Show notes
Key takeaways:Job hopping at a young age can help you better understand what you like and what you're good atDoing meaningful and impactful work keeps us engaged and not bored at work and hating our livesBurnout happens more often in tech than we care to admit, and one way to cope with it is by doing an activity that you're not good atNormalizing talking about mental health at work gives others a safe space to take care of their own mental healthTips for concentrating: activities with low cognitive load can help you concentrate better on primary activitiesDiscovering your own leadership style and what works for you helps you become a successful managerJumping off the IC track too early to get into management can hurt you as a manager in the long runAbout our guest:Denise is an Engineering Manager at HashiCorp and a professional margin-scribbler. She's been using sketchnotes and comics for the last few years to make concepts in engineering more accessible and fun.Find our guest on:MastodonBlueskyLinkedInFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:Rails Active Record Query InterfaceSpaces vs Tabs debateVideo game music can help with attention spanAudioslave (supergroup)Broken Social Scene (supergroup)Neha Batra (GitHub)MySpaceBook: Work Won't Love You BackTranscript:ADRIANA:Okay. Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery DevOps, observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela. Coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today is Denise Yu of HashiCorp. Welcome, Denise.DENISE:Thanks so much, Adriana. Very excited to be here.ADRIANA:I'm excited too. And where are you calling from?DENISE:I'm also in Toronto. We're neighbors.ADRIANA:Yes. Yeah. I always say on the podcast, I always get very excited when I have a fellow Torontonians on. We need, you know, we need to get some good representation in Canada.DENISE:Yes, yes, we are only 10% of the Cana... Actually, no, I think I think the GTA is 20% of the Canadian population.ADRIANA:AV: Oh, damn. That's. Yeah. DENISE:I mean, we are there's a lot of us, actually.ADRIANA:There are a lot of us. Well, with that, I think this is a great segway to get into our lightning round questions.DENISE:Let's do it.ADRIANA:Ready... Okay, let's let's see how lightning they are. They may or may not be. I roll with it. Okay, first question, are you a lefty or a righty?DENISE:I am right handed.ADRIANA:Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?DENISE:I have an iPhone. I don't really know how to use Android anymore, but every time I try to use my friend's Android phone, I end up calling her mom by accident. I just don't know how to use it. So I'm going to go iPhone for the, like, basic reason: I know how to use an iPhone.ADRIANA:And it's funny because my my mom, had, an Android for a hot minute because even though my dad had an... he had an iPhone for work. That was his primary cell phone. He decides he's going to buy my mom a freaking Android. My mom was computer illiterate. Like, who would any, like, any panic. Like, if she hit the wrong thing on a phone and it took her to a different screen, it would be. Like, oh my God, my phone is broken. I'm like. So she’d call me for tech support on her Android. And it's like, okay, if I if I'm there physically with your phone, I can probably figure it out. But like you calling me, I have an iPhone. I have no frickin’ clue what's going on here.DENISE:Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's not just her. I consider myself pretty, pretty tech literate. And I also struggle.ADRIANA:Yeah, it's a bit of. It's a bit of a maze. I ended up buying her an iPhone eventually because I'm like, oh, I can't deal with this. You have an iPad get... Let's get you an iPhone, mom.DENISE:Yeah, exactly. Exactly.ADRIANA:Yeah. All right, next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?DENISE:Oh, you know, I don't do that much development anymore, because I'm a manager now, but, for development, I think my brain is just most attuned to using Macs. I've developed in a Linux environment before, but, just having to think about every piece of software that you want to download does get in the way. I think. Yeah. So yeah, I'm going to I'm going to go with the, the boring answer here and say, Mac, I'm best at using Macs for development and otherwise, these days.ADRIANA:All right. Down for it, down for it. Yeah. Linux is fun. If you're, like, fiddling around, I find, I mean, I, I've, I've interviewed people who are like, yeah, Linux.DENISE:Yeah.ADRIANA:You know, I've had fun with Linux, but like, sometimes when all I need is for the damn thing to work...DENISE:Yes, exactly.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah. So. Okay. Next question. What's your favorite programing language?DENISE:Ooh. I trained as a Ruby developer, so I feel like Ruby still has a place near and dear to my heart. I think Ruby is the most fun language to do little toy projects and do prototyping in. It's still like my brain's first programing language. So I think if I'm going to start a new project and I don't want to think too hard about what frameworks I'm going to use or like, if I want to just get straight to the part where I start solving the problem and writing tests and everything and seeing something working, I'm still going to choose Ruby for that today.ADRIANA:That's cool.DENISE:Yeah. I like Ruby. I don't actually, I haven't used that many programing languages. I'm not one of those polyglot people. So I've used JavaScript. Because I was a web developer for a lot of my career. Picked up Golang a couple of years ago. That was pretty fun. It's a good, nice, fast language. Very opinionated. Which is. Which is nice.ADRIANA:I appreciate that about Go.DENISE:Yeah. And I've done a couple of projects in Go. Everything in HashiCorp is in go. So I think, like, Go literacy is a great skill to have, especially if you work in the infrastructure ops space today and you're looking to build tools because there probably is already a Go package for the thing that you're trying to do that you can just import. I was a Rails developer for a bunch of years. Worked at GitHub, did some Rails at pretty serious GitHub scale for a little while. So I know that, sometimes when you have like a huge monolith and especially if you're trying to coordinate with like tons and tons and tons of different teams, and you want to make sure that every, you know, every single query that goes out is performant. Sometimes, like using you typically people use like Ruby in production. They're using Rails in production underneath that. So I think like some of the challenges I've seen with Rails at that kind of scale is, active record is just so magical. It's like the main thing you have to use when you're interfacing with with SQL databases, but when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. And you spend a lot of time untangling the magic of active record. So that's my only kind of caveat. Like if I'm working on a real production system today, I think like there are definitely a number of scenarios where doing everything in Ruby, through everything in Rails, can slow you down at a certain point. But I think that probably is true for any programing language. code base large enough, there just is more coordination and more context switching that you're going to deal with, especially if it's, you know, ideally, it's not just you working on this model at this, you at like a couple dozen or a couple hundred other people.ADRIANA:Yeah, that's a very fair point, especially when you're working at such a large organization, which is like very jarring when you go from like small organization to large one where you're like, oh my God, I have to coordinate with all these people.DENISE:Yeah. Like my first job was in Rails and it was me and three other developers. And I remember, in the same day, I could say like, oh, I have an idea for something like, what if I built this new, you know, view for our teachers or whatever, and it's just like, go talk to the product manager, get him on board, explain why it's important. He's like, okay, cool, greenlit. Happy for you to spend a day on this. And within the day, you know, the features in production. So that's kind of fun and nice. But yeah, the bigger the company, the bigger the product, the bigger the code base. That's often not feasible.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. I, I worked I worked at a bank for 11 years and... let me tell you...DENISE:Yeah. And then banks and, you know, like, they have all this extra compliance and regulatory stuff that you have to make sure you're on the correct side of the line on for everything.ADRIANA:Exactly. Yeah. And I think, like for me, and like before I worked at the bank, I had worked, like kind of a medium-sized startup-y sort of company. And so, you know, I went from like, of course I have access to the Prod database to... You have somebody who manages the UAT database and somebody who manages the Prod database. And yeah, you can like mostly touch the Dev database, but we also have someone who manages that too.DENISE:Wow. Okay, so layer is on layers on layers of [...]ADRIANA:There were so many layers. And it was funny because I like purposely moved to a large organization because my thought was like, this is too disorganized for me, I need structure. And then I moved to this bank. I'm like. This is too structured for me. Yeah. Can't win, can't win.DENISE:Yeah. Well, I think. It's important to like one piece of advice that I always give people who are earlier career than me is like, jump around a little bit. You know, like you, the only way to figure out what kind of job you're going to enjoy is to experience all, you know, different types. So I often encourage people, like, if you're early career and you're, you know, you're looking at job hop because you feel like you're not learning enough or you feel like you could make more money elsewhere, which like, that is, by the way, always true.Yeah. It's true that especially early career, you will get paid higher faster if you job hop. Just like career progression within companies is often just not set up to aggressively retain talent on pay. But I always like, try to encourage people. I'm like, well, if you're, if you're bored because you're not learning anything, optimize for change, right? Like whatever the next place you go, pick something that's radically different from what you're working on now. So if you're at a startup, then go go to a more established company. Or if you're in, you know, like the education space. Go work in something. You know, go work in. I don't even know, like something that's like a software as a service or do something that's radically different.ADRIANA:Yeah. That's such really great advice. Like it it it actually resonated so much with me because during my, during my stint at this bank, I was there for five years. And then I'm like, I've had it with technology and I quit my job to become a professional photographer. Did that for a year and then realized, oh my God, why? Why? But it gave me like it gave me different. It gave me really good skills, actually. That worked out very well for later in my career and now also for DevRel. And then I ended up working there another like six years or so. But, yeah, I mean, and it happened like part of the reason why I quit was I was like, so unbelievably bored with my job. I'm like, yeah, like, I can sit here and do, like, not much and I'll get paid. But I hate my life right now.DENISE:Yeah. Oh my gosh, that that resonates with me so hard. I feel like. A lot of, like a lot of women that I meet in the tech industry have this. We have this affliction where we just can't coast. And I don't. Know what it is. I, I've was just I met. So many women who are like, you know, you're in a cushy job. There is no threat of you being laid off or fired or anything. Right now, your job is pretty easy. Maybe the people you work with are kind of annoying or hard to deal with. Maybe you feel like the work's not super impactful, but it's easy and you're getting a good paycheck. What is wrong with us that we can't just accept those two things?And like, I've also. Been in that position and I was like my brain is contracting. I am becoming worse at engineering. I'm losing my feeling of being plugged into the industry and to other people. And I need to go. I need to go off and I need to do something else. I need to feel like my brain is switched on.ADRIANA:Yes. Yeah, that that's the perfect way to describe it. And maybe it's, it I don't know about you, but, like, I've, I've got ADHD and, like, my brain, like it was too much for my brain. I'm like, this is, like, so fucking boring. I can't I can't take it anymore. And I needed I also needed to, like, I have this need to feel like I need to be productive almost to a fault. Like, if I, I have days where I feel like I'm unproductive, even though I've actually been productive. But like... That did not help.DENISE:Yeah. No, I've. I've quite literally like, gone to therapy for this issue, but, like, I just cannot sit and do nothing. I can't just relax and let a good thing be. I was really burned out back in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. So I left my job and the pandemic hit. And then I joined Microsoft slash GitHub, which in March 2020, it's a complete, like tangent, but March 2020. Fantastic time to join Microsoft and get that historically low strike price. And the only regret I have is like selling my RSUs way too early because now. Microsoft is doing so well. I don't like, I should have held, but I'm always like, just offload these RSUs. It's just like, get them off me. I'm not incurring any risk of the company. Just give me my money. But anyway, back in 2020, yeah, I, I left my previous job, and, before I joined GitHub, I, I was so burnt out at that last job that I quite literally have, like, memory loss from the last [...]ADRIANA:Oh my god.DENISE:Yeah. I think this, you know, getting to that stage of burnout happens pretty often in tech, right? You always want to say yes to things like, you never want to pass up an opportunity or put like, now I look back on. Then I realized that's what setting boundaries means. But I didn't do it at the time. I didn't have that language or that skill set at the time. But yeah, I was really, really, really burnt out. And my therapist worked with me on she was like, I'm going to, I'm going to set you a challenge, and you have to find an activity that relaxes you that is not outcome oriented. I asked, what do you mean? She's like,Do something that you suck at. And don't worry about the result. But what if I got good at it? Yeah. And she was like, what? So every week she would ask me, like, what did you do this week? And I was like, I tried to learn the guitar, but I suck at it. She was like, that is the point. So something that you. Suck at and do it for the sake of the process, not the outcome. So I think. That is such. That is such a hard rewiring of the brain for overachievers and. Probably for ADHD brains like us.ADRIANA:Yes. Yeah, that's that is so incredibly true because we we and and there's there's the instant gratification. Like you start something and you have to be amazing at it.DENISE:Yeah.ADRIANA:Right away. And then if you're amazing at something naturally, it's like, whatever it was like it wasn't hard. So then you downplay your own amazingness because it was too easy for you. Because you're actually talented at something.DENISE:Yeah, exactly. Like if you've been, I don't know, like my, my mom, I was the kind of kid that was signed up for everything because I also have an overachiever parent. And so I think like that, that this is the the drive to do a lot of things and try to be good at a lot of things is so deeply ingrained in my brain, I don't think I will ever work out of my system, but, I did a lot of music and art as a kid.Music, because my mom thought it was a good idea for me to play instruments. Therefore I would have a stronger college application. I was five, but she signed me up for piano lessons. I think in the back of her mind being like, one day this will get her into university.ADRIANA:That's hilarious. Now do you do you still like piano?DENISE:I still enjoy it. I don't practice every day by any stretch of the imagination. I play in a very, very casual, like, jam band with some friends once a month. We just cover. We don't have, like, a it's not a real band. So we don't have like, any social... anything. But this actually was one of the things that I, you know, I have been trying to internalize this advice of do something that has no output, right? Do something for the love of the process. And so I thought, okay, I want to push myself out of my comfort zone. I want to do something that's fun with my friends. So what if I set up this jam band and just, like, invite everybody over every, like, once a month? We play whatever instruments we want. So one person, you know, usually plays bass guitar, but the other day he brought in a saxophone. He was like, I have a, you know, I have a saxophone in my house. I know a little bit. I'm going to learn the saxophone part to “Valerie” by Amy Winehouse at this place. And like, you know, there's no expectation. We all sound pretty good because a lot of us do play music or played music a lot as kids. So we're not like, beginners.ADRIANA:YeahDENISE:We cover the songs like well enough to feel satisfied that, you know, it sounds good and my neighbors won’t complain. But I don't know. It's been a really fun and rewarding kind of like, side hobby over the past year or so. Yeah. Try trying to play play music for the process and not. I mean, at this point, I'm not getting into a university, you know, like that. That part of my not working or anything, not going to become like a recording musician at this point.ADRIANA:Yeah. That's such a really good point. And, it, you know, it's and going back to the burnout, like, so prevalent in our industry, like it's, it's ridiculous, like to the point where when I talk, when I talk to my therapist about burnout, she's like, yeah, there's a lot of burnout in your industry. I'm like. Oh, shit. She must deal with a lot of us, then. Like, okay, this is common. For for you. Like, what are what were the internal signs like where you started feeling like you were, burning out. Like what? What were the tells for you?DENISE:Usually I don't notice them. It's my partner who notices them. Yeah. So I if I lived on my own, I think I was just never notice. Eventually my mom would call me and be like, hey, what's going on? But my my partner has told me that, just my, I don't sleep very much. I, my, I mean, I'm still showering every day, but I'm not, like, picking up as many chores around the house. I'm not keeping the house as clean as it could be. I am, you know, leaving a lot of laundry on the floor instead of, like, putting it away in the laundry basket and things, like the normal functioning things, just take a lot longer to get done. Dishes won't be put away, laundry won't be put away, that sort of thing. But those are kind of like, behavioral things. But I think mentally I just go to a very withdrawn place, like, it becomes very hard to have a deep conversation with me. I'm like artificially happy. I'm like, cool, cool, cool. But I don't, you know, it's hard for me to engage meaningfully with people and with activities that I used to enjoy.ADRIANA:Yeah, that's that's such a really good point because I, I find for myself too, like when, when, like I'm in a funk. I definitely get. Very. Withdrawn and I get quiet. And, I'm yappy at home.DENISE:Yeah.ADRIANA:So when I get quiet, it's like. And so, like, you know, I've gotten into this habit, like my, my husband can notice. And he, he’ll... and my daughter too. And and they'll go like, are you okay? And, you know, in the past there was like, I’m fine. Which.DENISE:Yeah.ADRIANA:Not okay. Yeah. And now I'm trying to get into the habit of, like, saying, no, I'm not okay. And this is what I'm feeling and trying to be a little bit more like, introspective about my feelings and maybe just trying to understand, like, my triggers as well.DENISE:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. My previous manager, I've talked about burnout pretty extensively with. I'm like pretty open about this. I try to be open about it at work, too, and I think it's really important if you're in a leadership position, like if you're a team leader or a manager or a director, I think like being a little bit vulnerable about mental health is actually a positive thing. There obviously is a limit you don't want to like use your 1 to 1 time with your report. It's like unloading about how badly you're doing. I don't think that’s, you know, super appropriate.ADRIANA:I agree. I agree.DENISE:But, you know, saying like, hey team, I need a mental health day. Doing that periodically is actually really important, and it contributes to creating like an environment where other people can also find the support that they need from their peers. If that is something that helps them.ADRIANA:Yeah, I, I agree. Yeah. Normalizing it for your team is... The boss is doing it. Therefore it's okay for me to do it.DENISE:Yeah, exactly. I, some of the things that I, you know, you don't realize a lot of these things, like, are not noticeable in the moment because your own capacity for sensing and reflecting is so limited when you're in the midst of burnout. But looking back on that time, I'm like, yeah, like I mentioned, I quite literally have memory loss from there were things that my, my partner will say, oh, you, that was a really tough time for you. These are all the things that happened. I was like, wow, three of those five things I do not remember happening. Like, there's some former colleagues who who joined, you know, the Toronto office, in the last, like 4 or 5 months. And I was there, some of them have reached out to me on LinkedIn, just, like, casually over the years. So, hey, remember when we used to work together and I'll be like, yes, I'll type. Yes. Hey, how are you doing? Like, I have no recollection of who you are. That's so bad. Like, according to LinkedIn, we did both physically work in the same office three years, but I have literally have no recollection of any conversation we've ever had.ADRIANA:It’s basically like a trauma in your brain and you.DENISE:Kind of....ADRIANA:And you’ve pushed it away. That's. Yeah, I think it is. It's funny because like on a similar vein, like, you know, my, my sister and I like we're three years apart and we'll be like reminiscing on stuff of the past and I'm like, I'll be like, oh, do you remember this, this and this? She's like, no, but do you remember this, this and this? And I'm like, no. So it’s like, different things are significant to us. Different things are like traumatic enough to remember or traumatic enough to forget.DENISE:Yeah. That's funny.ADRIANA:Yeah. Right. Oh, we still have some, lightning round question.DENISE:Okay, let's do it.ADRIANA:Okay. Next question. I'm sure it'll like, it'll it'll result in in in some nice tangents, which I absolutely love. Okay. Next one. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?DENISE:Ooh. Interesting question. I think in my heart of hearts, I am still a dev that loves to ship features. I work at, because it's funny, because I worked in the kind of cloud infrastructure, cloud software as a service space for a bunch of years. I was at Pivotal for three and a half years. GitHub was was feature dev, the work that I was doing there was feature dev, but now I'm at HashiCorp. I'm back kind of in the, the, you know, cloud cloud services seat. So I've had a lot of time to learn cloud operations and get, you know, get good in that skill set. And I think I have a lot more context and appreciation for what that function is at big companies and how to make, you know, cloud teams, platform teams successful. But I think when it comes to my personal practice, the kind of work that I find really fulfilling is user facing work and not not that like ops is not user facing. Absolutely. Like your internal dev teams are your customers and you know that is customer facing work. But I just really I think like I think app development is still the thing. If I were to go back to doing IC work today, that is probably what I would still do.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. Yeah, I, I, I kind of, I, I on my side I kind of love both. I, like, app development was like kind of my first love.DENISE:Yeah. ADRIANA:It will always have. A special part is special place in in my heart for that reason. But yeah. But also like I love the idea of, like, I can code and like, bring up infrastructure. What? So wonderful. Who’da thought. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?DENISE:I feel like you can... YAML is more human readable in my opinion, but JSON doesn't try to say that Norway’s country code is a boolean. Have you ever run into them before we are designing a drop down? Yeah. If you, I ran into this a couple times and a GitHub, I was working on a feature called Issue Forms, which I think is still in production, but, basically we let, repo maintainers configure a YAML file. And within that YAML file you can define like parameters for, for generating a web form and their web form, it's like users have to fill out instead of a free flow markdown text box when they submit a new issue. It was like came off of it. It's like a longstanding feature. Requests from, the early days to GitHub. But two years ago we finally had the chance to implement it. And so I spent a lot of time researching config and going really deep on like, yes, YAML, the right way to do this. Should we make up our own bizarro like markdown hybrid thing built upon, like GitHub flavored markdown? Should we use JSON Should we use something else? Ultimately we landed on YAML because enough of the other config configuration driven things like GitHub actions were written in YAML already on the platform. But yeah, we did a lot of research and if you so like one of the things we wanted to to give operators the ability to do or like repo maintainers, the ability to do is like define a dropdown with with pretext values in it.So oftentimes you want to you want to ask your issue opener in an issue like, did you read my code of conduct, or do you agree to the community standards and this sort of thing. And you can do like a checkbox, but you could also do like a yes or no dropdown. So if you put “no”, YAML casts N-O, as a string, uppercase or lowercase or a mix, that gets cast into a boolean, that gets saved in, the Ruby library, that parses YAML will treat it as a boolean. So when you go and you try to do string operations on a like, you know, string-dot-count or string-dot whatever, it throws a runtime error. So I don't know, there's. Just like a lot of these, there's so many weird cursed pieces of knowledge. And the same will be true if you're designing like a dropdown menu. You're like, what's your country code? Right? And Norway is N-O, it's like randomly in the middle of all your other country codes. There's a boolean value. And that will only ever break using any kind of, you know, YAML parser library in most languages. Type safe languages are probably a little bit better at this. I imagine it probably is better in Go, but Ruby's not type safe. Ruby is just, you know, you can do whatever you want, so dynamically typed languages and YAML are, a just source of such cursed individual pieces of knowledge like that.ADRIANA:Oh, damn, I had not encountered that before. Okay, okay. Today I learned. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?DENISE:I think I'm. I'm in spaces person. Tabs just show up inconsistently, and I'm kind of like, I don't know this. We might as well just go for consistency, I think. And I think spaces are more likely to be consistent. I don't know. I don't really have super strong feelings on this.ADRIANA:But it's definitely that's definitely a very compelling argument for spaces. And that's a the other thing too is like when you when you commit your code, like, who knows, who knows how it will end up. And then, you know, especially on different machines, right. Like a Linux machine versus a Windows versus a Mac, like there's always that aspect to it. So, yes.DENISE:Yeah, exactly.ADRIANA:Cool. Okay. Two more questions. Do you prefer consuming content through video or text?DENISE:I'm leaning more towards video consumption these days. Because I, I find it really hard to just sit and read things or to sit and write, which is challenging because as a manager, often a lot of the tasks that you have to do are sit here and read this document and give feedback or sit here and write this document. So I struggle with that activity. I think this is probably like, ADHD, or some element of that. So watching a video helps me, because I can, I found that if it's something that I really, really need my brain to ingest, I will often try, like taking notes or sketching noting or doing something that's not like a full brain activity while I'm listening to content. Lately, I found that playing Stardew Valley.... Stardew Valley and Animal Animal Crossing are both like low context enough games you can just, like, sit there and fish or whatever. You don't need to think a lot about what's going on in the game. You can listen to a video or listen to, listen to audio and then still, keep enough enough, like processing cycles in your brain going.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's interesting that you mention that because, my daughter was saying how, like, there's certain activities. Oh, yeah, it was reading because she said she has a really hard time, like just sitting down and reading, and she says that it's very helpful to put on music while she reading. So it sounds like a very similar sort of thing.DENISE:Yeah. Yeah, I like music too, but not music with words, because then my brain fixates on the words.ADRIANA:Yeah, I, I agree, I, I think she does music with words which like my thought was, oh my God, I'd start like, you know, bursting into song like, I'll like start singing along spontaneously and it's like, oh.DENISE:Yeah, exactly. So it's got to be like, I, I do like video game music sometimes that actually helps because supposedly video game soundtrack music is optimized for concentration.ADRIANA:Oh, interesting.DENISE:Yeah, I think I had a long time ago. I don't know if it's actually true. Maybe I'm just repeating something that's like video game industry propaganda. But, I, you know, understand that a lot of video game music is intended to promote focus so that you can solve the problem or like, you know, figure out this dungeon or whatever.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah. Well, if it's true, that's that's quite interesting.DENISE:I don't know. I end up listening to a lot of, like, drum and bass. Like club music. Or or, listen to music in a language you don't understand.ADRIANA:Oh yeah...DENISE:Yeah, like animé music. Like everything's in Japanese.ADRIANA:Yeah, that's such a cool idea. I find electronica, is really helpful, like when I'm coding because it’s upbeat. And so it's like it gets you in the groove.DENISE:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I find like motivational music is very important. So sometimes if I'm doing a house task like cleaning the bathroom or folding laundry, I'm like, I, I think this is only going to take five minutes, but I can't like I just can't think about dealing with this. So I need I need some motivational Kelly Clarkson to get me through this activity.ADRIANA:Yeah, exactly. Like just something to lift your spirits because it it makes such a huge difference. Like, I'll be in a shitty mood and then, like, if I hear a good song, I'm like, all right. Okay. Final question. What is your superpower?DENISE:I think, my superpower is that I can organize people. I, I, I'm pretty sure I always tell people like, I'm pretty sure I was a border collie in a past life or something. Like one of those dogs that really wants all the humans to be in the same room together. Like in my field of vision. I need to, like, herd you, like, like a flock of sheep.ADRIANA:Yeah.DENISE:Because I think, like, if I had to describe my personality in one sentence, it would be that, like, I like, like getting people together, putting together events, even, like, at work. This translates a little bit to, like, I really want, I don't know, at my core, I think I'm actually a very simple human, like, when it comes to work or how I interact with other people. Fundamentally, I just want two things, and that I want people to be happy and I want everyone to like each other. And those are two, like, incredibly basic and I think borderline crazy and naïve kind of ideals. But, I don't know, like, I have done a lot of reflecting over the course of my career around like, what does leadership look like, right? Like read all the manuals, read all the books done, you know, gone to the conferences and there's like all sorts of tools that you can have in your toolbox, and there's all these like, styles of management that you can adhere to or not. But I kind of realized, like at the end of the day, my programing is that I am a people pleaser. Maybe a lot of that is socialization because women are socialized to want to make people happy.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DENISE:But in terms of like the energy that I tried to bring to work and to, you know, my, my personal life, I have this, like, idealistic belief that people have the capacity to everyone has the capacity to like each other and want to get along. I think people fundamentally want to get along.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah. It's so true. And people want to belong.DENISE:Exactly. Everyone wants belonging, right? And of course, like everyone has a different relationship to work and professionalism. Some people just want to turn up for eight hours, do their work and go home, and that's fine. But honestly, like the majority of people that I've met over my career have, I think like people perform better when they have a sense of belonging and inclusion. And the only way that you can really build that in a sustainable way is like, get the relationship foundation sorted out, right, like facilitate, create environments. People can get to know each other as human beings, where people can build trust. So that's why I'm kind of like, you know, border collie, like trying to just get people into the same room. Like, I hate one of my pet peeves is like seeing people talk past each other in slack. Drives me crazy. It drives me nuts. And then like the the people are going back and forth, they're talking past each other for like days on end now.ADRIANA:Yeah.DENISE:They need to just get into the same room and just talk things out.ADRIANA:Yeah, it's so true. And it sounds to me too, like it's almost like you're this aspect of your personality is like pretty much primed you to be a manager, I think.DENISE:So I didn't at first I thought, people pleasing was a weakness. When I first became a manager, and people would, you know, I got a lot of. I feel like anytime you switch roles, you get a lot of unsolicited advice, right? People reach out to you, like, and let me know how it can help. Sometimes, like, they do want to help, and that's great. But sometimes they just want to tell you, like, here's how I lead, here's how I manage. This is the best way that I found to, like, get your team to deliver, and that's fine. Like, there's different styles of leadership and management that might work for some people. But I think, early on in my career, I made the mistake of just taking on board every piece of advice.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DENISE:Someone told me, like, put up really firm boundaries with your reports. Early on, I was like, okay. So I like, messed up a bunch in early one, two months by telling people, here are the things that I can help you with. Here are the things I probably can't help you with. And I thought.You know, like, it's this healthy boundary setting, like, no, this actually is kind of telling people like, fuck you, if you say these things to me early on. That's how this lands, until you get really, really, really good at doing that kind of messaging, which I was not early on. But yeah, like one of the, the a lot of the advice I got was like, you know, protect your own sanity, like figure out what you have control over and figure out what you don't have control over. You can control your own reactions to things. Can't control your feelings, can't control other people's feelings. So don't ever try to make everyone happy all the time. And I think there's still a lot of truth in that. There's still a lot of good advice around taking care of yourself that's contained within that. But the more that I've sort of, like, allowed myself to be myself at work, I have allowed myself to get sillier and have more fun with the things that we have to do. So I was like, very serious early on. I was like by the book, like, here's the company process, here's how I work, and reading material. Here's what I expect from you by this date. And I think like that is a style that absolutely can work for a lot of people. But what I've discovered is, like, we all have to do these, you know, like there are many ways to get from point A to point B, where point B is like, your team outputting a certain amount by a certain time.There's like the by the book path, but also maybe there's a more fun path. Right? So yeah, things I, I did, I could have, as I talked a lot about how I wanted to give the team a framework for thinking about like, how much time should we spend on work that's not committed. So like, check that work or interrupt based work or at work that comes from community feedback. So the framework I came up with was like, well, everyone's on a main quest, right? So if you play an RPG like Final Fantasy or whatever, you have your main quest, you need to go to the castle and defeat the villain or whatever, rescue the princess. But then along the way, you're allowed to do a lot of side quests.You can pick up any number of side quests that you want. But the difference between real life and game is like in the game, you can take as long as you want to finish the main quest. That's fine. In reality, we have to finish the main quest by this date. So with that in mind, like you can on board side quests in the meantime, but I'm going to check in with you each week.I'm like, what's your balance of time between the main quest and your side quests? And if it's like you're 100% side questing, well, maybe we got to reorient for next week. You know, maybe we need to move that ratio a little bit. So I don't know. I found that like the more I've let myself be myself and be geeky and be silly and talk about things like RPGs and like gaming and Taylor Swift and things like that. In team meetings, like I, I also recently, in my current role, I, there was an internal rework and I basically run two teams. I was told to try to make them function as one team. And so, one thing that I did early on was I got everyone in the same room and I'm like, put up a picture of, the members of, the band Audioslave, which is a super group. And then I put up a picture of Broken Social Scene, which is also a supergroup made up many different Canadian indie bands. And I was like, what? What do these people have in common? And nobody knew who anyone in the pictures. I was like, I’ll tell you. This is Audioslave in this Broken Social Scene. And they were like, oh yeah, we still don't get it. Super groups like we are a super group. I don't know that they bought it, but I don't know, like I think leaning into being a little bit silly and just letting yourself have fun with the, you know, the work that's in front of you is really important. And it's a way to make, you know, this thing that we have to do this thing for capitalism, right? We have to participate in society by earning money. So you might as well make the process our own.ADRIANA:Yeah, I, I totally agree. And, I so, so relate to what you're saying because I found, like for years I had, you know, I, and I think to a certain extent we all have like the work persona and the at home persona. But I think letting more of like my at home persona bleed into my work persona so that I'm more comfortable and then that makes other people more comfortable around me and put them at ease, because I think there's like, I think traditionally, you know, in our parents generation, there's this sort of like very stiff, stiff upper lip sort of upper workplace. And it's, you know, we all dressed up in, in suits and stuff and it's like you can't swear literally at work and. Blah blah blah. And I feel like those times are a changing. And we gotta roll with it because, like, I don't know, like I always thought the idea of, like, sitting in a suit to code was like, ridiculous. It just makes my brain break. And like, I worked in consulting for four years, first four years of my career and and like, they had a very strict dress code. It was like it was business casual. So like the idea of, like dressing up to go into an office, to sit in a room, to code, it's just so fucking weird to me. And so, like for me, it starts with like the attire, like I'm not saying like, you know, go nuts on your attire, but like. You know, get... Like, let, let loose a bit, right?DENISE:Yeah. Exactly.ADRIANA:Yeah.DENISE:Yeah. Like, I, I think it would be really funny, though, if a tech company ever had like a formal Friday. Like the opposite... Everyone comes in business casual for the day. Everyone plays ping-pong... You’re on beanbags while wearing, like a jacket.ADRIANA:That would be kind of funny. It’s like a little fuck you. It's so funny because it reminds me of, in, in, the, the waning years of my banking days. There's this one guy on our team. And at that point we had, like, moved to business casual. So it was like, not so strict and we had casual Fridays. Yay! And there's one guy who joined our team, and he was like, he was really young. He was in his early 20s, like right out of school kind of thing. And he would show up to, not to school, to work, like dressed up, like really nice suit. Really nice tie. Dressed better than than the manager. And and I mean, he was nice to look at too, like. And, but it was like, so funny of, like, you're dressed better than the boss. And he was like, just like, up his game. But it was so funny because, like, he he was like dressing up to code.DENISE:Well, maybe he was dressing for the job that he wanted, not the job he had.ADRIANA:Yeah, I think so. Yeah, he was, he was yeah. He pretty much adhered to, to that dress code the entire time that I there.DENISE:Oh wow. That's impressive.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, very impressive for me. I've gotten, like, more and more casual as, like a rebellion to my earlier years. Like, I remember, in my bank job, like, we didn't have casual Fridays at the time that I was pregnant, with my daughter. And, like, my feet swelled in the summer, from being pregnant, from it being hot. And I'm like, I don't give a fuck what anybody says. I'm going to wear flip flops to the office because, like, I couldn't. It was just like, it was horrible. My feet got really swollen and I'm like. Ain't nobody gonna bug a pregnant woman about what she's wearing. I'm going to bite your fucking head off if you say anything. No one said anything, but. Yeah.DENISE:Yeah, well, I remember like. Well, I'm so glad that tech is, you know, there basically is no dress code anywhere these days at, you know, tech companies. But my first job. So I didn't always work in tech. I, studied economics for my undergraduate degree, and I interned at a financial services company before, during university. And all the women in the office wear heels. So I turned up on the first day in flats, and I was like, oh shit, I'm underdressed. Every day for the rest of the summer, I would bring my heels in my bag and switch, change, right before I went into the building. But I'm just like, wow, that feels like a lifetime ago. I can't even imagine. I barely I will barely put on heels for like a wedding these days.ADRIANA:I know. Yeah, I, I did the bring the shoes to. I actually had a shoe drawer. At work. So I like, walk in to the office in running shoes. And then I open the shoe drawer. What tickles my fancy today?DENISE:Oh, smart, that's so smart.ADRIANA:Back back in the days of offices. Which meant that when I had to leave, that, like, when I left that job, I was, like, carrying so much crap out of the office, I'm like, never again.DENISE:Yeah, you’re basically moving furniture out at that point. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Oh my God. Yeah. I know we've got just a little bit of time left, but, I did want to dip into a little bit, like, how how did you get into, going from, like, software engineering to management, is that something that, like, was that a career goal that one of the some people I talked to was like, yes, that's what I want to do.ADRIANA:Other people's like, I just sort of fell into it and decided I actually liked it. How, what was your journey into management?DENISE:I think I've been interested in management for a long time. Since. Well, in my first few years in industry, I was just kind of, like, just survive. Just, like, try not to get fired as an engineer. Don't even think about what's next. But, after I was working for a couple of years, I started to get a lot of feedback. And I think this is something that just very commonly happens. The women started getting a lot of feedback around the lines of, oh, you have such great soft skills. Like, you're doing such a great job of like mentoring your peers, reaching out to people like, have you considered becoming a manager? And I just like, kept getting that message over and over again. So I interviewed for a couple times and I was working at Pivotal. But the interviews never worked out. And so I shelved the idea for a little while, joined GitHub.I joined GitHub as a senior IC, so that was also the first time that I'd been able to join a company straight as a senior IC, and so I was very excited about that. And I was like, nice to get recognized, you know, like right, right out the gate, not having to like, earn, work my way back up to that and fight for that again. And then literally three months into that job, my manager, yeah, my manager left. There was I joined at a time of, like, extreme internal turbulence, and there were just a lot of reorganize. So my manager got reordered to another team and I was offered it was like, oh, do you want to be the manager? And I was like, oh, oh, well, this is happening a lot earlier than. I thought I would. That I kind of thought I did some, some thinking at that point around like, I just got here. I'm not I don't quite have org credibility as a senior, I see, and I have a bit of insecurity around my ability to contribute at a senior level. So I think I'm going to stay a senior IC for a little while longer, learn the org, build some relationships, figure out who are like the who's who within, you know, within this place.And looking back, that was probably one of the best decisions that I made. Because a year later, the opportunity to become a manager came up again. I happened to then report to probably my favorite, like, manager of managers that I will ever... No offence to my current boss, but, like, what a probably my favorite manager of managers that I've ever worked with of my entire career. Neha Batra, happy to name drop because she's awesome. She's still at Microsoft, but, Neha was the director of a newly formed group called Communities at GitHub, and it was a really, really fun place to be it because we did all the open source stuff around getting people in open source communities engaged with, with each other, you know, engaging productively on the platform. So we worked on things like GitHub discussions, issue forums like I mentioned, where I learned a lot about YAML. I sort of like the new user onboarding experience, community and safety and trust at scale, on GitHub. So a lot of really interesting problems or a lot of really fun problems to work on. But the the year that I spent as a manager at GitHub I learned so much because of where I was in the org chart, because I already had, a lot of credibility back from shipping a bunch of, you know, good pieces of work as a senior IC.So, yeah, I guess, like my very long winded answer to your question is, I've always been interested in the manager path, but I was unsure about when would be the right time to sort of pull the trigger, because I do think that, again, because women are socialized to the care take. Right. And to like, want to look out for each other and help each other.I do think that women disproportionately get the feedback that they should be in management because of we have good soft skills, but I think jumping off the IC track too early before you've developed that credibility can really be an impediment long term. Because if you are, when you become a manager, first of all, you have no time to code anymore.You like whatever, whatever amount of technical knowledge you have that is locked. My best has frozen. Like whatever you have in the bank that that's all you're working on for the for. You can like increase your knowledge a little bit here and there, but realistically, like the whole job is interruption based and it's relationship building.ADRIANA:So true, so true.DENISE:Yeah. So I really like recommend staying on the senior IC trajectory for at least a couple of years, like total career wise, like I've seen people become a manager after one year in industry. And I'm like, whoa... that's I hope that works out for you. Like, I, I hope that works out for people, but that would not work out for me. Like one year in industry, I was so clueless. I knew nothing about anything. At that point. I was like, how would you like one of the the the key things you have to be able to do as a manager is mentor people, right? Your reports come to you for advice in 1 to 1. So they're like, I'm working on this kind of problem, or I'm having this problem with another person on the team, right. And if you if you have like so little personal experience to draw on, you're going to find it really challenging to help them navigate those kinds of situations.ADRIANA:Yeah, it's so true. And also having like, you know, a base amount of like technical expertise in general as well to be able to like provide and not just sit there and be like, okay, you do you like. Have like enough of an opinion to like, okay. Yeah, I like the direction this is going or let's revisit.DENISE:And I think like something I'm still trying to get a better balance on is like, how much should I facilitate and how much I put my own opinion out there? Because as a leader, you have a lot of built in power just because you have the title manager, right? People think that's your decision. Like when it comes to decision making, you get more votes than everybody else. But I don't think that should be true. I think that should actually be more untrue than it is true. Like, I think if we were waiting the inputs of everyone on the team, it should be like one weight for everybody, half a weight for the manager when it comes to, like, technical decision making. But in practice, that's not how people see you, right? Like everyone... thanks to North American and like, military base school. Like we are taught authority and to respect titles.ADRIANA:Yeah. So it's so true. Yeah I, I like when I was, a manager, like there was definitely this sort of I had some, some direct reports who were like, very shy and it's like, well no, I need you to be, like more assertive, like in. And the other one is like letting go of, you know, wanting to control everything. Because, like, I remember when I was, you know, being in, early in my IC career, having managers who were micro managers. So I definitely... my mental note was like, I do not want to do this to my direct reports.DENISE:Yeah, exactly. But that's also another thing that I think, like having a few years of industry experience at different companies makes you a better manager because you have enough personal lessons like this, right? You have enough examples of what not to do.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I love what you were saying about like jumping companies. That doesn't... it gives you like, different breadth of experience. It’s just nice to, to see how things are done differently and yeah, it, it gives you perspective that you wouldn't have, like, even if you're in the same company for like 20 years and doing different types of work, it's still that company culture. You're not going to see that that much difference.DENISE:Yeah, exactly. One thing I have observed about people who jump companies, every couple of years versus people who have been at one company and they go to, you know, like HashiCorp, or they go to GitHub. You know, this is like only their second job because they spent ten years or 15 years at the first company. The people who job hop more are generally more adaptable and they are more successful quickly... that they they rise through the ranks more successfully. Because once you've learned the organizational politics of like 2 or 3 different places, you're kind of like, okay, this is all, the only thing that that's true is change, right? People are just going to change their minds all the time, and I'm just going to roll with the punches. And the more that you just accept that, you know, the less you're going to be taken off guard when, when things like, you know, project priorities shift, roadmaps shift business priorities, whatever, you're just kind of like, yeah, this is just another this is just another day. It's just another normal week. It’s fine. I'm going to focus on what I can still have impact on, and I'm going to adjust my mental model over, like, what is the highest impacting I could do in a given week given this new information. So I think you're you're a lot easier, a lot quicker to adapt. But for the people who who have only been in one environment for most of their careers and they come to a new place, I think, my observation is that there is a bit more ramp up time.It takes people longer to correct their mental models because they've been given this one type of feedback for a very long time, and they believe that that is a correct way to get feedback or reach out to people or collaborate or whatever it is. And so, like every new piece of information in their second environment, it's like, oh, this is like world changing for me. Like what else? Like and it sets off a whole bunch of like negative internal monologue. I think about like, what else is different here? Like what? Like my whole what can I not trust anymore of what else am I wrong about? And it's really not that deep. It's just like company. The way the companies work is so arbitrary and you just gotta learn to adapt.ADRIANA:Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And and you start, like, you start seeing patterns after a while, you work at it and. Yeah. And then as you said, like the, the one constant is change. Like I remember I think my first like company reorg and I was like oh my God. And then you know after your third or fourth you're like.DENISE:Yeah, exactly. At GitHub we had... one of my favorite emojis was one called Live Laugh Reorg.ADRIANA:Oh my God.DENISE:It was amazing. The reorg themselves were not amazing experience but... Like at some point you got to develop like a very ironic sense of humor and just laugh about these things because like, what are you going to do? You can't spend all your time being upset about things that are not within your control.ADRIANA:Yeah, it's so true. I know. Otherwise you'll be like grumpy, jaded person.DENISE:Yeah, exactly. So just laugh about it. Be like businesses go to business and just move on.ADRIANA:How did you get into software?DENISE:A little bit by accident. I was in the UK from 2013 until 2014 because I was doing a graduate degree in social policy at the London School of Economics. Like really unrelated, I have no schooling in software or in computer science. But when I was a kid, I always, like, made my own websites. I taught myself, you know, I was one of those kids who you teach yourself, HTML and CSS that you can make, like a cool MySpace or like a cool profile or whatever. So I knew a little bit about that. And I because of that, I in, in like middle school and high school, I was always like the webmaster for my school clubs and was always like using Apache File server to FTP or whatever, like. Yeah, I was like, you know, this kid stuff. But I never really pursued it because I got really heads down into like the study of, policy and like law and all of that. When I was in high school and university, like, studied economics, university. So I finished my graduate degree, and in 2014, the UK's immigration policy was that if you have a student visa, you finish your degree at the end. You have like four months. You're allowed to be in the country for four months trying to find a job, but if not, goodbye. So I was at the I was in my four month period, just submitted my thesis and I was like, dang, what do I do? Like what do I do now? I try to apply for these like policy analyst jobs really hard.There's like no. Positions open and they definitely don't want to sponsor me a visa to stay here. So one day I just saw an ad on Facebook to go do a coding bootcamp. This is like 2014, so coding bootcamps were not as big as they are today. They were not a super tried and true path into industry. And at that point, I wasn't really sure that I wanted to be a software developer, but I was like, well, let me try and let me try and do this. Like I've always been kind of good at tinkering with computers. Like this might be a good skill set to have in the back pocket. If I decide I want to go work at like a think tank or like a policy research or something like that. So I did the course, met a bunch of people, actually got really excited by the process of the thing that I think, like, you know, earlier we talked about app development vs ops, like the thing that I still find amazing about software engineering and like, I think app development specifically is that you can take an idea from nothing to something that works using just a laptop. You don't need, like, anything other than your brain. And so I still find like that process is really cool. Yeah, like this coding thing might be there might be there might be some legs to this. Like maybe this is more than just like a back pocket skill. Maybe I should look into this as a career path. And that's how I landed my I landed my first, junior software engineering position off the back of that bootcamp with, like, two days left on the end of my visa. It was very stressful.ADRIANA:Just in time.DENISE:I’d just about made it. I still had to fly home to the US for a little bit so that the visa could get processed and reenter with the correct documentation. But yeah, like looking back on it, I think I would have been happy to be a policy analyst. But those jobs, like the upward mobility in those roles, is just not the same as in technology. I think the. Impact, the impact that we can have is far greater, for better or for worse. Right? Like we can do a lot of good. Yeah, we can also do a lot of harm with the like the skills that we have. But yeah, I feel like, I'm pretty happy with my choice. You know, looking back, ten, ten years later, I feel like my brain gets stimulated every single day. I get to work with some really cool people, interact with with a lot of cool people in the community. And, yeah, like, I definitely have this, like, sense of, I don't know, like, we're all doing something pretty cool together. Which I think is. True for a lot of industries like I talk to my friends who work in, I don't know, I feel bad for journalists, actually, like I said, friends who work in journalism and there's like, not really, that's the same sense of optimism that I see in tech. So I think we're very lucky to be where we are, and we're very lucky that now is a time that people are willing to put money into technology. You know, people want to invest in this for some reason. I don't know why. Somebody needs like a 20th web app in Rails, but people seem willing to pay for that.ADRIANA:So fair enough. Fair. Yeah. We we love our technology, that's for sure.DENISE:Exactly. One day we will realize, like, oh, all those apps that we wrote are just like sitting around, do we really need that? Much like, does every company need a bespoke web application? But that's that's something to worry about later.ADRIANA:Yeah. I feel like the archeologists of the future are going to look down on this time and go like, what the fuck were they thinking? To be a fly on the wall.DENISE:Yeah, exactly.ADRIANA:All right, We're we're coming up on time. But before we go, do you have any, like, hot takes or, words of wisdom for our audience?DENISE:Hot takes. Oh, wow. I should have thought about this more.ADRIANA:It could be a word of wisdom.DENISE:Since I've been thinking about it lately, I know, like, I don't know, I feel like during general economic uncertainty, people get worried about layoffs and people get worried about attrition and that sort of thing. So one thing I openly tell, like probably this is a bit irresponsible coming from someone who is a manager at a company, but I honestly tell people like the best, you got to advocate for your own career. You know, like, I have a book on my shelf over there that's literally called Work Won't Love You Back. And the truth is that, companies have to optimize for shareholder value. They don't optimize for the well-being of you or your family. So, in times of economic uncertainty, one of the best things you can do for yourself, even if you're happy at work right now, even if you feel stable, even if you feel like things are not going anywhere. The advice I always tell people is take an interview once every six months. Take a call from a recruiter. It doesn't have to go very far. You can end it after the introductory call. It doesn't matter, but get a sense of what's out there and always like, know your worth. I think that's especially true for, women and people of color. You know, we are historically underpaid. And also, if you are a man and you're listening to this, share your salary with your women and minority coworkers, you are allowed to do it. It's legally protected for you to do that. And the more information we have, the better we can look out for each other.ADRIANA:Awesome. Yeah, those are really great words of advice. Well, thank you so much, Denise, for geeking out with me today.DENISE:Thanks so much. This is a lot of fun.ADRIANA:Yeah, this was awesome. I'm glad we had a chance to do this. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...DENISE:Peace out and geek out.ADRIANA:Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally design all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.