 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day two of Dev Upstays Boston. Super excited to be up here. I don't know if you've come in previous years, but in previous years I've helped organize. I've had the pleasure of, like, rejecting my own talk submissions to previous years. So this time I wasn't an organizer. I had enough time to get something together that was actually worth putting on screen. So this talk was actually originally done for SREcon earlier this year. And it's also since been turned into a book chapter in the book Seeking SRE. I'll have some info on that at the end of the talk. Thank you. Okay. Cool. So the title of my talk is Beyond Burnout. And I think at this point most of us have a pretty good idea of what burnout is or how it might affect us in our jobs. But just to recap, burnout is about occupational stress. It's about what you do on your job that's making you sicker emotionally or mentally. And it's something that can be dramatically affected by how you structure your teams, what your workload is like, what kind of work-life benefit, work-life balance and benefits that you actually have at your job. But the premise of this talk is I actually want to go a little bit beyond burnout. So this isn't just a talk about stress. It's actually a talk about mental disorders and living with them. So it won't bother me any more on the intro. But I will say there are some content warnings for this talk because we are going to be talking about mental disorders. We're going to be talking about people maybe being in crisis situations. But we're also going to be talking about things like the legal and medical system. So no worries if you want to step out or you don't want to hear some of this. Or watch the talk later on, because this is all going to be recorded. By the way, hello to everyone over in the other room. Sorry, you can't make it. Okay. So I'm giving this talk as an activist. So that means I'm not a mental health professional. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert on employment law. Also, I don't know if anyone came from abroad, but the recommendations here are U.S. centric because some of them deal with the legal system, and that's the one I know best. Also, because of the sense of nature of this talk, I'm not actually going to take questions on stage, but I'll be around for a while afterwards so you can catch me in the hall or at the open spaces or something like that. So you're at a DevOps conference. I think you probably agree that most engineering problems are actually people problems. That shouldn't be that controversial at this stage in DevOps adoption. But we're still kind of figuring out one of the last bullet points here, which is managing stress and mental health. So if you listen to the DevOps thought leadership, you'll hear a lot of best practices around reducing really that stress burden of work. So things like trying to get rid of pages, trying to reassign responsibilities so that you have less toil, have more ownership over your work. Even ways of interacting with each other, like the hug ops hashtag, there's been all sorts of great ways to try and get people to be happier and healthier in their jobs. But as it turns out, mental health, it's like the overall state of our system. So some of that is going to be your job stress. Some of that is going to be stress from dealing with your coworkers, from dealing with demands that are placed on you. But a lot of that is actually what you came to the job with in the first place. Not everyone's coming in with the same baseline. So having mental health as an overall state of your system, it's actually much harder to maintain that if you came into it with a mental disorder, or at least for many people with mental disorders. When I say mental disorders, we're actually talking about a wide constellation of different syndromes and diagnoses and personal histories. To the extent that we're actually dealing with about 25% of people being able to be diagnosed with a mental disorder at any one time. And that will vary depending on who you ask, what your criteria are, but we're going to go with a number around that range. And that number actually goes up to 50% if you include people over their lifespan. Because it's possible for you to not have a mental disorder, then maybe you experience a traumatic event. You have PTSD. So now you do have one. And then maybe after treatment you get better from it and you consider yourself recovered. So then you don't have one again. So if you consider the lifetime incidence of this, it's actually up to 50%. So it's like as common to have one of these at some point in your life as to not. And when I say mental disorders, I'm playing a little loose with terminology here because really we have a lot of different people talking about them for different reasons. So there's not a consensus on terminology. But one half of this that I'm talking about is mental illnesses. These are what a lot of people think of when they think of mental disorder. So that's depression or anxiety. They're really more like illnesses that affect the functioning of your mind. And they're highly associated with some kind of internal distress. So they're things that for the most part are inherently negative that most people would not want to have, that consider stressful and often do want to try and fix for themselves. Just as an aside, things like grief and burnout are not mental illnesses. There's no political view that says oh, if you have this political view, you're mentally ill. That's actually the consensus of the American Psychological Association that you can't be diagnosed with a mental illness for your political views. But when I say mental disorders in the context of this talk, and again that's not for everyone saying that term, but in this talk it's also going to include neurodevelopmental disorders. These are disorders that affect the way that you process information or handle emotions, but not necessarily in a strictly negative way. And in fact a lot of people with neurodevelopmental disorders may not actually consider themselves to be disabled. They may not consider themselves to be sick. And a lot of them really don't necessarily want to be cured. So this can be something that you have from a very young age, like autism. It can be something that is acquired later on like a traumatic brain injury. And they typically affect like very specific areas of cognition. Something like depression is very wide-reaching and it affects a lot of how you see the world. You have a learning disorder. It might actually be for one very specific task that you have a learning disorder and all other areas of your life you may not even notice that you have one. In fact a lot of people don't get diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders because of that. So in this talk we'll be talking about a lot of different types of disorders. And I think it's really important to emphasize that the medical model is that if you have a disorder then it's naturally a deficit and that you should treat it. But that's not how everyone thinks about this. The neurodiversity perspective on this, which came out of more community activism with people with some of these diagnoses, is that everyone's mind is different anyways. These are just natural variations on human minds. We should have a society that respects these variations and works with them and trying to fix them or work around them. So mental disorders are actually what I'd call a hidden diversity problem. So if you take the statistics of people with mental disorders, they actually have horrible statistics on employment and happiness. And that's not necessarily because of their mental disorders. In fact a lot of that is actually due to stigma and discrimination. Sure it might suck to have anxiety but you can live with anxiety. You can learn to manage anxiety. You really can't learn to manage people being discriminatory towards you. You can obviously try and take some actions but it's really something they're inflicting on you. And unfortunately people with mental disorders, it's one of the few groups that has legal protections. So you're not allowed to discriminate against people on the basis of this. So they have these legal protections and people basically don't care. They're still fully willing to discriminate against this group of people. And in fact it's actually encouraged in mainstream representation. Like how many times have you heard about like a psycho serial killer or a crazy ex-girlfriend or something like that that's discouraging you from thinking of these people as fully formed humans. Now another thing that's really important to note from a diversity perspective here is that mental disorders themselves are not evenly distributed. So it's not like that 25% is like every fourth person in the room has a mental disorder. Twice can impact your diagnosis and your availability of care. Certainly your gender. Women are diagnosed with mental disorders at a rate of about one and a half to two to one. So about twice as likely depending on what disorders you're talking about. And poverty. Poverty is actually a huge one. And that's not necessarily oh I'm poor right now so I'm stressed out about it. Particularly for early childhood developments if you grew up in a household with poverty that can affect you the rest of your life even if you later on are maybe in a tech job and now have access to a lot more money than your parents ever did. Now that being said I don't want to cast too gloomy a picture of mental disorders because actually mental disorders and mental health are orthogonal. They can move independently of each other. It's actually really possible to have horrible mental health and not have a diagnosis. It can just be because you hate your job. You hate your coworkers. You're not getting along with your family. And likewise you can have a slew of diagnoses but if they're all well managed if you've come up with coping strategies maybe you actually have great mental health at this point. You know once you've lived with something for like ten years yeah it's still stressful when it happens but you're kind of used to it at that point. That being said the correlation matters. So when we're talking about the ways that this affects this there's some obvious negative symptoms of mental disorders. Things like you know you have to leave work because you have a panic attack or someone in your workplace because you have a problem regulating your emotions. But for most people it's actually these stigma symptoms so to speak that are the most stressful for them. If you've ever been hospitalized for really anything you know that that already can be stressful but if you've been hospitalized for a mental disorder of some kind most of the time you have to come up with some story about what you were doing because people won't even call you back if you say to them oh I was in a mental institution for two weeks or three months or something like that. It's illegal discrimination they still do it anyways like how are you going to prove that it's actually very challenging. And even if people you know don't say that that's what happened to them if they try and come up with a story it can make them seem less credible it can make them seem like they have resume gaps. So even just getting appropriate doctor mandated treatment can already set your career back even if you get all of your symptoms fixed to a level that you want them to be. And something that really doesn't get talked about right like if you hear that someone is depressed you say oh go get help well what is getting help actually look like. Therapy can actually be really emotionally challenging especially if you have like things that happen in your childhood things that are happening with your family it can be really a traumatic experience in its own right. A lot of the medications that we use we don't really understand how they work so you have to try maybe five of them ten of them twenty of them until you find one that works and then it's actually a huge hassle to keep it going to get your medication on balance. For example lithium is a drug that's used to treat bipolar disorder. You know it's actually horribly toxic so if you're on lithium you actually have to go get blood tests all the time to make sure that the medication that's keeping you from being manic isn't also literally killing you. Here's actually my map of what I had to do to get medication when I was living in Stony Brook, Long Island I wasn't able to transfer my prescription so I'd have to go on a ferry to Connecticut then go back home stay the night there go to my doctor get a physical piece of paper with my prescription bring it to the pharmacy and then repeat that trip every month. That's what I had to do for medication access and I know my story is not the worst among people here. So all this is about mental disorder so far let's bring it back to SRE or you know DevOps, no not everyone in this audience is in SRE so if we're already making reliable systems from unreliable components we should keep in mind that any unreliability from a mental disorder is small in scale compared to the unreliability that already exists with humans so any time you have a human involved in a process they're going to have different opinions they're going to have knowledge gaps so a mental disorder is sure something to consider but it's just one facet of who they are as a human. So I think the question we should ask is how do we care for engineers with mental disorders so we all hear about engineers being anxious and depressed and overworked right like raise your hand if you think that applies to you no not that many hands okay I think it's definitely a stereotype though as it turns out though well this is T so actually the most stressful occupations are things like the person who made me this T or the person who is going to have to clean up this theater they're occupations where you don't necessarily have as much prestige or pay or control over what you do as you do as a software engineer so I think we have to really be honest about this that our line of work yes it can be stressful but it's the good kind of stress it's known as you stress it's stress that actually can make you a stronger person and teach you lessons it's not the pointless stress that often comes with a lot of other occupations under a capitalist system really none of these apply to engineering as an industry and in fact if you look at the aggregate statistics on who suffers the most mentally from their jobs it is absolutely not like white car industry professionals who have a lot of choice and a lot of pay really is service workers it's teachers it's people who are under constant stress because their jobs are not valued in the same way so this will be controversial for some people but what I would say is that there's not a widespread mental health crisis among engineers instead there's a crisis in inclusivity across all of America for all people with mental disorders and engineers we should fix are part of it because that's what we know best so thoughts and prayers not scalable awareness campaigns you know they make you feel good but they can be very stressful for the person who already is aware of that to see a lot of people like show up want to just talk about that thing with them for like a month and then never bring it up again that's not lasting change and it doesn't make their life better it can actually make it worse if you have personal experience with something like maybe you've had loved one who had depression that might be completely irrelevant to someone living with autism and in fact it could be demeaning to try and make that consideration they might be perfectly happy with their life as opposed to someone with depression and if you end stigma that doesn't actually address some tangible barriers so obviously we should all work to end stigma but we should do that hand in hand with ending barriers that are more practical because a lot of the barriers that people with mental disorders face are actually barriers that would exist even if someone was exhibiting no ill intent towards them barriers so for example if someone can't get through a college degree because they have a mental disorder let's say they have a learning disorder and they're having trouble going through their classes they're fine on the job but they can't complete an academic degree well if you your job requires that they have a college degree you're actually discriminating against them you're not saying oh you're a bad person for doing this but you're adding a requirement it's another hoop for them to jump through that's so much harder for them than for you so don't just care a lot about people with mental disorders caring a lot is important and you should do it but it doesn't stop there you have to prove that you care by evaluating your organization's systems and you have to remove those barriers that you may not even realize are there until you really sit down and take a look at it so again let's not talk about how do we care for engineers with mental disorders let's talk about how we make engineering workplaces more inclusive and we have a great tool for this so if you're an American with Disabilities Act it's probably I'm a political science nerd so I think it's like one of the best pieces of legislation the US has ever created it's totally awesome and it's not actually just the legislation there's an entire set of guidances interpretations so there's all sorts of great material out there if you're a manager and you know if you're not feeling this talk if you think like this is an overblown concern I will absolutely help your future employees sue you if you violate these laws and it will be awesome so that being said I hope everyone's aligned in the importance of needing to learn this even if maybe not for the same reasons so let's talk about how we can drop sanity as a business requirement and I want to talk about this with SDLC the software developer Lifecycle because every one of us has different jobs we work at different companies different projects but we all go through this same life cycle and we can look at each stage in this life cycle and think about what kinds of changes we want to make now this is a little bit text heavy so I may not go through like every bit of this again I'll note that I've actually turned this talk into a book chapter and it's also really important to note this talk it's not just like oh I had all these awesome ideas that no one's had before this is all based on research from other organizations for example SDLC has a lot of guidelines where I've just directly translated the guidelines into power point format the point of this isn't that I necessarily have some better idea of what's going on the point of this is can we take those recommendations and apply them specifically to a software engineering workplace where things are just run a little bit differently so it helps to have that extra domain knowledge so if you think of recruiting and retaining employees as a funnel well you got to optimize wherever people get bottlenecked in that funnel you have to understand what each stage is and the first stage is application so on a job application this is a place where you really lose people before you even get to know them so if you bring in people to interview and it doesn't work out you can keep metrics on like who didn't take the job offer you can take metrics on like how long employees stay at your company but if you have a really bad application that dissuades people from even starting to apply to your company then you're never going to get people captured in your pipeline so this is step one and you need to just be very clear and explicit about what you expect it needs to line up with what actually is happening on the job and that also needs to include benefits vacation schedule because for a lot of people with mental disorders their needs may actually totally eclipse the sick time available to them what you think of as vacation time may actually be extra sick time for them if they need to be institutionalized that could be like two weeks three weeks and that really starts to add up plus they just also get colds you can be sick with more than one thing one quick tip here I highly recommend using job lint for all postings it's not perfect and job lint is not a substitute for really thinking about it but if you run your existing listings through job lint and it identifies problems for every problem you see there there's probably more that it's not flagging you really need to sit down with your team and figure out why it's flagging these jobs that are mathematically described is this listing ring about to anyone I feel like I get emailed this listing every week or so from some recruiter I've never heard of for SREs in particular there's like this huge set of requirements that we expect people to have they have to be awesome at documentation and talking to people they have to come to conferences like this and do public speaking and in reality it's not the tech skills and all of those social skills if you just ask for one of them then it wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem and I think a good strategy here is to think about the requirements that you have are they actually requirements for every SRE on your team or are they requirements that your team your DevOps team has to fulfill in aggregate I think most of the time it's actually the second one but it's sold as if it were the first one you expect every person on your team to have all the skills of all the previous people who are on your team and that doesn't really work for building diverse organizations now interviewing is another place where you can really lose a lot of people the interviewing process is stressful even if you don't have unexplained gaps on your resume it's stressful even if you don't have an anxiety disorder but you can imagine that maybe if you have autism and have difficulty making eye contact with people that actually an interview could be horrible for you so do what you can to make the interview process as efficient and human friendly as possible of course also should be one that's less focused on impressions because that's where discrimination can really easily sneak in universally across the board there's like a correlation between how marginalized a group is and how much that affects implicit judgments of that group so if you have a scientific criteria if you have more objective criteria set out in advance if you break for how you're going to grade people with those criteria then actually discrimination still happens because it's that pervasive but it's lessened than if you have very free form interpretations how much you like this person, how much of a culture fit that person is of course what I should really say here is if you're really interested in recruiting in a more egalitarian way in a more diverse way you want to take that seriously like anti-bias training for all of your hiring managers and preferably even for your interviewers to have at least some basic training because there are so many ways that this can sneak in even asking questions like what college do you go to is assuming that someone had the resources to go to college it's sort of discriminating against people who went to less impressive colleges maybe a community college instead of Harvard so if you ask what school someone went to and they say Harvard and you say oh wow they're really actually saying well those people who didn't go to Harvard for whatever reason are so much less impressive onboarding is another place where you can really make a difference this is where we start to get more quality of life so you've already made the offer to someone they've accepted what can you do to make it an easier road to them becoming productive to fitting in with the team one huge thing that you can do is schedule a post hiring interview a great tool what you do with this is you interview them about how they're going to want to do their work and what you can do to facilitate that now you should already be doing this for things like what type of monitor do you want what type of keyboard peripherals do you want I've been asked those questions I've never been asked if I use a screen reader I've never been asked if I have difficulty reading text or difficulty standing up for a long period those are all questions that you can fit into this interviewing process that being said if someone comes to you and says yes I need an accommodation you know maybe for them they can't learn from written material as well so they need a subscription to a video based learning platform well if they come out with that requirement for working there you are required by the ADA to accommodate reasonable request for accommodation like that but what I highly recommend is don't treat that as an exception if you treat that as an exception what I'm saying is yes I'm willing to do this but only because you went out of the way and asked for it if you treat it as a new part of company policy if you document that it's now available to anyone who needs it you're going to be really surprised by how many people have been suffering in silence who would have benefited from this something that's a very small cost to the company they would have benefited immensely but they didn't feel safe or comfortable asking about it the more that you offer the more that people are going to be willing to take advantage of it from an efficiency perspective this is one of the best things that you can do for your company accommodations are cheap and the productivity gains are massive from being on a team that you trust that you care about and that frankly you have the necessary tools because that's what you're providing with accommodations you wouldn't expect someone to use like a command line text editor you'd happily buy them a license for some IDE so think about it the same way with accommodation requests now compensation is actually super important here in massachusetts they passed this awesome law where it's no longer going to be illegal to ask people about their salary history and that can put you in a kind of hard place as a recruiter right you need to know how much to offer them you know kind of what that role is going to be but you think maybe you could get them to go a little lower if you ask well actually that's why it's now illegal because that is a hugely discriminatory factor it might not actually seem like that but if you think of it as iterating if I get paid 5,000 less on my first job then on my next job that I'm applying to I'm going to get paid 10,000 less because I can't negotiate as much because those negotiations are almost always a percent based increase so those percent based increases compound a low salary given to you at your first job is going to stay with you for the rest of your career and not even allowing recruiters to ask about your previous compensation means that they have to have it more in line with the market they can't take advantage of the fact that you had a rough history that you maybe didn't do as well on your first few jobs because you were still going to therapy at the time so even though this might seem something like neutral it of course is going to affect people who are discriminated against in any way including people with mental disorders I actually just want to give a shout out to Harvard here the way they do this is they have salary grades some government jobs do this as well and it's a very well documented what grade a position is going to be in it doesn't mean you have no room for compensation adjustments but what it means is that you have like a defined range of negotiation and people on both sides know that it's going to be a number somewhere in that range benefits are something that's actually super important if you have any kind of mental disorder because benefits affect your treatment because in America we don't have a functioning health care system and we have to get it from our employers so that means if you have a bad insurance plan and by bad insurance plan I just mean one that is not exclusive of mental health care of trans health care people are not even going to apply to your job they're going to see that that's what they're going to get and they're going to say no thank you I will take the $5,000 pay cut but this thing that will save me $20,000 in benefit costs so you really need to actually get a professional to look at your insurance plan because insurance plans are so complicated you can't reasonably be expected to know this yourself but make sure you talk to a professional that this is an explicit goal of yours is to have it be a fully inclusive health care plan for people with mental disorders one other thing that's important here think about what it means to say that you have like unlimited vacation at a company right clearly it's not unlimited I can't take a vacation for 365 days a year someone's going to say no that's too much vacation so what it really is is like a soft cap on vacations it's like you can take vacations until I think it's been too much what is that based off of it's my evaluation of your performance it's how likeable you are how well I get along with you what did I just say about like soft criteria they're much more likely to expose discrimination so if you don't feel safe telling someone about your mental disorder how are you going to feel safe asking for two weeks off to go to a therapy program that's inpatients if you have soft caps like this they favor people who don't actually use that kind of compensation they favor people who feel comfortable asking for time off to stay with their kids or do something that sounds friendly and non-scary if you say I need to take this time off because I need treatment that implies to a lot of people that you're a risk and honestly it's scary for a lot of people because of that stigma so think about whether your policies that you have at your company today are actually contributing to this that being said if you offer therapy if you offer time off don't expect that people will get better obviously if someone feels sick and they're trying to get better it's great if they get better you should congratulate them if they say hey I've been feeling better lately it's really hard work getting better if you have a mental illness but you might need to go to therapy the rest of your life just to maintain a balance you may not ever actually get better that might just be your maintenance that you just have to do the same way that someone who has cancer even after they cure cancer they may have to go to chemotherapy periodically for the rest of their life and honestly if someone is not in therapy don't see that as a sign of them failing there are a lot of legitimate reasons not to be in therapy or not to be in therapy right now like you have good rapport with a particular doctor and they leave they change their practice they change what insurance they accept this happens way more often than you might think continuity of care is actually one of the largest challenges in getting people proper mental health care um now when it comes to job duties right um we all have some things that we just have to be able to do like you have to at some level be able to write code and log into servers and run commands so you know you shouldn't let someone tell you like you're you're being biased by hiring someone who can't do and is not going to learn those things but that being said there's room and job duties to ship things somewhat one of the biggest things you can shift is to move away from adversarial decision making adversarial decision making is what's used in the criminal justice system it's pitting two parties against each other with the rationale that if they both bring in evidence and they both try and strike down the other's argument that you'll get like a stronger decision at the end and adversarial decision making can work it's not strictly bad but there are other ways to make decisions that also work they may produce different outcomes sometimes those outcomes will be better sometimes they'll just be different so think about is that the only way that you have permitted on your team to make an argument to advance a case is to actually have like a fight about it with someone and then think about what that experience is like for someone who grew up in a household where their parents yelled at them for someone who went to a battlefield and has PTSD it can be very hard to have that stress response flushing through your body it can trigger a lot of really unpleasant memories even if it's actually an argument over something completely boring like whether you're going to use Java or Python by the way you should use Python I have a Python tattoo yeah I'm a fan alright so just try and find ways to value and promote multiple kinds of contribution and you know you don't have to shift every part of how you work as a company to do this so if you wanted to that would be awesome think about ways you can promote specific people on your team and acknowledge that maybe they aren't getting the attention they need in meetings but is there a way you can give them a presentation at the company is there a way you can get them credit for the work that they've been doing if you're a manager you absolutely have to think about how you're advancing the career of each and every employee not just the loud ones so working conditions let me just say I love nerf guns they're a lot of fun shooting things is cool doesn't belong in a workplace that's incredibly stressful for someone who can't have people sneak up behind them who again have been in a combat experience likewise if you have a sensory processing disorder you might be able to do your job just fine as long as there's not ping pong tables around you as long as people aren't having meetings next to you it can go beyond the standard distraction that a lot of people have and it can actually just totally block people from making any forward progress if they have a very serious sensory processing disorder particularly like auditory processing disorders so have an office layout that's human friendly have private offices available you know not every employee needs a private office though I gotta say having had one before it's really nice I recommend it but have them available as a form of accommodation don't just use them for phone calls and meetings people also need quiet working spaces on occasion one thing you can really do to help people is have a formal policy for flexible scheduling and remote work because again this is that same kind of implicit fuzzy benefit that is going to be most beneficial to the people who can strongly self advocate and just take it without really asking for it and personally I'm someone who looks the part I benefit from that I can just say hey I'm gonna take a two week vacation and I don't have to say hey what else can I do to make up for the vacation are you sure it's okay do I need to find coverage there are a lot of people that have to work harder to get something that even seems that simple as taking vacation so again have formal policies around these so people know what to expect it's an open bargaining table because the act of bargaining itself is actually harder if you're being discriminated against finally on working conditions just flat out don't tolerate jokes about mental disorders you should see this as the same vein as making racist jokes or sexist jokes makes your employees uncomfortable it makes your customers uncomfortable and you know what it makes your lawyers uncomfortable you lose employees from doing this and it has a concentration effect if you lose employees except for the ones that are comfortable at this the problem will just keep getting worse and worse that's how you get a workplace that can't retain any women by tolerating jokes about sexism and this is how you get a workplace where you can't have someone with mental disorder safely if it's acceptable to joke about people being crazy or out of their minds one important note sometimes people use black humor to cope today I think it's not good for you to do that at the office but it's like a false equivalency to say that someone making a joke at the expense of someone with a mental disorder should be treated the same way as a person with a mental disorder making that joke I think it's just important to note that because having like a zero tolerance policy is not the right answer here you do have to pay attention to the specific context of what's being said okay so for training once you get to an employee who's been around for a while they're going to want to get trained up on the job training is something that's very beneficial to people who have faced any kind of discrimination because they've had fewer opportunities so once they land the job you have to think about how are you setting them up for their next job because let's be real nobody is going to stay at a company like 10 years that's just not a thing that happens anymore for the most part you should expect your employees to move on and you should be ready for them to move on you should train them not just for what they're going to do on the job today but to make sure they're ready for their next job and when you do training it's really beneficial to have like multimodal training there are a lot of people who can't watch videos there are a lot of people who can't read long book chapters having a variety of content is great I'm a little biased because I'm on the platform but I really like O'Reilly's safari platform they have a lot of different modalities to their content you can sort of go at your own pace which again is very good for people who might process information in a different way let's get past that slide it's very funny but just don't do these things if your employees doing well right you're going to want to promote them at some point but some people they don't get promoted into like more and more management they don't get promoted to more and more senior IC and there's often a question of like oh did we make the right decision this person isn't getting promoted they're just staying and doing the same thing they're not learning something well maybe you were a brilliant software engineer and then got a traumatic brain injury and where does that leave you well it leaves you as a brilliant software engineer with a traumatic brain injury it doesn't necessarily make you stupid it doesn't necessarily make you unable to do your job but you might have a much harder time learning new information after an injury like that or if you have a learning disorder you might have gone through classes learn a very specific skill well but maybe you have a hard time self teaching so it's very difficult for you to actually learn all the new responsibilities that come with management so don't see someone staying in their career track and not constantly seeking the biggest best new opportunity don't see that as a flaw in their personality you know they might have all kinds of personal stuff happening that they feel completely justified staying where they're at and happy there so find a way to work with them and understand what their career goals even are because you know we can't all get promoted to senior managers right that doesn't even work some of us don't want that path for ourselves and again this is a great place to see whether you have any implicit requirements in promotion I happen to like conference speaking conference speaking is great you get a lot of attention from employers and from recruiters when you speak at conferences and actually that has absolutely no bearing on what I'm like to work with that what's that I lost my mic there we go so there's really like no bearing on how you are as an employee overall it's just one facet and you have to me try switching this up a little bit so don't require that people have these like ill formed these ill formed like track records like oh you like led a major initiative or you presented things to the company yeah those are super important and valuable if that's what the person said their goal was if they weren't trying to do that as a goal you have to ask what was your goal did you accomplish it because someone might have had a goal of document every piece of software at the company do you know whether they succeeded or not that's actually just as important as doing a major one off presentation one can say it's actually much more important to have a sustainable lasting effort so we need to value those types of contributions too because that's really much more favorable to people with a wide variety of interests and skill sets and ways of processing information in the world I'll note here don't protect people from career enhancing work what I mean is if I come to you my manager and I say I have an anxiety disorder and I can't do public speaking very easily if at that point my manager starts never assigning me public speaking they have failed me as a manager because that's not what I asked for in that situation what you're disclosing to them shouldn't actually be the basis for their decision making should be a conversation with you that's one point of information in the conversation but if you never give something if you never give someone something they're bad at then they never have a chance to improve at it either so don't try to protect people from themselves because the best case scenario is that it's humiliating and the worst case you can actually make someone worse at their job by assuming that they can't handle their responsibilities they feel defeated, dejected and not taken seriously so instead practice consent consent is a negotiation it means that people should decide what happens to them you have to figure out what their goals and constraints are and you should always aim to make offers rather than coercing people or making decisions for them it means that you have to actively care about what they're looking for as a person to try and understand that maybe occasionally you're going to have to say no because there's a business of course we can't always get what we want but you need to at least try if you want to really be a fair employee to people with mental disorders one final note I haven't talked much about crisis most people with mental disorders are not in a state of crisis most of the time if they were they would not be out working jobs they would be hospitalized if they weren't able to function if they had a stereotype to vision of like oh this person is having a total breakdown or they're hallucinating or something like that obviously that happens there are some people who do experience mental disorders in that way but that's not necessarily your responsibility as an employer it's also not your responsibility as an employer if an employee has a heart attack on the job you need to get them to a hospital but you don't need to be a heart surgeon you need to have a basic emergency response plan in place you need to know who they want to be sent to because it's not always to a mental institution in fact some people are horribly traumatized by them and they would much rather be sent home with a friend if they're having a very bad day if they're crying at work so if you wait until the last moment you wait until someone calls you and says like hey he's locked himself in a room we can't get his attention if you didn't have an emergency response protocol in place you certainly have one for a fire, you have one for an active shooter have one for a mental disorder or a breakdown as well one thing that's really important to mention in the United States particularly don't call the police on people who are suffering from mental disorder unless you're comfortable with them getting killed because that is often the interaction that happens with police officers and also a person of color particularly if that's also a queer person that's really something you actually have to think about as a manager is if I call the police it will make my job somewhat more comfortable but what will it do to that person because you can actually get arrested for this, you can end up with a criminal record because maybe you were having a panic attack you didn't want someone touching you, you punched a cop while they were trying to pull you somewhere suddenly you're being arrested for assaulting an officer that can be a life changing event so don't just say oh they're having a panic attack call 911, it needs to be more nuanced than that and you really have to speak to the particular person that you're thinking of and drafting this sort of policy because it has to be good for them as an individual I'm going to leave you with any message here, even when it's not convenient and even when it's not possible you should always be thinking of consent and autonomy sometimes someone does need to be involuntarily institutionalized, it's the thing that happens but you should be thinking about their best interests and what they would have wanted in that situation if they had been capable of advocating for themselves at the time so if we all become inclusive the good news is we all benefit so a lot of what I talked about you might have noticed is not actually specific to people with mental disorders it's good for people with young children, it's good for people who are just moving to a new area, people who are remote workers it's good for women in engineering and hopefully it's good for you I hope that you want to work in a workplace that is more inclusive and just I hope you want to work in a workplace where if you get sick people will actually care about that and try and accommodate that rather than just giving you the boot because this is all stuff that's achievable if we work hard we can make this a better place for people with mental disorders and in the process also for everyone else so on the slides I have some good next steps, what you can do here for example open sourcing mental illness, OSMI they actually have a lot of the resources I use to put all this together but also this talk is now a book chapter so if you want to give this book to your manager you can like buy a copy and hand them a physical book and say hey please read this it's important to me, you should practice saying that phrase because I send stuff on my manager all the time, things that I think will lead to a better team I think it's one of the most important things you can do as an employee so again this will be on the slides later on but thank you all for attending this and I hope that you can go into your workplaces and make this actionable, thank you