Stating the Obvious
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| Number of Parts | 88 | |
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| License | CC Attribution - ShareAlike 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor and the work or content is shared also in adapted form only under the conditions of this | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/37337 (DOI) | |
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| Production Year | 2018 | |
| Production Place | Pittsburgh |
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:17
I'm gonna say this now that I'm actually live here. If you're in the edges or the back of the room
00:23
unless you just don't like people, which is totally cool, that's all right. I'd love to see if you could kind of come in a little bit so I can actually look at y'all instead of doing one of these. So, hi. I'm Ernie, and I missed you.
00:44
Wow, these are like the friendliest hecklers ever. So, I took last year off from submitting to and attending conferences to do some self-care and just to step back and think about what I really wanted to talk to you all about
01:01
if I could share only one thing. And this talk is that thing, so I'm really happy that you came to see it, but I'll be honest, I'm a little nervous too, so seeing all of your faces right now. So, I'm hoping this public speaking thing is kind of like riding a bike. I'm an engineering manager at a company called Splice.
01:22
Unlike what seems to be every other company here, we actually don't use Ruby, we use Go. And I'm not actually even hiring at this moment. So, this isn't a pitch to come work with me or anything like that, I'm just really happy Splice let me come spend time with y'all and I wanted to thank them.
01:41
I'm really excited to be in Pittsburgh too. This is one of those places that feels like home for me because I actually grew up about an hour south of here, so it feels like coming back home. How many of you drove to the conference? Me too. I actually drove from Louisville, Kentucky. Now, I've always considered Louisville to be the south.
02:03
We say y'all after all, but people have told me that Louisville is the Midwest and weirder yet when I've told them while I'm originally from the Pittsburgh area, they've told me that this is the Midwest.
02:25
Now, have you ever stopped to think about the term Midwest? I'm no geography buff, I'll admit, but it seemed to me obvious that Midwest should probably be center a little bit west of the middle.
02:41
You know, not like far west, just Midwest. But as you probably already know, this isn't the case. And I say probably no because sometimes I think that the tech community at large, especially those of us who work in some of the usual places, we have a different take on geography altogether.
03:01
In the tech community, you've got the east coast and there's like some things that happen there. And you've got the Pacific Northwest and there's some stuff that happens up there as well. And then, you know, there's the west coast where there's always one more thing happening. And then there's this tiny little area right here
03:23
where, you know, obviously we're changing the course of humanity. The rest of this, the Midwest. Anyway, I'm a curious guy and I wondered why we called something mostly east of the west coast the Midwest, so I did some research.
03:44
Now, because the Northwest territory was between the east coast and the far west at the time, the states carved out of it were called the Northwest. Makes sense, okay? Now, by the early 19th century, anything west
04:03
of the Mississippi was considered the west. By the late 1880s, we'd settled further west and most of the states highlighted here had been considered Midwest. By the time we'd settled the western prairie, this western most highlighted row of states from North Dakota to Kansas became part of the Midwest
04:24
and this is in fact the current definition that is used by the US Census Bureau today. Now, I want you to notice two things here. First, neither Louisville nor Pittsburgh is in the Midwest which, I mean, they're close
04:41
but they're not there, so, you know, we were right. The Midwest is, though, in fact, centered a bit west of middle. It's just that the definition of middle changed. So, the middle was the Mississippi and this is completely natural to people at the time even though it takes a little bit of curiosity
05:01
and research for us to come to now. Anyway, I thought that was interesting. I thought it was worth sharing but this does conclude the history portion of our talk. From here on out, we're gonna turn back to something that's from your own educational history. You remember story time, right? Whatever happened to story time?
05:22
I mean, when did we decide that it was only for kids? When did we stop getting something this awesome? Do you remember your favorite question when you were a kid? I'll bet it was a single word. A question that you asked over and over until it frustrated the grownups.
05:41
You know the question I'm talking about, don't you? The question is why? When we were kids, we were constantly trying to make sense of the world around us, try to figure out how the world works and why is the tool that we actually used to do that? We know that there's gotta be some reason for things
06:08
and we're pretty sure, not completely sure, that that reason's worth knowing. So, especially whenever it's coming to rules, right? For instance, like why do I have to go to bed at 8 p.m.
06:21
or like chocolate chip cookies have eggs in them and eggs are a breakfast food so why can't I have chocolate chip cookies for breakfast? Or maybe why shouldn't I drive my little sister and myself off the go-kart track after a heavy rain? That last one might just be me but you get the idea.
06:41
So, we would pepper the grownups with why after why until they would eventually get frustrated and they would give us a predictable answer because I said so. And that's a really unsatisfying answer as a kid, especially because we all kinda knew that what that really meant was I don't know.
07:01
But I don't know isn't an answer that adults wanna say. They're not comfortable with that. It's a lot easier to tell people that this is just how it is. And I think this is where a real tragedy occurs because at some point along the way we learn that it doesn't pay to be too curious.
07:20
We stop asking why and then we start to take certain things for granted. Now, I call this a tragedy because whenever we stop asking why, whenever we stop being curious about and we start accepting some answer as the way it is, as good enough, we lay another brick in the foundation that affects how we interpret
07:40
what's happening all around us. We build up our worldview. But now, you're probably wondering where this is going. That's fair. So, as I've been doing this conference speaking thing for a while now, no matter how often I do it, I can't get past the idea that all I'm really doing is stating the obvious.
08:01
And yet, I can't help but notice that no matter how many times and how obvious I think these things are, we don't always act like it, myself included. If they're so obvious, then why don't we live like they are? So, in this talk, like other talks I've given and other talks that you're gonna hear
08:20
throughout this conference, I'm gonna stand up here and I'm gonna tell you some things that have become obvious to me. And there's a good chance that your instinct is gonna be to react in one of two ways. Either you're gonna nod your head in agreement, or you're gonna dismiss what I'm saying as naive or just plain wrong.
08:40
And I'd like to suggest that either of these reactions is problematic. Because your initial reaction to what I say has a lot less to do with what I say and more to do with how what I say and how I say it squares with your view of how the world is or, and this part's even more important, I think,
09:01
how your view of the world should be. So, since no two people have a worldview that's exactly the same, and we're gonna have differences in what we find obvious, I wonder if that's part of what makes statements that start with obviously so irritating? Because someone making an incorrect presumption
09:23
that their worldview is shared by you can feel really uncomfortable. But there's real opportunity to learn about each other and ourselves in the space between reacting and hearing. If we can just take a breath and kind of sit through the discomfort for a moment
09:41
and remain curious, asking questions before snapping to judgment. So, through the rest of this talk, you're going to have an opportunity to practice this. You're gonna see a bunch of slides like this one with obviously in the top left corner and a statement that might prompt a reaction,
10:00
positive, negative, or otherwise, from you. And I'm gonna invite you to resist reacting and instead just stop, take a deep breath, and ask yourself three questions each time you see an obviously slide. So, try to commit these to memory now because I'm gonna give you time to use them later.
10:21
The first one, is it? What's my initial instinct? Is this obvious to me or is it obviously wrong? The second, why? Why do I hold my opinion? Why might this other person hold theirs? And third, so? So what?
10:40
If this is obvious to me, then what would living from this truth look like? How might it change the way I think and the way I act if I really believed it? Before we get started with story time, I feel like I need to get something out of the way. For the longest time, when I would go out to speak at conferences, people would come up to me and they would act like they knew me
11:02
and I found it really weird. And then I got to thinking and I realized that they weren't really wrong. And I think that's because for the most part, the things that I do and say in private aren't really much different than the things that I do and say in public.
11:20
And I tend also to be really open and vulnerable with strangers. I'm not necessarily sure that I recommend that. That's not necessarily always the safest thing. But I don't actually know how to be any other way. For example, I'm just gonna guess here, but I'm thinking probably most people aren't comfortable getting on stage and intimating the precise quantity of testicles
11:41
they currently have provided that number is non-standard. But whether, I'm glad somebody enjoyed that. But I've always been very open about my experience with testicular cancer. And it's not just the big things. It's maybe cancer sometimes,
12:01
but maybe other times it's my emotional state or anything else really. I've always just sort of defaulted to being open and vulnerable. And that's unlikely to change. It's definitely not gonna change before the end of this talk. So let's just deal with that. I'd like to tell you three stories for today's story time. And the first one is gonna be called Doogie.
12:22
When I was growing up, my first job from the age of 13 was having a paper room. But from the time I could drive, I started to look for something like a real job. Now, as you probably know, for a 16 year old, your career options are somewhat limited. But I had decided at the outset that I didn't wanna work in fast food
12:41
because it seemed like a really stressful job for the money. Everyone's always in a hurry. They're timing you. And you've got that one idiot in line that thinks he's the first one to crack the joke. I thought this was supposed to be fast food while he waits. It just seemed like way too much stress for the money for me. They really do have a stock photo of everything,
13:01
by the way, if you were wondering. So I didn't want stress. As a kid, I actually struggled with undiagnosed IBS. So if I was stressed, I was likely to have some serious stomach issues. Now, I had missed a lot of school due to that, but my parents mostly thought that I was faking it at the time.
13:21
They also told me that I needed to be realistic, that everybody has to start somewhere. But they had raised me to never stop asking why, and I really wasn't too keen on accepting their that's just the way it is answer. And so it was after working my network, which mostly consisted of teachers at the time, that I found myself working my first real job
13:42
as a commissioned appliance salesperson. And this was like 16, and I'm being trained to be an appliance salesperson. So that was kind of cool. Definitely not fast food. My coworkers were all in their 30s, 40s, or older, and so they had taken to calling me Doogie after the title character, the TV show
14:03
about the youngest doctor had just completed its run around them. Now, to be fair, I kind of see why. We both had very poofy hair. But I mean, look at that face. You'd buy a refrigerator from me, right? So the first cool thing about working in retail for me
14:22
was that I found out that I was actually okay at dealing with people. And this was a huge revelation, because I know you're going to find this hard to believe, but I was not a popular kid in school. And so I didn't have a lot of opportunity to find myself in social situations. The second cool thing I found in my new job was it takes a little more explanation.
14:42
So I lived in what was then, and still is, one of the poorest counties in Pennsylvania. And my family was not an exception to those demographics. What wealth did exist there was largely the result of coke and coal mining about a century before, feeding into the steel mills here in Pittsburgh.
15:01
And that wealth had long since dried up and never moved away. Now, as a result, for many of the people that were walking through those doors, the appliance they were about to buy represented a very significant investment. So I learned everything I could about every appliance, and I could rattle off size and brand and everything else from just a model number.
15:22
And I paid special attention to the things that would actually come back through the doors needing repairs, that just were regularly breaking down. So when a family would come through the door, I would listen carefully to what they were looking for, what their budget was, and then I would help them find the most reliable appliance for their budget. The one with the best warranty, too,
15:40
because I knew there was a good chance they couldn't repair or replace this thing that failed. So that was the second cool thing about working in retail. I was able to really help people and their families in a tangible way. And it was a really good feeling for a teenager, especially when someone would come through the door and ask for me by name because they'd had a good experience. Now, in the sales business, especially in appliance sales,
16:04
SPIFs are a term you grow very familiar with. Is there anyone out there that already knows what I'm talking about when I say SPIFs? So a few. For the rest of you, I'm gonna explain. So SPIFs are an incentive program that manufacturers, they pay a salesperson directly for selling specific products.
16:20
So SPIFs oftentimes are worth way more than whatever you might make on a commission. So for instance, in my wonderful job, I could sell a $1200 refrigerator. I would get three quarters of 1% as a commission. So I'd make nine bucks off that sale. But a SPIF on that same refrigerator might be 25 or $50. Now, the cool thing was that some really reputable
16:41
companies that made quality products offered SPIFs. So it was kind of like free money, really, in that case. And you were gonna sell these things anyway, except it wasn't for us because when we would sell a product that manufacturers had a SPIF on, my boss would actually forge our signatures on the SPIF forms, collect the pay that we would do, and then repurpose it toward lower quality
17:03
or older products. And to give you an idea of what we're talking about here in our warehouse, we had things that still came in Harvest Gold and Avocado. If you're familiar with those colors, there's gonna be very few people that know what I'm talking about here. So he had made his own SPIF forms then,
17:20
designed oh so beautifully in Sharpie. And then he would have us fill those out instead. Now, I found out this was going on. I didn't really care. I mean, I was a kid. I didn't need the extra money, so I just kind of kept on selling what I thought was gonna help the customer. And I missed out on some money, but I was okay with that. Eventually, I got called back to the boss's office.
17:42
I'm gonna do my best boss impression here. Gee, buddy, come on back here. That's actually how he talked. He also did call everybody buddy, and it was just up to you to figure out who he meant whenever he would say that. Gee, buddy, I noticed you hadn't been selling my SPIFs. Don't you like money? Well, the rest of our conversation consisted of me explaining to my very principled stance
18:03
on selling what's right for the customer, building loyalty, and my values as a person who cared about doing right by people, but he was having none of that nonsense, none of it at all. So that's how I lost the most lucrative job my teenage self could have hoped for. And yet, it wasn't all lost.
18:23
Some new things became obvious to me based on this experience, and that's gonna give us a chance to practice what we learn. So get ready to stop, take a deep breath, and ask the questions, is it, why, and so.
18:41
So first, it became obvious to me that other people, even people who mean well, don't know what you're capable of. Even though my parents, they had told me that I was gonna have to settle for a fast food job, I held out for something that felt better to me. And it could have gone a different way, but it didn't, and I found out that I ended up being
19:01
perfectly capable of doing a job that surprised them. And if I'm being honest, it surprised me too. I didn't expect to like dealing with people, and I didn't think I was gonna be very good at it, but I learned that even I don't know what I'm capable of until I try. Now, even though that job
19:23
might have just been selling appliances, I had found a way to accomplish something greater while I was there. I found a way to help people, and having that purpose helped me put up with some very, let's just call it suboptimal working conditions. I've come to believe that you can do any job
19:42
with a greater purpose than the one that's been set out for you. And this has really been a key to finding happiness in my work for the years that I've been in this industry. I left that job with a sense of self-worth and self-respect that I hadn't had up until that point.
20:05
I learned that I could take an active role in defining what I was capable of, and what I would choose to do, what I would put up with. That made me a happier person as a result. My boss might have thought I was a loser, but he needed my consent to define me as such.
20:24
The truth was, I had stood up for my values, and that made me anything but a loser. Our next story is one we're gonna call 50 cents. Now my first technical job was working, this guy, was working technical support at an ISP.
20:42
The more observant among you are gonna notice this is not a photo of me, but this is in fact the most menacing technical support representative I have ever seen in my life. Just look at that expression. You've seen that expression before. You've seen it. What?
21:00
Okay, so you're gonna have to forgive me for using stock photography here, but the only photo that I could find of me from this era of my life was this blurry and poorly framed photo of my Neo costume from the company Halloween Party. Anyway, I had started working there when the office was a short drive away from me, but when we acquired another office,
21:21
we purchased another ISP, I decided to stay on with the aim of working my way into a systems administration role. Now I had become a lead technical support rep at that point and I had been training all the people that were starting at the new location, so I thought that boded pretty well for my prospects. So I put up with now an hour long commute each way to get to this office.
21:42
I was being paid hourly as well, six dollars an hour to be exact. This man I had to clock in. So I left home early every morning because I wanted to be sure that even if I hit unexpected traffic, I wasn't gonna be late. Still, one day after I had clocked in
22:01
and got logged into my headset, I was told I was late. I was surprised because I had clocked in on time and being the insolent youth that I was, I told my boss to check my time card. She told me it didn't matter what the time card said, that I had to be in and at my desk by my start time. So to be clear now, we're talking about a difference
22:22
of maybe three minutes here, not too much. I told her if that was the expectation, she should schedule me five minutes earlier. I got written up for having an attitude problem. She wasn't wrong. Maybe I picked the right stock photo after all. After that, I suspected my prospects there maybe weren't as hot as I had thought.
22:42
So I suppose it was a bit lucky then that I got hired in the systems administration role that I was hoping for under a new manager before she had a chance to fire me. I got a 50 cents per hour raise and I was promised another 50 cents per hour if I was doing well in that role within six months. This meant I was now making $6.50 an hour
23:01
as a full-time systems administrator. Yeah, I see some of you know how much work that was. So anyway, I stayed on an sysadmin role for just under a year and I had set up a ton of monitoring and automation scripts there. Eventually, I was offered a job at another ISP for $7.50 an hour.
23:24
That was gonna be the sole technical employee. This was gonna mean I was gonna take network administration, systems administration, server builds, tech support, everything for that low, low price at $7.50 an hour. Now it was a massive increase in responsibility for a very tiny increase in pay but I felt like I had hit a dead end where I was.
23:42
My company still hadn't even come through on that additional 50 cents an hour I was promised. Those two quarters were two of the things that I brought up when I gave notice that I was leaving to the vice president. He was furious, by the way. After all I've done for you, he bellowed. I was just a kid after all
24:01
and he thought he was gonna be able to bully me and I'm still kind of surprised that I had the presence of mind to remain calm and remind him that while I appreciated being given the position, he had to acknowledge I did a good job for the money that he had paid me. I felt a little bit weird explaining to a VP the basics of an employment relationship. Though he agreed I had done a good job,
24:21
he had me escorted out that day. But after I was gone and the answer's to why didn't we handle this? Who handled this kept coming back? Well that was Ernie. I was rehired a year later for more than twice what I was making. The VP who had yelled at me no longer worked there. I probably wouldn't have gone back if he had
24:41
and I found myself having learned some more obvious things from the whole experience. Now this is your cue to remember to breathe, ask the questions and some of these are gonna be a little more probably uncomfortable than the last batch so be warned. First, you set your own asking price.
25:00
When I first took this job, I felt thankful to just get a job period and I never even asked what they paid, never thought about asking for a specific salary. My answer had been yes before I'd even been told a number. But I would have had to justify my asking price and when I started, I would have had a hard time justifying any price because I didn't know my value.
25:24
So you need to know your value. Did I become twice as valuable in the year that I was gone? Was I capable of twice as much work? Of course not. It was just that my absence for the year made it clear to my company that they weren't quite paying me what my value was.
25:43
Now I should have been making that value clear while I was at the job and honestly before I ever took it. But to know your value with any degree of certainty, it isn't enough to rely on other people to tell you. You have to know what you value
26:01
in order to know that what you're getting from the job and giving up for the job is a fair trade. Now at the time I left, I was leaving money on the table because I overvalued the experience they were getting me by dumping lots of work in my lab. And truly that did have value, getting the chance to do the work. But there were other things
26:21
that I drastically undervalued at that time and one of them especially. When I was young, it was really easy to undervalue my time. After all, I mean it seemed like I had so much of it to spend and we've all heard the phrase time is money for so long that we can be forgiven
26:42
for being so willing to trade time for money. If we're not careful, we're gonna make that trade for a long while before we truly understand the opportunity cost of the trade that we made. I spent all of my 20s gleefully trading time for money with no concern for what I was giving up
27:02
in order to do so. I traded my time freely in exchange for money to buy things to own that in turn owned me and I can't point to a single one of those things today. A while back I decided to have this license plate made to remind me of what the car I drive and the toys I collect amount to in the long run, nil.
27:23
Time is the most non-renewable resource that's ours to give. It's something that we're all running out of. And while it's true that we can exchange time for money, that exchange rate is highly variable and our supply is subject to all sorts of things that are outside of our direct control.
27:42
For most of us, we don't know time's value until we've spent a good deal of it already. I don't have any special claim to this particular truth by the way. This is something we've been aware of for thousands of years and yet if it's so obvious, why don't we find ourselves acting like it is? For the longest time, I didn't know my value
28:02
because I didn't know what I valued. So ask yourself, what do you value? If you're having trouble answering that question, I'd suggest an easier one. Where do you invest your time? If you can answer that, you'll begin to understand what an employer is truly asking from you in exchange for that paycheck.
28:22
And depending on your answer, you might start to get pretty frustrated with the choices that you've been making. I know I was. It's obvious to me now that commuting is unpaid labor. I was spending two hours a day going to and from my job. Back then, I could do almost anything we needed from home
28:42
and if you're a software developer today, there's absolutely nothing that says you can only be productive whenever you're sitting in a very specific chair in a very specific office in a very specific city. The high speed internet connections many of us have in our homes today are far faster than the DS3 lines I had at the office back then
29:01
and we have fantastic communication tools that use all that bandwidth. If you're spending time in a commute every day, is that time that you actually want to invest, are you getting something out of it? Realize too that if you're a thought worker, you're working whenever you're thinking and if that's really true,
29:22
then pretending that work happens at a specific hour or in specific locations is just plain silly. What do you actually need to do your job? Maybe you say I need a computer or I need a text editor and sure, that's part of it but a huge part of what you're being paid for is just thinking.
29:41
Now I've had some of my best ideas in the shower and I'm pretty sure my company doesn't consider my shower to be part of their or any other office. If your company doesn't support a distributed team, then it's only disadvantaging itself. It's ludicrous to me that companies say
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they're looking to hire the most talented people but often mean the most talented people who are currently located in or willing to relocate to San Francisco. Yes. I don't mean to pick on San Francisco. It's a lovely city but it's an easy one
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in this particular case. Do you think that it might be possible that some of the most talented people in the world don't fit those criteria? Now I'm not gonna lie to you. Running a distributed team takes more work. For starters, developing strong written and verbal communication skills are a must on a distributed team.
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But strong written and verbal communication skills are important anyway. Programming is written communication and there's a whole lot of communication that goes on before you ever start coding. All other things being equal, I do believe that a team full of strong communicators will beat a team without them every time. So if your company intentionally limits its candidate pool
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to a tiny subset of the world's most talented people by insisting they live in a specific location, all so that it can build a team that requires less intentionality and discipline in communication, I think it's reasonable to say that they're fighting at least one arm tie behind their backs.
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If a company claims it's distributed and then wants to adjust your salary for market rate, please do me and yourself a favor and ask them why. If the company is actually running a distributed team, the value they get from you is not dependent on the location you work from. Plus, stop and think how ridiculous this is for a second.
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If you choose to move somewhere else of your own accord, does your company change your salary? What if you had a sick relative that you had to take care of? Should they change it then, does it matter? Since when is it up to a company to determine what your standard of living should be, as opposed to paying you based on how much they value the work you do?
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You might say, well, what about those of us who want to live somewhere with a high cost of living? That's absolutely a choice you're free to make. It still doesn't affect how much value you deliver to a company, though, and I think that making your salary
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depend on where you live, it really kind of dilutes the impact of that choice. That's a choice that you have a lot of power with. So we're back to discussing how we determine our worth again. This never gets old.
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So there's nothing like a cancer diagnosis to get you thinking about what you really want to have to show for your time, and you know now, if you didn't before, that I'm a cancer survivor. What you might not have known is that my mom was also a cancer survivor. She was diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer in 2012.
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Well, last year, we found out that her cancer was back and had metastasized to her liver and to her bone. She was undergoing chemotherapy, and I really wanted to be with her. Additionally, my daughter was going back to college. Now, we have the same birthday, and she was turning 21 on the same day that I was turning 40.
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So I really wanted to celebrate with her, and we were gonna be driving her back to college anyway, and because I worked at Splice Engineering and we are a distributed team, I didn't have to make a choice. I got to drive with her and my wife back to her last year of college and help her move in. I got to be a bad influence on her.
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We got to go out and celebrate our double birthday, which was a big milestone for both of us. I also got to celebrate other important milestones, like her first drink, and then I got to drive home to Fayette County and visit my mom and the rest of my family for a week and a half.
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I got to toast lollipops with my youngest nephew at his second birthday party. I got to spend all of this time with the people that I love most without neglecting the people on my team, whom I also love. I didn't have to take any vacation time, and my time spent traveling had exactly zero impact on my team at Splice. When I wasn't working from a hotel room
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or my parents' house, I was working from this really sweet office that looks like it's straight out of the set of Mad Men with my best friend of 35 years. On my drive home, I discovered that I could tweet and dictate notes via carplay, so I was even able to write part of the outline for this very talk while I was driving home and tweet a lot.
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Now, we are blessed to work in an amazing industry that affords us this kind of freedom. Would it really have been worth sacrificing these experiences to work somewhere that required me to put my butt in a very specific chair in a very specific office in a very specific city to do a job I could do anywhere?
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Look, I don't say any of this to make anyone jealous if this isn't your situation right now, but to explain why I feel so strongly about the value of distributed teams. A company that lets its team members work distributed creates space for the kinds of experiences that last. Space where there otherwise may not be any. A company that lets people spend time
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with the people they love, no matter where those people are, that's a company that values people. I believe that if you care about people, you're going to attract people that care about people. If you care about people, you're going to treat those people
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with respect and dignity and not like cogs in a machine. If you care about people, the people who work with you will find putting people first as natural as breathing and your company and products will be better for it. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, well, that's all well and good, but it takes sacrifice to put a dent in the universe
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and I want to work with people that are willing to make that sacrifice. But here's the thing. People are an important part of the universe. Scratch that. People are the important part of the universe. When you talk about making a dent in the universe,
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what do you really mean? If you don't impact people in some meaningful way, who is going to care? Who's going to remember you when you're gone? Isn't that what we really want? To have touched people's lives? I'm so happy to be part of a team that gets that. As my mom's condition worsened,
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I went home more often, driving every other week. One Saturday, not long after I left to head back to Louisville, my dad sent me these texts on the right deck about a package he had received. I listened as Siri read the texts, but I couldn't understand what he was talking about. So I called him and he explained that my company had sent 20 handwritten cards
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and chocolates from different members of the team, and they were addressed to my mom. He read the first one to me from my VP Juan Pablo, and as he did, we cried together. It explained the purpose of the cards. I had expected them to be sympathy cards, but these weren't that.
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The team had written 20 letters about me to a woman they didn't know, expressing how through me she had touched their lives. Last month, I lost my mom. If I hadn't been part of a functional distributed team that put people first, I wouldn't have been able to visit my family every other week for months.
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I wouldn't have had the opportunity to spend as much time as I did with her. It's likely I wouldn't have been with her when she died and I would have missed out on making memories that I'm gonna cherish forever. So if you ever find yourself questioning the value of building a functional distributed team that values people, I hope you'll remember this story. Last story's a quick one.
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So hay rides were kind of a big thing when I was growing up. Anyone else? Big thing, hay rides, yeah. So yeah, one guy, yeah. So there was this hay ride that I went to in junior high and it was at a church. Afterward, they had a bonfire with hot chocolate and s'mores and stuff,
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but unless you get confused, I'm not pictured here. I'm pictured here. Now by now, you've detected a theme. No matter when a picture is taken of me, I will look like a dork. As we've established, I wasn't a popular kid and just like every school dance I'd ever attended, I was a wallflower. So I was leaning up against the wall being a perfectly acceptable wallflower
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and I wanted you to take a moment to appreciate how much effort that takes in an era where there aren't smartphones. Like you can't look like you're busy. You just have to lean there and pretend you're that disinterested. Then suddenly two cute girls appeared and they were talking to me and I was skeptical because I was like, well, it's a church thing. They probably have to talk to the dork standing over there all alone, but still, I had to do something.
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And so this was my inner monologue around that point and yes, I really was trying to think of what a cool person would do. So if I had a phone that had internet access, I might have been able to figure this out, but I didn't have that and I was left to my own devices. So I thought of the coolest person I knew, Arthur Fonzarelli from Happy Days.
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After all, he was cooler than the Fonz. The answer is no one. No one is the answer you're looking for. So I tried to strike this particular pose, propping my foot up against the wall that I was conveniently leaning on, only there was a window there. So I put my foot through the window, sent glass kind of shattering down on top of these kind grandmotherly types
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and that was, yeah, I made an impact, all right. It was not the impact that I had planned to make and it wasn't the last time that I would do something that wasn't really true to who I really was in order to try to fit in with what I thought people wanted from me, but we don't have time for all of those. So through this and other experiences like it,
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I came away with what might be one of the most important lessons that I ever learned. Look, life is hard. It's also pretty awesome, lots of the time and it's most definitely worth it, but yeah, life is hard.
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So maybe live just one of them is a thing. We throw the term authenticity around a lot to the point where it's lost almost all meaning. Even corporations and brands try to be authentic. Just seeing or hearing the word can bring on kind of a strong impulse to react. So if you're feeling that impulse,
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just breathe with me for a second. We're almost through this. You're not a corporation and contrary to what some might say, you're also not a brand. You're a human being. So what does it mean to be an authentic human being? To me, the easiest way to describe it is living one life. Being my authentic self means
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that if I check out tomorrow, the people I know could still have a discussion with me in their heads. They'd know what I would say and what I would do because they got to know me, not the me I thought they wanted. Living an authentic life is leaving something behind of the real me to remember. And thankfully, it's also a great way to have real and genuine relationships
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with the people around you today. But what does your authentic self look like? We're all still figuring that out. It's okay. People change, people grow. Maybe you're still trying some things on for size and that's totally fine. But when you do find something that fits, I hope you'll actually take note of it. Why is not just a question for others,
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it's a question we ask ourselves. You may remember I said when we stop asking why we accept an answer as good enough, we lay another brick in the foundation that affects how we interpret what's going on all around us. We start to build up our world view. That affects what seems obvious to us, how things are or how things should be. Living by what's truly obvious to us
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is as natural as breathing. Maybe if we remain curious, we'll keep asking ourselves why and find values we didn't know we had, truths about ourself we didn't know and we'll start living like we mean it. Look, striving to live an authentic life is vulnerable and scary and hard, but it's also really living and loving and connecting
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and it's so worth it. Maybe one day we'll find ourselves surprised when people we've never met think they know us and we'll be even more amazed when we realize they're not wrong. So with all that said, doesn't seem fitting to end our time together without sharing my own why. When I say my why, I mean some fundamental truth about what I find most valuable.
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It's an answer I end up with for many of the things that I do if I just keep asking why long enough. Why am I doing any of this? Why am I here right now? You might not know yet, but you've got the tool to figure it out if you're curious. For instance, earlier I told you I think people are the important part of the universe. And we talked earlier about how a great place
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to start figuring out what we value is to look at where we spend our time. Start with where I'm spending my time right now with you. So I'll ask again, what's my why? I hope the answer is obvious right now. My why is people. More specifically, since you are a part of the group people, my why is you.
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And I'm gonna go one step further and say something that you might not expect to hear from the stage of a programming conference, but that's okay because you know now if you didn't before that I have no filter. I love you. Not the collective you. I told you I'm from the south. If I meant y'all, I'd say y'all. Or I used to be from Pittsburgh,
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so maybe yinz, but I mean that I love you. I don't blame you if you're skeptical because especially if, I don't even know you yet, especially since we use the term love for everything from family to french fries these days. I'll forgive you for being jaded, thinking I can't possibly mean it.
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But see the thing is I don't have to know you personally to know that you are worthy of love so I'm willing to go out on a limb now. You are loved and worthy of love. And stay here with me for a moment and breathe and remember the exercise. You try it one last time with me.
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Is it? Is this obvious to me or obviously wrong? Why? Why do I hold my opinion? Why might he hold his? So? So what? What would living like I'm loved and worthy of love look like?
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How might it change the way I think and act? If I really believe it. It's harder actually looking at y'all doing this by the way. So I'm willing to bet there are some people in the audience right now who don't feel that way and if even one of you comes away from this talk recognizing how very much they're worth
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then I'll consider my time well spent. Anyway, thanks for letting me share some stories with you. I hope you'll share some of yours and I hope that you'll know by doing so you'll have made a dent in the universe.