don't stand in the fire. But also things like if people are passing me over for raids, which they did initially at first, right? Like they're like, you're not geared enough. We've got, you know, we can't tolerate any dead weight in this raid, right? Like, but I also learned that it felt good for people to cushion it, right? To say, you know what, not this raid, but maybe the next one and will help you get that gear that you need, right? Kind of bringing everyone's level ups that you have a deep bench. That was something that I learned very much from watching people put together World of Warcraft raids. Or blamelessness after a wipe, right? Like, if you wipe on a boss, you could have a raid leader who's like abusive and yells at everyone. Or you could say, you know what, what do we need to do to do better? Like, you know, maybe we should position people so that they have less likelihood of accidentally standing in the fire, right? Instead of, oh my god, you stood in the fire, you all fall for person. So that's how I learned how to participate in a team and how to give and receive candid feedback as a team member. And then I started playing Eve Online. Eve Online is probably, as Liz Frost would attest, you know, it is, it is like the probably the third love of my life. So, this is me in Eve Online. Thanks to CCP for the permissions. So, I wear a couple of hats in Eve Online. I do personnel management as a director. I do all of our external diplomacy with other entities. And I also handle logistics. I make sure that we have all the resources that we need in the right places. And how did I get here? Well, incident management is kind of an interesting skill that I brought from my work into Eve and brought from Eve into my work. What do you do when the situation hits the fan? Fleet fights in Eve are very, very chaotic. You typically can have anywhere between five people and hundreds of people on each side or maybe even five different sides biting over the same objective. And Eve players have figured out that you have to have someone who's giving orders. You can't just have people kind of figuring out what to do on their own because they'll do conflicting things and you won't actually win the fight if you're uncoordinated. And I was in a whole bunch of fights and what a pattern that I noticed was that the fleet commander would die and then there would be silence. And then we'd all lose our ships and then we'd die, right? So, I realized that even though I didn't know anything about fleet commanding, that it would be better for someone to step up and start making calls and even like asking, you know, hey, Person X, what do you think I should do? Okay, let's do that or let's not do that, right? So, I learned that any call is better than no call and that silence is death and that started getting me leveled up on the idea of how do we effectively command fleets. Started commanding larger and larger fleets and I realized that you needed to delegate roles, right? Like you needed to say, Person Y, you're in charge of telling me are the heels holding? Or Person Z, you know, please tell me what's going on. Like, do you have the person that we're trying to, whose ships we're trying to destroy, do you have them tackled, right? And that way you can maximize the communications bandwidth available. If any of you have ever played the game Space Team, I highly recommend it, it's an Android game and you yell and shout commands at each other because you think whatever you have is the most important thing. So, it turns out that it's not a good idea to have people randomly shouting, right? Like you have to have clear ideas of who can speak, how do you take the floor from each other and that winds up carrying over incident management at work too. The idea of you have to have an incident commander, you have to have someone who is in charge of each function and is reporting information so that people can get their work done. The other aspect that I learned about incident command from Eve is from sieges and evictions. A lot of the combat in Eve revolves around trying to put up or destroy very large staging fortresses in your own system or in other people's systems. And that takes a lot of advance planning and logistics to knock over someone's home or to plant a staging outpost. So that meant that I had to start thinking about how do we rotate people through roles, right? If it's going to take 72 hours to have this fight, how do I make sure that I have a critical mass of people available even at 4 a.m. local my time worldwide in order to make this effort successful? How do I make sure that we have all of the supplies that we'll need available at the right times? How do I preserve operational security? How do I make sure that information is not getting out in an unstructured way? And how do I debrief afterwards? How do I make sure that our efforts next time go more smoothly? And if you succeed, you get rewarded with the explosions of someone else's structures and if you fail, your own structures explode. Win-win. And that brings me to the other point which is adequate suspicion. You know, like, I trust my coworkers. I think they're great, but I do not trust my systems. So whenever I talk about evil and trustworthy people in Eve, substitute your systems, your computer systems, right? Your systems are going to inevitably betray you, right? So what are you doing to defend in depth? How do you prepare for the worst? Because if not, you know, you're going to find that your system walks off with all of your users because it goes down. Or in the case of Eve, that someone will go and control a drag the contents of the corporate inventory into their own hangar. Bye-bye, 30 billion of assets. But I think one of the critical lessons I learned from Eve that really helped my career was learning a new set of skills, learning how to become a manager, learning how to build scalable organizations that are high-performing and persist over time rather than falling apart when someone pushes on them a little. So when I started playing Eve, I started playing Eve with a group of 20 co-workers, people that I knew from Google. And we trusted each other, we liked each other, sure we had some interpersonal disagreements, but one of the main challenges I found was when we joined an alliance, when we joined a group of 150 people who were complete strangers to each other. And how did we build the group of people into a cohesive team that stuck together? And going even a step further, when we as a group of 150 people joined together with a coalition of 5,000 people that I was in charge of, how did I effectively get everyone to work together? One of the ways I found to do that was by building an intentional culture, by thinking really critically, what do we want our culture to look like? And we decided to model it on the concept of listening and respect and thinking with our brains, of making sure that people feel included as part of the group. And part of that meant that we couldn't tolerate people who were rock stars. For two reasons, first of all, if you have a rock star who starts doing all of the work, then other people stop doing the work and then eventually that person will leave you and then you'll find you have a gap, right? So it's much better to build a resilient, redundant organization rather than have a single rock star holding everything up. But it also turns out that rock stars, as some of you know, have an insidious effect, right? Like they poison the well because they think they can get away with more and more and more things and they start behaving in ways that are contrary to the interests of the organization. I'll talk about that a little bit more later. The other thing that I learned was how to effectively delegate to people, right? How to not micromanage people. How to give people the tools they need to succeed at doing something so that I can walk away and trust that it'll get done or that it'll get done close enough to good that I can rely on the result. Because I realized that if you don't do that, what happens to you is what happens to many organizations in Eve that eventually your key players burn out and your organization becomes brittle and then it fails. But since we've built a durable organization, our organization has persisted over six years across three different kinds of space. And today we kind of have this massive set of fortresses set up at home that so far has resisted invasion. We'll see. So let me tell you about what the manager's worst case scenario is. I had to provide very, very difficult feedback to my former boss, the person who used to run the Alliance so as a part of. So he handed control of the organization to me and said, hey Liz, you know, it's, or hey June, it's now your job to run this organization. And then he started, he started doing things on his own. And his behavior started getting worse and worse over time. He almost was behaving like Linus Torvalds. He would be perfectly nice to new players. But if you were an experienced player and he thought that you should have known better, he would yell at you in front of everyone and chew you out and make you feel like an awful human being. And I had to explain to him, you know, gently at first, you know, hey, when you yell at people in front of the newbies, you make the newbies afraid that you're going to yell at them even though you know that you're not going to yell at them. And that makes them feel unwelcome, right? Situation behavior impact. But unfortunately, that didn't work. And well, he and the organization had to go separate ways. So firing your former boss turns out that that's something that I got to practice in a safe environment. And fortunately, I have not had to do that in real life. But if that situation ever comes up, I feel like I'll be prepared for it. The other art that I learned through playing Eve Online was the art of diplomacy and negotiation of how do you make friends? How do you influence people? Even if their interests are not necessarily yours. And there are two key aspects to this. The first one is to value your trustworthiness, to value the trust other people place in you. And the way that I do that is that I find what is someone interested in? What are the key things that someone wants that I can potentially help them with? And then I make sure that people know that I'm not interested only in myself that I want to come to something that's going to be mutually beneficial. A lot of organizations in Eve do scamming. They'll betray you at the drop of a hat. But I take a different approach because of the fact that I know that Eve is a small game and eventually those interactions will come back around to me. And this wound up leaving me in a good situation about a year ago. About a year ago, we were in the course of knocking over someone else's sandcastle destroying all of their assets. We got to the final timer, the final timer before which their structure would be destroyed. And they approached me and they said, June, or Liz, we're interested in joining you. We've looked up to you for a while and we think we're really proud that you picked assets as an adversary. And I could have gone on and destroyed their structures. I could have said, sure, we'll accept you into our organization and then steal all of their stuff, but that's not what I did. They had the trust to come to me and say, you know what, we want to join you and trust us not to backstab them. And I gave them a certain amount of trust. I accepted them into my organization as members. And it's now a year later and they're some of our most loyal and dedicated members and most active members. So it kind of paid off for all of us because we were able to trust each other because we didn't backstab each other. The other thing that's really important about diplomacy is that you have to stick to your principles. That there are some trade-offs that are just not worth making. So within the first year of my playing Eve, we wound up in a situation where there are people running around our part of space that we were in theory allied with that were shooting our friends who were not supposed to be shooting our friends. And we first, you know, told them nicely, please stop shooting. And then eventually we were like, you know what, you've shot our friends. That's against the rules of engagement. We're going to blow up your ship in return. I was asked to apologize for this. I was asked to reimburse the cost of the ship. I said no. Do you know why I said no? The answer is that people have to trust that your apologies are genuine. It doesn't make sense to apologize for something that you're not apologetic for. So it's kicked off a big giant war in Eve. The people that were allied with that person wound up trying to kick us out of our space. And because we believed in our principles, we fought them to a standstill and eventually we negotiated a truce. So we like to say we never meant the knee. And all of this collection of skills, how to be diplomatic, how to manage and delegate, how to build skillable organizations, that taught me how to become a manager before I became a manager for real. And I served as a manager for two years, which I'm pretty happy with. I'm glad that I had a chance to practice before I had to do it with real people's careers on the line. So now let me tell a final story that kind of relates more to the tech side, which is playing factorial. I started playing factorial last year. It's a hell of a game. It's really fun. And in it, you play the role of someone who has crashed land on a planet and knows how to automate things. And that's your sole resource, is that you know how to automate things. And this is obvious implications for anyone who does any kind of operational work, right? That you should think about how to do less work yourself so you can. And there are a couple of key lessons here that you have to make machines do the work and be impatient and not be content to just sit there doing the same thing over and over and over again. But factorial really makes you think about what do you need to automate right now? Because your resources are finite, you can't automate everything right off the bat. So it forces you to prioritize, right? What are you prioritizing to spend your resources and time and attention on to automate? And it helps to kind of look around your system, figure out what are the common things I need to automate and then developing solutions to that. The other thing that I learned from factorial is how do we debug complex systems? How do we manage complexity? Because it turns out that sometimes you have to refactor a running system. And when you refactor a running system, you have to be able to figure out really quickly what are all the dependencies? What things depend upon the thing that I'm changing out? What downstream effects will it have? And when something fails, you have to be able to trace it back to the source. You have to be able to figure out what failed, what do I need to do to get the system back running? And you have to think about how do you limit the blast radius so that when you do break something, the damage is minimal and easy to repair. And also, you can think about how to build more resilient systems in the first place. For instance, you can think about how do you build self-adjusting systems such that you don't end up with things deadlocked or things starved of resources on one hand and, on the other hand, swimming in resources that they can't use? And building these self-adjusting systems and making sure that you can monitor, that you can see at a glance, is everything working or not? So I've now spent the past 20 minutes telling you all about all of my personal video game exploits, but what should you take away from this as someone who doesn't necessarily share my taste in games? I think the first important thing that you need to figure out is what things do you want to learn? Not necessarily for work. It could be for personal growth as well, but what things do you want to learn? What are you interested in? And what is your next project of whatever kind to require? And then you have to figure out, you know, who can you learn from? What resources do you have available for you? Be intentional with your time. Sometimes it's, you know, it's great to do self-care and play a mindless game of Connect4, right? But if you're looking to grow yourself, you have to be careful with your attention and think about doing things that actually help you towards your goals. And if you fail, that's okay, right? Like, that teaches you a lesson that maybe you need to do some intermediate steps or maybe you need, or maybe the thing you're interested in learning is actually something else. That's okay. And once you've acquired those skills, how do you actually leverage them, for instance, to make your career more successful? One way to do that is to volunteer for things, right? Take those stretch assignments because you know that you have the backing of the skills you've learned elsewhere to help you succeed in them. Or talk to people about what you've learned, right? Like, I'm telling you right now, here are the things I learned from playing Eve. Here are the things I learned from playing Factorio. You can do that in your own workplaces or in your own communities. And you can inspire people to do the same. And also, employers shouldn't care where you got their skill from. You should list the skills that you've learned on your resume, right? If you learned how to manage volunteers from playing Eve online, you can say, I know how to manage volunteers, right? Like, that's an okay thing to say. Don't be ashamed of it. Don't be ashamed of your interests. And on the flip side, as an employer, what should you do? It turns out that if you accept people from a wide variety of backgrounds and make your organization more diverse. So I think the key lesson is be expansive of what you accept. As I said earlier, what matters is the people of the skills that they need to succeed at the basic requirements of your job. Don't police how people got the skills. It doesn't matter whether someone went to a coding bootcamp or a four-year college as long as they know how to do the basic requirements of writing the code that you need them to. And frequently, people have skills that you may not have thought of that will help them accomplish your job. So if you're interviewing someone, ask them whether they have some skill that you didn't assess that they feel would be helpful towards doing the job. You might be surprised. But on the flip side, do not demand spare time and passion seriously. Hobbies are something that is that not everyone has the luxury of doing. They shouldn't be mandatory. Self-care is an important skill. And also lots of people are parents, for instance, right? So be careful about not being too demanding of people and saying, hey, I want this perfect person who has all the passion in the world. So what question should you ask when you interview someone? You might ask someone in order to assess their nontraditional experience, like did you build something that didn't work? What did you learn from it? Or tell me about an interpersonal conflict that you've resolved, even if it didn't happen in a work context. Or how do you motivate other people? Or what motivates you to get an idea of whether your organization has problems that they are going to be interested in, or whether they'd be a good manager who is capable of motivating other people? So with that, I'd like to encourage you all to go forth and learn. PS, GPS. The talk yesterday about GPS reminded me of scanning an eve. So it turns out that I went home yesterday and I went and scanned down a bunch of signatures. And it turns out that, you know, first you know where in the sphere it is, then you know where in a circle it is, and then you know what's one of two places, and then finally you can figure out where are you. It's kind of cool. So that's it. And PPS, I think there is an end conference session this afternoon on the topic of bringing your hobbies to work. So I'll be there. I'll be super excited to see many of you. Thank you.