MIKE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I'm hosting again today. With me today, I've got Thomas Wilcox, Will Archer, Vivian Moore, and Tim...It is Chaffin, right? You know, I've heard people say Chaffin all the time for your name. It's Chaffin, right?


TIM: It's Chaffin, but, you know, elementary school just damages us all, and I don't really know [laughter] what it is, so...


MIKE: [laughs] Yeah. As usual, I'm going to start with a lead-in. I'm going to go to aerospace. There is a cool alloy I learned about a few years ago. I've looked it up in advance of the call to make sure I knew what I was talking about. They call it Nitinol, which sounds like it would be some sort of alcohol, but it's not. They just stuck some words together for nickel, titanium, and NOL comes from the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, where they developed it. So, it sounds like it's an alcohol, but it's not. It's just nickel and titanium in equal parts. That's really it. And they just did some very slight variation, like a few percent between equal parts, but basically, it's equal parts nickel and titanium.


And it's got a few interesting features, but the one that I want to talk about is that it can be deformed significantly and spring back to its initial shape pretty much indefinitely. You know, normally, you know, you think, like, steel. Steel's pretty good at having some elasticity, right? But, you know, you bend some steel bar, you know, steel bar enough times, it's probably going to lose something. To some degree, it'll do well. You know, if you have some springs, you know, they'll spring back a lot of times. This nickel-titanium alloy is even better. It's just basically forever, you know, it'll always spring back, and it's relatively light.


And they've made wire out of it and woven the wire into a mesh, and they're using that woven mesh. It looks kind of like chain mail-like, so it's not...It kind of retains its shape. And they plan to use it for wheels, and they've got prototypes of this for future rovers for NASA. So, instead of having a solid metal wheel like they have...And have you ever seen, like, the selfies that the Curiosity Rover takes on Mars? Those wheels do not look good. They've been [laughs] riding around on rocks for, like, over a decade now, and they do not look good [laughs], all kinds of big holes in them. Because they kind of fly the...you know, send the thing up on a rocket, so they make them super light.


These nickel-titanium alloy wheels are basically just a...they're even lighter because there's...it's not like foil; it's just this wire mesh, right? Just this really thin wire. But they can put a vehicle on it, and it'll behave like a rubber tire because it'll spring back as many times as you want. Super light. So, it takes the pressure from the vehicle above, and as it goes, it just springs back.


There was a Kickstarter a couple of years back where they were selling bicycle tires made out of this stuff, and I didn't hear about it till after. " Oh, that would be cool [laughs]." Because if you put that on your bike, you'll never get a flat again, ever, and it lasts for, like, decades. So, it's the last tires you ever have to buy. Just, it's a really cool idea. I guess it's an expensive alloy to make; that's why we haven't seen it widespread. But they use it...I guess there's quite a few usages of it in aerospace and other places where they really need something that's resilient. So, cool stuff. Worth looking up if you haven't looked it up before, and just, like, watching videos of it. It's pretty cool.


It has some other cool properties, too, that are a little off-topic, but I guess you can put it to a lower temperature, bend it, and it'll hold that shape. And then you raise it up to the original temperature, it'll spring back to its original shape. Interesting stuff.


And there is a tie-in here because today we want to talk about pressure and resilience under pressure. We often talk about pressure as a bad thing, but pressure is reality [laughs]. We're all going to be under pressure of some sort. We are paid to go do a job. You could say, "Oh, it just doesn't matter," and just wander off, and that's not going to work very well. There are demands. There are demands in life, and they're not going to go away.


And, in many cases, pressure can even be motivating. Like, you know, if you don't have any demands, you can get bored. People actively seek out more interesting and demanding work and activities. People who are retired still do something interesting because they want to have a little bit of pressure. We don't do well without it. Then again, people break, right? Burnout is a real thing, and it's something we got to deal with.


So, there's the topic for today. How do we get ourselves in a position so we're like that nickel-titanium alloy, you know? Pressure...under pressure, we bend, we spring back; we're good, and keep going. How do we get there?


WILL: We all know about the bad parts of pressure. Those are pretty well-established. We've sort of, like, gotten over them, like, many times. Foundationally, I keep on going back to the two things that I think most people want, right? I mean, people want excellence, right? I think that's a foundational thing that, like, most human beings, and certainly most engineers, are driven towards excellence. And people are also driven towards growth. And both of those things, I believe, are uncomfortable. They're painful. They're going to hurt, you know?


One of my favorite quotes is from a guy named Ronnie Coleman, absolute monstrous freak of a man, one of the legendary bodybuilders of the world, and quite the wordsmith. And I quote, "Everybody wanna get big, but ain't nobody want to lift no heavy-ass weights." [laughter] You know, it sums up so many things in life. Getting the opportunity in the year of our Lord 20-odd-26 to work as a professional engineer is hard yards. People struggled for years. Even me, who grandfathered in in Gen X when it was, quote-unquote, "easy," I saw the wrong side of midnight a whole lot. I spent a lot of nights and weekends studying to, like, get an opportunity to do this thing.


And if you can't deal with pressure, if you can't push yourself to an uncomfortable level of effort, it's hard to imagine people being successful or people being very good at this stuff. For a long time, I have held as my, like, sort of platonic ideal, like, a good marathon runner pace as what I aspire to in my professional career, right, like, where I'm running hard, and I'm feeling it, and I'm hurting. If you run for a long distance, it doesn't feel good, you know? But at the same time, like, you are in a flow state. You're rolling. You're in this pace that works.


But as I've sort of gotten older, I've maybe come to a level of acceptance of, like, how I work and, like, kind of how everybody works forever. It's very rare, very much the exception rather than the rule, that if you're going to do anything, if you're going to accomplish anything, if you're going to ship anything, be it writing a novel, or releasing a stage play, or shipping a new version of your app or whatever, you're going to hurt. Like, pushing yourself over the hump is just going to hurt. It's going to have this spiky burst of work.


And I personally have, like, raked myself over the coals for, like, decades over my inability to, like, just glide my way through these projects. Because I know I could just glide, and if I was a perfect person, I could just glide, but I don't. And very few people I know do; like, there are very few people I know accomplish meaningful things without, like, just some level of pressure and suck. And I've given myself a little bit of a hall pass to just be like, "Hey, that's what you're going to do."


If you want to make a big release, you know, if you want to get one of those bullet points on your resume that you're so proud of, yeah, you're going to see a couple of weekends; you're going to see some nights. It's just how it's going to be. And, I don't know, I mean, that's just sort of, like, my, like, maybe more nuanced relationship with pressure because it's just the same old thing all the time. You got to have some of it to do something really cool that you can really be proud of, you know?


MIKE: I read something from...I believe it was the person who coined the phrase, and I might have the phrase slightly off, but follow your passion, or something similar to that. It was this big idea, you know, follow your passion; do what you love doing. And then a lot of times people fill in the blanks after that, right? And then you'll never work another day in your life because it'll always just be joyful.


And I read an interview with the person who'd...they wrote a book about it or coined the phrase. I don't remember the exact details, so you'd have to look it up. But I read an interview with them, and they said, "You know, that keeps on getting misinterpreted. What I meant was: follow the thing you care about, and then you'll be able to deal with all the misery that you're inevitably going to go through to get there."


WILL: Oh, man. Yeah, so, you know, in an alternate, like, reality, right, like, I've been a working musician, right, for a long, long time, like, since I was a teenager, right? Do you know what a recording studio day is if you buy, like, a day at a recording studio? That's 12 hours. That's a 12-hour day. Like, I bought a 12-hour block. That is the block that it comes in. It's not like 9 to 5 with a half-hour lunch. None of that.


It's a 12-hour day. You will buy as many of them as you can afford. You will be working from start to finish the entire time. And, you know, as much fun as it is to have, like, you know, to make music and to see, like, your finished artistic process, you know, realized, it is a brutal, brutal grind. If you have ever listened to different snare drums for three hours continuously, let me tell you that the new penny shine does wear off quickly [laughter], you know? And, I don’t know, I could give you so many stories about, like, people who have pursued a life in the arts and the absolutely savage hours that they undertake for the privilege.


MIKE: And not everybody can do it because they...No. They didn't love it enough, they say [laughs], but there's people who do. Many of us who have things that we love doing, and we're willing to suffer through it because, at some point, it is inevitable; it is innate, I think. It's inseparable. Accomplishing anything meaningful is going to be tied to some degree of suffering, some degree of pressure, some degree of...This is not fun, you know, type 2 fun, as they call it in outdoor activities. Like, type 1, it's just, you know, everything's great. And then type 2 fun is, yeah, that was hard, and that hurt, but I'm glad I did it.


WILL: Yeah. So, I guess maybe, like, maybe, like, operationally, right? So, okay, when is it good? When is it bad? When is it necessary? And when is it too much, right? Like, how do you draw those subtle distinctions, right? Because, like, because, again, if you're even listening to this podcast, you're so far down the rabbit hole of dealing with all of this. You've done it all. You've done all of it.


Even Vivian, who's just starting, right? Tell me what finals week is like, you know what I mean? Like, and you're just getting started, but you know what I'm talking about. What is final group project week like? You've got the deadline; you've got to ship it. And then, you know, if you haven't figured out that it is not going to change any [chuckles], let me break the news gently as I can. Like, you're going to be steady rolling on this forever. So, how do you draw that line? When are you doing a good job, and when are you doing a bad job, you know?


MIKE: I was thinking about this ahead of time, and I'm going to...I was going to touch on one aspect of this, because I don't think it's the only one. But one thing that makes a difference is the degree of autonomy that you have in dealing with this. And I'm going to define that a little bit more broadly. You think about an open-book test. They can be harder because the professor's going to make that hard, right, than a test where you're just testing the knowledge that they've acquired, and you don't have that...


But people still often prefer it because there's no arbitrary rules, right? You can go back. You can reference it. That world has probably changed. Now we've got AI, you know, the whole world's turned upside down. But assume [laughs] that time that you'd have an actual physical book sitting there in the test that you can reference, and you have, you know, like, a time limit. So, you know, you couldn't possibly just start reading the book at the beginning of the test and be able to answer all the questions. So, you have to learn the material.


But if you have that reference material so that, you know, the arbitrary slip in your brain, "Oh, I can't remember that word," and you can look it up, and you know where to go look it up, makes you feel like, "Oh yeah, I can do this." And I think that naturally takes the pressure down because you have the tools that you need. When you're given the tools that you need, then I think that...and, you know, that can be training, that can be the ability to search, whatever the case may be, you know, somebody to reference, "Hey, how does this API work?" I think that changes things dramatically because you don't hit...The times when you hit a roadblock, and you can't do anything, right? You're actually blocked.


One of the things that is most frustrating is, "Oh man, I'm ready to ship, but the infrastructure's not ready." Or, you know, "I've done my part of the assignment, and my partner didn't." The things that you can't control because you literally can't do anything else, I think, are what's most frustrating. Those are the things that take it from good to bad really quick.


TIM: You touched on something. This is the reason I was interested in this session, because pressure in terms of cybersecurity is such an interesting topic. And it's something that we look for when, like, interviewing someone into the job and trying to get a gauge of how they perceive pressure because cybersecurity work is adversarial by nature. And there's this whole concept within industry called ethical pressure, which is so cool.


But on the topic you were referring to, I like the concept of being prepared to fail. Like, you ever gone to Florida or somewhere in the down south where we've got, you know, these huge causeways that are going across large bodies of water? You start going across them, and you hear that da-da, da-da, da-da, and then you, like, take a sec, and you look at what's going on there. They've got this huge bridge expansion joint right there. So, when you have a natural event, your bridge doesn't destroy. It's designed to split at that point so the whole causeway doesn't get torn out of the ocean floor. It's actually designed: "Oh, well, we're just going to adjust. We're going to fail for a brief period of time so that we can still maintain the overall concept, which is a road."


Same thing; we see that in cybersecurity all the time. It's the whole concept behind a honeypot. We know that your front door is going to fail, and we can't protect it 100% of the time. So, when we do get to that point, someone's going to eventually pop your password or your account, whatever it is; we flip a rule, route that traffic to a honeypot, let them win, so to say, so that we can see what their goal is, stuff like that.


Like, the whole point, I think, of good pressure is to learn how and where to fail so you can be prepared for that. Like, calm execution matters so much more than heroic or dramatic improvisation. You're not going to be good at that point to be calm, prepared, and be able to cope with that pressure unless you do what we call ethical pressure, which is, like, you know, you do penetration tests, you do...And site reliability was, what is it? Chaos monkey tests.


DAVE: Chaos monkey.


TIM: Yeah. Every kind of discipline within software engineering has their own flavor of we need to inundate the team with failure so that we can learn how to handle this routinely when it comes around.


WILL: So, when you're talking about pressure, I feel like you're talking about, like, sort of, like, pressure testing systems, like, on an engineering level where you're, like, sort of, like, putting these systems under pressure to, like, just, like, we're talking, like, a stress test or, like, a failure mode for penetration or something like that. Okay. All right.


TIM: Yeah [laughs]. That's a lot different from the business side of it, which is hit a deadline, right? This is like I want to pressure the infrastructure, the actual functionality of the whole thing, yeah.


MIKE: Is it so different?


TIM: No. That's the part, right? It really isn't [laughs].


MIKE: Well, somebody who's been in a few roles here, Justin, a number of years ago, sent me a book that he had read, "Antifragile." Has anybody read it or familiar with the concept?


DAVE: I've read of it.


MIKE: I read through a lot of it [chuckles]. I don't think I quite finished it, but I read through a good portion of it so I can speak to the idea. The idea is that there are some systems that, when pushed, do better, to a point. It only works within a band, right? You push it beyond a certain point, then it has failure.


But a good example, kind of a classic example that refers to what Will is talking about, is a muscle, right? Under stress, a muscle will become stronger. It's designed to actually do better under stress, and if you don't put it under stress, it'll atrophy and eventually just go away. My dad had a tendon, I think, in his shoulder snap. And he mentioned that the muscle it was attached to was just essentially after...He actually didn't know that this had happened [laughs]. He'd had surgery on it at one point, and eventually it snapped, and he wasn't aware of it.


But the muscle associated with it had just withered away to nothing. It's essentially not there anymore. Because it wasn't pulling on anything, your body just absorbs it more or less. It disappears. But if you use it, right, if you use it, you can get all big [laughs], if that's what you're after, or at least strong, depending on your goals. But some systems do better under stress, and that's a really interesting idea: that any of those systems, you want to keep them under stress because that will lead to improved performance. That's the idea behind the chaos monkey, right?


If you're always breaking your system all over, then it improves that system because, over time, you become more and more resilient to where you anticipate it before it happens. And then when real bad things happen, you're okay because [chuckles] you're already way stronger. And on a personal level, and I haven't really explored that with, but, I mean, you develop skills by putting some pressure on them, right? You work it. You develop it. You push it beyond comfort and find out where the gaps are and then start filling those gaps. I don't know what your all's thoughts are.


WILL: No, I mean, I think, that's exactly right. I mean, I think most of the people...I guess I'd say two things. I think, like, most people I know who are successful are sort of [laughs]...if they don't have a problem, they'll invent one just to keep things easy, you know? Like, they will get bored. And maybe on a slightly darker note, I've found that my baseline level of anxiety is pretty much independent of my actual physical or mental circumstances. Like, if I don't have some drama, then I'll invent it, and so I might as well invent productive things for me to be wound up about so that...you know what I mean? My nervous system's baseline level of cortisol is inadvertently directed to something productive.


DAVE: Pick a good LMO.


WILL: Yeah. I'm not going to stop, so I might as well harness that energy towards something useful. Yeah, I've spent a lot of time, like, chasing inner peace, and it's just like, this isn't in me, man. Maybe in the next life. Like, I'm just going to be productive and mostly happy. And I don't know, but it's like...


MIKE: You remind me of another reference I read about somewhat recently. They've done studies of hunter-gatherer societies, people who live in hunter-gatherer societies. There aren't very many of them left, right? Most of the world is pretty modernized. And even those that exist usually have some connection to the outside world, but there are some societies where, you know, the people pretty much...I mean, they're getting their food through hunting and gathering, pretty much how they live.


And they did a study a few years back, and I'd have to go look it up. But they looked at the calorie expenditure of people in this hunter-gatherer society, and everybody thinks, "Oh, wow, they must be burning, like, 5,000 calories a day," right? They just got to be these superheroes because they're running around all day looking [chuckles] for their food, digging up their food. And what they found was not that at all.


They found that their daily caloric expenditure is almost exactly the same as some guy sitting in an office. It's the same. And you're like, "But how is that even possible?" It's surprising. But it turns out that when your body is under that stress, it uses...You know, because they actually are active, right? That your body will start shutting down systems that are less important, such as inflammatory processes.


So, if you're sitting in that desk and not running around chasing a gazelle, you know [chuckles], or digging up roots somewhere, you are not stressing that system. And so, your body's like, "Okay, I'm going to take care of all the background processes." And so, all that background process handling can go overboard, and you end up with inflammation. You end up with, you know, with your body actually going too heavy on the, like, the immune and take care of itself response, which can be harmful.


So, it's fascinating. Like, even though the total energy used is the same, the outcomes are different, and the only way to keep your body healthy is to stress it some so that it doesn't overdo it on those background processes. I thought that was really fascinating.


TIM: Yeah, I remember I even had a therapist tell me about that applies to, like, mental stuff, too. The body is really good at adapting itself to do whatever you are doing in the most effective way possible. And it's even more traumatic from a, you know, a psychological or even a physical perspective when you go from...if you take the desk, the office worker, and then overnight put them into, you know, an Aboriginal tribe in Australia and be like, "Okay, figure it out," like, the body will go through shock, same thing with, like, relationships, same thing with your career.


You're really good at being optimized at what you're doing. Calories is everything, yeah. And that pressure and stress forces you to stay out of the optimal pattern, so hopefully you're progressing or growing as an individual. Otherwise, we're really good at coasting as humans [laughter].


WILL: Well, I mean, I'll say...


DAVE: That is interesting because a weird parallel to that is mentoring is one of the best ways to get a step change in somebody's performance. So, you're bringing them in, and I'm going to show you the entire process.


Worked at a call center years ago, and they put me with Christie. And everyone in the call center was knocking down 8 calls a day; really difficult tech support. So, I mean, like, 8 calls a day, like, a call an hour was reliable. Christie knocked down 30 calls a day like clockwork, and she was my mentor. And when I was done, I was knocking down 20 to 25 calls a day. I was the new guy. I had to go to Christie for some of my calls.


But it's like, how is this? And I'm like, well, the first couple of days with her were really, really stressful because she hangs up on a customer, immediately answers the next customer, and is typing up her notes on the previous call while asking the next customer, "What is the problem?" and da da da. And nobody else was interleaving, and that's...I realize it's a kind of a weird thing, but I picked it up because of the mentoring. I guess if we drop you in a tribe of Aborigines, that's going to be extreme mentoring, but it's the same kind of idea. You pick up all of the side habits that coexist and support it.


WILL: Well, I mean, like, I'll tell you one thing about, like, working out, right? Like, so this is devilish, and this has nothing to do with programming, well, maybe only tangentially. But a lot of people, they work out, and they have this misunderstanding about how calories actually work, right? And so, you'll go out; you'll go for running. "I'll go run for a mile, and I'll burn, I don't know, some 100 calories," some pathetic amount of calories, right? And so, "I'll burn 500 calories, and then I can get a Snickers bar," right, "at the end, and it'll even out." No, you cannot, because what will happen is your body will try to achieve homeostasis. And so, like, you will burn off 500 calories, right?


And, like, the first thing it's going to try and do is make you ravenously hungry, right? Because if you owe your body 500 calories, you're going to have to pay up. But the second thing it will do, you're just like, "No, I'm going to white-knuckle it, and I'm not going to eat," right? Or, "I'll eat some broccoli," or whatever.


The second thing it'll do, it will throttle down your metabolism, right? It'll lower your heart rate. It'll lower your energy expenditure. And it will also lower all that energy that you were spending stressing out, which is really good [laughter].


But, you know, so if you find yourself with all this anxious energy that is making your life, you know, less pleasant, and you'd be like, "God, I wish I could just chill out," burn off 500 calories right at the beginning of your day. And, like, your body will...anytime you find yourself trying to freak out, your body's like, "No. No, you owe me. You still owe me 500 calories, and you want to spend all your anxiety on this? No, go take a nap, or better yet, give me a Snickers bar."


DAVE: Your body starts to mortgage, right? It's like, oh, this is just a temporary famine. I'm going to shut down in order to bank to get that Snickers where I'm not running healthy, right? All the intermittent fasting guys are really up on this. It's like, you've got to go for 18 hours because you're still burning sugar at that point. It's not until about the 18th hour that your body finally goes, "Okay, fine. I will operate in a sustained mode like this," and you switch over to ketones and yada yada.


And it's that same thing, right? It's like, if you just do short stresses, your body just increases its kurtosis. How far away from average it's willing to go and still believe nothing has changed without moving the center point. [inaudible 27:53], "Oh, he's just starving us for a minute? Fine. Shut him down. He'll give us a Snickers later." And then, boy, you're going to get into insulin and bank that fat.


MIKE: This is still kind of tangential, but I've found the same thing. If I can beat down my body a little bit in the morning, right [laughs], that workout, then my stress levels are way lower during the day. I don't know, it's hard to measure, right? But there's, like, this well of calm I can draw from because my body is like, "Okay, you've already taken care of the stress today. You don't have to do that anymore [laughs]." And it helps.


I don't think it's the only thing that helps, because there's a variety of other techniques that, you know, you have to do to be able to deal with it, but it helps to stress...you think, "Okay, I'm in a stressful situation. What I need to do is go to bed." No. What you need to do is get up early and do something additional, and then your day will be less stressful, which seems totally counterintuitive. But it works.


WILL: Yeah. Like, it works great.


MIKE: So, for software, what does that mean? How do you develop, you know, that, you know, what's your chaos monkey, right [laughs]? What's this anti-fragile thing? What do you do to stress the muscle, you know, stress the system so that it does better?


TIM: So, I think the first thing that we need to call out is that sustainable performance matters more than the stress. It is important to have stress and pressure so that we know where the faults lie and where we can improve performance. But just like working out a muscle to complete absolute failure seven times a week, chronic urgency just creates burnout, and eventually, from my perspective, it increases security risks; healthy on-call rotations fail. You actually need physical recovery time as an employee, as an engineer, you know, just getting away from your desk, and then staffing becomes a problem because then you have high burnout, high turnover, and then you start losing tribal knowledge and things start to compound.


So, there's, like, a healthy...it's a bell curve of healthy pressure, and up at the front end, you're losing efficiency because you don't have healthy pressure. But on the back end of the bell curve, you have...The contributing factors are just spiraling after that point. So, you really have to find that healthy point in software engineering. Where is healthy pressure, and when is it to call it quits and let people be people [laughs]?


WILL: Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I love a good...not love, I accept, as necessary, a good, hard burn when I'm trying to kick a project out the door. I've done --


TIM: A hackathon, yeah.


WILL: No [laughter]. [inaudible 30:39] a hackathon [laughter], but we'll leave that one alone. I think that's more, like, management failure, leadership by pizza party [laughter], adding responsibility. But no, I mean, like, a good hard crunch at the end of a project where you're getting it over the hump, out the door, you are launching it. You are giving birth to this beautiful baby, and there'll be blood, sweat, and tears. And then you're going to have a hangover, you know? You're going to have a hangover. You're going to have a sprint or two where you're just going to suck. You're going to be bad. Just own it, where it's like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to get this thing out, and it's going to be a glorious, shining moment."


And I'm like, I've found, like, as I get older and maybe a little bit more in tune with, like, you know, my own internal life, when I ship a project, I bum out the next day, you know? Like, I bum out.


DAVE: Crash.


WILL: Yeah. Like, I'm sort of bummed, like, the day after. I ship it out, and, like, that weekend I'm just like, "Woo, woo," just a big mope, you know? Because I came down. And I'm going to suck for a sprint or two, you know, no zero days. But, like, I'm not good. And if you're sort of, like, managing your team and their stress, like, you're factoring in that. And when you're not managing pressure, then you'll just be like, "Okay, we did crunch, so hey, appreciate you guys. Back to just a regular sprint," you know? Like, it ain't going to be that way. It's not going to be that way, and it'll...You can't push it.


And you can get into, like, really dark anti-patterns where, like, you'll overpromise. You'll get in a burn, right? But you're not going to make your goals because you can't manufacture capacity that you didn't have in the first place, and so you'll do your crunch, right? And then you won't have delivered on the promises you made, but you crunched your team, and you just squeezed them out as much as it'll be. And then you get into this sort of, like, suck-doom loop where everybody's burned out. They're not particularly productive. They're not doing much. But everybody's working 60s because you have this sort of cascade failure of, you know, broken promises.


DAVE: Did we talk about meaning? Dan Pink wrote a book called "Drive." There's a fantastic video on YouTube if you...bunch of them out there. The RSA videos where they do the whiteboard drawing of the guy giving the talk.


But autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the three things that you need to really just, like, be driven to do things. And autonomy is kind of the, we trust you and value you enough to let you do your job the way you want to. Mastery is, is this something you can get better at? In other words, is it worth getting better at? And then, yeah, the purpose is: is it tied to, like, a valuable mission?


And the weirdest thing is, like, when you put in 70, 80, 90 hours, and you hit the deadline, and everybody's happy. And your boss comes in the next day and says, "Congratulations. Your reward is you get to keep your job [laughter]." I've seen that happen. Half the team resigned. And he was mad that we, I was one of them, that we walked out on him. It's like, yeah, you deserve that.


I had another employer that gave us comp days. It's like, "We love you. Go home. Don't come back till Wednesday." And man, we would crawl over glass for that guy. It was fantastic. Yeah.


MIKE: We talked about --


TIM: Yeah, my last SRE team, we loved comp days. You could get a bonus for being on call. And, eventually, we're just like, you know that... just forget about the money. But if you give me a four-day weekend every three weeks for doing a rotation, I love it because I spend more time with my family doing things I love doing, things that money can't pay for. I want that time.


MIKE: Absolutely.


DAVE: The other side of meaning, and somebody said death slog a minute ago, and that's what keyed me off on this, is that...I was just talking with T1, Travis, my team lead, and I sat him down. I said, "Let me tell you how to manipulate Dave Brady. If you tell me, 'Boss wants butts in seats. Everybody here until 6:30,' I will punch out at 5:00 so loud you can hear it from two buildings away. If you come by my desk at 3:00 o'clock on a Friday and say, 'There's a rabbit in the field that needs caught, and we need it. We've got to get this taken care of,' I will be at my desk Monday morning wearing the clothes I was in on Friday and smelling like I haven't been home for two days because I got to catch the rabbit."


Give me meaning, and I will burn the candle at, you know, both ends and the middle, and then I will crash, right? Drop is a real thing. Like, post-intensity drop is a very, very real thing, and how you manage that is key.


Mike and I had some really good heart-to-heart conversations in the middle of a really big tech push a couple years ago to integrate a really, really big thing for Acima that...I don't think I can name that project, so I'll just say it was a really big tech thing that we were trying to bring together, big integration, and it all came together at the very last minute. So, QA was testing everything end to end, and we were all...It was 3:00 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, right, Mike? It's like we were --


MIKE: [inaudible 36:12]


DAVE: And we were on Slack calls typing code, and, "Oh, this piece doesn't work. Okay, let me go fix the onboarder." And we were turning and burning, and we got it done. It was fantastic, and we were so tired for weeks afterwards. I don't know if the project was worth it, but having that experience in the belt was worth it.


MIKE: We talked earlier about autonomy and excellence. It's kind of a couple of those aspects, but not necessarily the purpose. That was number three, right? Having that autonomy is what we started with, knowing that that was not everything and that need we have for excellence. You know, we want to do stuff, but we hadn't talked about the purpose yet. It's working on something meaningful. Like, even if it's just you finish the feature your company wanted, you know [laughs], and you got it out there, seeing that thing in production is nice. You know, there's something to be said for that [laughs].


WILL: Yeah. Well, I mean, like, and I...It's funny how, I mean, because on one hand, right, like, there is some...hmm, how do I put it? I hesitate to overstate the whole, like, notion of, like, you know, this burning, purposeful desire to sell, you know, leases or mobile phones or whatever, right? Like, I mean, there is some, like, there's a bit there, but, like, it's just people are social animals. We have a social mission at work. We're all part of this team, this tribe, and we do this thing, you know? Like, we want to do it, and we want to do well at it.


I've run into a lot of, like, the most burned-out, toxic teams that I've struggled with, like, morale-wise, have been when there was this death of hope, I guess you'd call it, right? Where they were going to keep on getting challenged and challenged and challenged and challenged, right? Push hard, push hard, push hard, but it's like this isn't...You know, the top of the hill is just another hill. There's no, you know, like, people need to believe in some sort of, like, progression or advancement and not just this endless cycle of slog, you know?


And it can be difficult because I've worked for several companies, big companies, that are going to be...they'll bury us all, but, like, they were going through really hard times, and there weren't a lot of growth opportunities. There was this guy...I remember I was...It was on Threads, so it wasn't a tweet; it was a Thread. But it was this guy, and he was talking about how he made it to, like, senior director in some, like, ridiculous period of time. He had a bullet-point list, you know, of the thing, right?


And it was a whole long list of Threads, right? Like, he was talking about all the things that he did and, like, the projects that he took on and, like, the leadership opportunities that he seized and the initiatives where he just did extra. But, like, the first bullet point was like, "I was in a company where we were 10Xing," you know, like, "We were on this massive growth trajectory, and so I just happened to be there," and then all this stuff, you know what I mean?


And if you're working for a mature enterprise, you know, like, it mitigates the level of sort of, like, you know, pressure and purpose, right? Because, like, on one hand, it's like, hey, you know, with this company, right, whatever it might be, right? I'm not calling out, you know, certainly not calling out Acima or Upbound because there's dozens of these. They're almost the rule, not the exception, right, where, like, the company is just going to do what the company does, and it might go up, and it might go down, you know?


Walmart is not going to 10X, ever. It's as big as it could possibly be. They could do a little bit better, or they could do a little bit worse, you know? And you yourself can do a little bit better or a little bit worse, but it does, like, sort of, like, affect the perception. Like, I've never worked in my life harder than when I had my own startup. It was me, you know, my name on the door. I was co-founder of the thing, and I could work tremendously and get, you know, potentially unlimited rewards, right? Like, sky's the limit. And I worked, like, tremendous amounts.


But if you're working for your enterprise, limited trajectory, like, you know, very stable but, like, you know, neither too hot nor too cold, like, it changes the perception. And when you start applying this massive amount of pressure on somebody who knows that the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow is a 3% cost-of-living raise, you hope [laughter], changes the dynamics rather abruptly.


MIKE: It feels like many of the most successful engineers I work with have been through a startup or several because that experience is really hard to get another way. You've got to swim the deep end a little bit [chuckles]. It's a bit like that being dropped off in a tribe, "Hey, you're a hunter-gatherer now." Having the tribe there with you helps a lot if they can give you at least something. You know like, "Oh yeah, don't eat that one. It'll kill you." But that experience, you know, being stressed that way in a way where you can grow makes a huge difference, and if you go through a series of those, you just come out stronger.


WILL: It's true, you know? Like, it'll give you an extra gear. You know, it's hard to imagine you can't get that working for a sane and reasonable workplace [laughter], but you can never really know what you're capable of. You know, like, I listen to a podcast or two, and they'll have, like, some Navy SEAL, you know, guy out there who's, like, a motivational, you know, big deal business.


And they'll make points that, like, they're easy to mock, and they're easy to make fun of. But they really do resonate with my lived experience in that, like, you are capable of so much more. You're capable of so much more than you realize. And if you have the motivation and you drive yourself past your limits, you could do more. And I know I have, like, an extra gear that I can access because I've gone there and I've done, like, some intense stuff over the years. And that's a real benefit of pressure. Like, I'm not superhuman, and I will definitely crash, and I will bum out after I finish my project and all those things, but it'll get done on time.


MIKE: Well, I think there's a few practical lessons. Tim asked, you know, how do you keep from going on the wrong side of the bell curve, right, or on either wrong side? Like, we've talked a lot about, yeah, well, you need to hit the top of that, but how do you avoid going on the other side?


I think you have to recognize when you have gone that, like, and take the crash, right? Put yourself in a position where you get that break. If you're going full steam, eventually you're going to run out, and you're going to break down. You've got to put yourself in a situation where you're going to get that break.


On the flip side, and we talked about the startups being so valuable, I think there's something to be said for, you know, create an internship if you're doing interns...where people have to build something real and [chuckles] maybe their hands aren't held the whole time. Now, this is going into production; go ahead and work on that and, you know, we've got a real deadline. You know, giving that chance to actually have, "Oh, this is something I've got to do, and there's a deadline, and that's kind of stressful."


You know, give people a chance to shine so they can stretch. You know, don't try to keep every task so easy that people don't get the chance to grow. Give people legitimately hard tasks, and let them run with it. Let them struggle with it because that's how people will thrive. I think that we have to create that kind of environment and watch for that other side. Give people the chance to, oh yeah, you got an accomplishment? Take that comp day, right? Give people the chance. I think that those are both critical. You need to give people a chance to be under the pressure, and give the people a chance to decompress.


TIM: We've noticed in our cybersecurity team we need several mechanisms to make this work. We've even incorporated it into our weekly team meeting. We need a time-capped portion of a team sync where we just complain, and we vent, and our leader has to just listen to it. And he knows he can't do anything about half of it, you know? But the team needs to complain. It's a tough job, and we just need to vent as a team, "I dealt with this, this, and this, and it sucked," you know?


But the other parts of this that keep you from teetering from one side of the bell curve to the other—blameless learning is critical. No one should be at fault. We're all learning. We're all trying to do our job. Post-incident reviews are mandatory. We need to know: did we fail because we're burned out? Did we fail because we didn't have the right tools? We need to have an educated response to a situation so that we don't do it again. And we need to improve those systems and processes. And it just doesn't make any sense to punish individuals because then it just instantiates a culture of fear, and fear in any corporate culture is toxic, and people get out of there super fast.


DAVE: I've seen an executive get fired for losing the company money because it was that executive's job to know the company was losing money, and the company didn't know they were...The executive didn't know they were losing money. The executive got fired, and it seemed like the right call to me.


I've also seen an engineer lose the company a lot of money and just walk in ready for the pink slip, and his boss go, "What are you talking about? I just paid $25 million to train you. Get back to your desk." That is somebody who's like, "I love this company. I'm loyal. I'm sticking this out." Something else goes wrong...and you end up with somebody who when the next time the servers are on fire, can go, "It's okay. We got this. Trust me, we've been through worse. We're going to get through this."


Yeah, it's literally a...for the bosses listening to this, catch somebody failing and create psychological safety around that. It will pay off 10X. We used that before. It will pay off huge.


TIM: Yeah, we see that in cybersecurity so much. As soon as I find a vulnerability, or you put your password in plain text, or something goofy, wrong, if we do that in the wrong way, the next time you find a vulnerability, that person, engineer, business unit, they will do everything they can to hide [laughs] the fact that they did something wrong. And it's like, I don't want you to feel like you have to hide under a shell. I want you to know it's okay. Let's fix it together. Just be safe. You know, stuff like that.


DAVE: Yeah. It's the why are you hitting me with the stick? Oh, I need to stop doing that thing, versus why are you...stupid stick [laughter].


WILL: So, I want to...You know, I think this is an interesting question. So, if you're a boss, right, like, okay, you're a boss. You're a people leader. You're managing people, and you're in charge of, to some degree at least, the pressure that you put on people. How do you manage that? How do you gauge how much is applied? Like, how do you manage it?


I'm not going to lie to you. Like, my only real, like, conscious rule of thumb is don't. Because I will generate, like, just in my, like, living and breathing, a field of free-floating anxiety that I can't really resist [laughs] existing. So, like, all of my conscious action is like, "It's okay, everybody. Everybody, it's cool. Don't worry. It's all right. Everything's going to be fine. This is going to be cool," you know? Like, if you sat in a room, and you didn't even speak English, and your desk was next to mine and you only spoke Japanese, you'd be like, "I better get these tickets out." Like, you just pick it up [laughter]. And I have to combat that because it's not healthy.


MIKE: I think that I'll say, actually, something I've picked up from our CTO, Balaji, that I admire, that I think he does really well, is he'll see somebody he thinks has potential, and he'll give them a hard project. Like, okay, take this, run with it, and he won't even follow up that much. He's just like, "Okay, here you go." And then they come back, and it's not going to be perfect, right? But something will be learned. That person will learn what they're capable of. They'll learn a lot from that project, and now, you know, kind of they know where the limits are.  And, oh, was that too much? Okay, well then you assign somebody else to help them.


That doesn't mean that it's a...I mean, in some ways, you could consider that a failure, right? They failed in it because you gave them too much. But that's okay. That's a learning experience. Give them something, you know, have somebody mitigate that, and then that's fine, you know [laughs]? Have somebody else help with that and solve it. And if they do accomplish it, like, there was a growth experience. Now we know what the limits are. Okay, here's another hard project.


I love that approach because, first of all, it gives...There's lots of autonomy there, right? Lots of autonomy, lots of purpose, lots of opportunity for excellency and all of those motivating pieces. And trust as well, and not the kind of judgment that we're talking about, right? It's a, "Hey, I'm not going to micromanage you. I'm going to let you do your thing and see if it works out."


And, of course, there's always going to be situations where it does...There are occasionally going to be people who shouldn't be in that situation. You can get them out. But most people, I think, given the opportunity, as we've been talking about, they'll want to run with it. And if you've been watching people, and you probably know approximately if they're able to do it, give them the task. Give people an endless series of meaningful things to work on. And that's not too bad of a thing to ask for. I mean, that's a pretty good life. Have a whole series of meaningful, challenging projects to work on. I don't know, thoughts?


WILL: I don't know. It wouldn't work on me. Like, I would just be like...because I wouldn't know if you cared, you know? Like, I would just be like, "Okay. All right," you know? I mean, like...


MIKE: There's something coupled with that, though. He's also...So, in this specific situation, Balaji's also very good at genuine, sincere appreciation. Like, "Oh, wow. You did that really well. Thank you [laughs]. You accomplished this for me." And following up periodically, "How is that project going?" So, he doesn't follow up every day, right? There's no micromanaging, but once a week, you're going to hear, "How's that project going?" Like, oh yeah, he cares. He wonders how it's going, and he wants a status report.


So, there are signs, regular signs, that there actually is caring, right? That it's not just send you off, never going to talk to you again. There's genuine appreciation, sincere, like, genuine, like, "Hey..." Because you can tell when somebody's sincere because they've really noticed, right? They notice the little pieces of it, and you can tell when somebody cares, and definitely get that. I think that, you know, we talk about psychological safety. Having somebody who listens and cares, that's hard to beat.


So, there's a pitch [laughs] for one way to approach it. Deliberately giving people challenging tasks, right? Giving them a chance to stretch. Thinking about that is a key part of how you're planning the work. "Oh, I think this will stretch somebody. Let's give them a chance."


DAVE: Well said.


WILL: How do you know when somebody's, like, under, like, too much pressure? I mean, like, there's obvious, like, there's like, oh, you worked all weekend, right? How can you tell when somebody's gassed out?


TIM: How do you know when someone's gassed out?


WILL: Yeah. You could just be like, oh, you know what I mean? Like, your perception of the workload is, like, you know, usually, hopefully good, right? Usually, hopefully, you know what you're asking of somebody, but sometimes things just don't go according to plan. Like, how can you read somebody who's under you and you're like, oh, they're not doing so good?


TIM: So, this is something I always look at on the other side of the interview table. A good employee is really good at knowing their boundaries and communicating their boundaries to their manager. That's the sign of a senior engineer or a senior employee, someone who knows, "If I do X, Y, and Z, I will not be able to do A, B, and C."


So, with my manager, I'm very transparent. I tell him, "Look, I can hit projects A, B, and C, but you just asked me for another project. Which project do you want me to cut? Which plate do you want to drop?" So, good engineers are really good at being transparent about that.


Junior engineers have this pitfall usually of they want to be the hero. They want to do the amazing things. You get the same amount of paycheck at the end of the day, and they haven't quite learned that yet.


So, you, as a manager, need to learn how to ask. You can't read that. You have to be able to appropriately confront your employee in a private setting and say, "Hey, where are you at?" Usually, that's like a weekly one-on-one or some kind of ceremony that you have, but I don't think you should read it from your team member. You should try to elicit it from your employee so that they feel safe to be able to tell you, "Hey, these are my boundaries." Otherwise, yeah, if you don't have that cycle going on, it's never...No one's a mind reader, you know?


WILL: I don't know. I mean, like, I haven't...Like, I don't always...how do I put it? Like, I try to have a plan B other than, like, you know, perfect. Like, if my management style and assumptions of private communication and psychological safety always, like, I feel like I'm maybe, like, letting myself down, you know? Like, "Oh, they'll just tell you." And I'm like, "Maybe."


MIKE: Yeah. They might not.


WILL: I mean, in the end, they wouldn't be over-pressured and burned out if, you know what I mean, like, you as a leader are managing their workload correctly, right? So, like, already we have one failure and then, you know, assuming that, like, "Okay, but they'll just tell me if they're burned out," you know? Like, something already went wrong somewhere up the chain of communication for you to get into this state.


MIKE: So, you're going to have to eat some crow [laughs] and be willing to say, "Hey, it seems like you're not getting as much done lately. Are you okay? You know, do you need a break? I may have put too much on you." I think, like, you know, you're implying that there needs to be some vulnerability and accountability from the manager saying, "Hey, I may have misstepped here. I'm sorry. You're not okay."


TIM: Yeah, that's a good manager if they can approach that conversation in a wholesome way. Like, someone that asks those questions is a good manager for sure.


MIKE: I think we've covered a lot of material here. We've talked about how to approach this from a manager perspective. We've talked about it personally. You know, we've talked about some of the things that you can do to stay motivated so you don't burn out, looking for some signs, you know, of burnout, managing that. I think I want to take this to a close.


I've got one more image that keeps popping in my mind as we're talking about this. I've done a lot of long bike rides with my oldest son. He loved bike riding, and so I got into it, and now I still love it, and I do it without him. But he's grown.


But when I go with him on a long bike ride, and we, you know, do, like, these big, epic, brutal, all-day type things, or all night, and he always has me ride in front because we'd noticed early on, and especially when he was younger, that he would burn himself out. You know, he'd push hard; he'd burn hot, and totally wear out, and have to crash, right? Not crash as in literally crash, but the figurative. And have to take, you know, a long break, get back riding again. Where, you know, old guy with more experience knows what the boundaries are and just keeps a steady pace, keeps it going.


There's pressure there, right? Continuous pressure. You know, you got to get to your destination. You got places to get to. But with experience, you can learn to...Well, you got a hill to push up, and then you slow down afterward so that you can maintain that steady heart rate, just keep going. And that senior mentor can lead the person who's coming up behind to know where those boundaries are. "Okay, slow down [laughs]." "I don't have to push so hard." And you can develop a steady state where you get into that flow state, like, "Hey, I'm good. I can keep on going and going."


And that's not something you get overnight. It's something that you work on over time. And in that social environment with a mentor, you get there. I think that kind of sums up everything we've been talking about. You've got that mentor; you've got the balance; you've got the sprints, and then the time to balance out afterward. Let's do things that way so that we can keep that steady state, so we can go see cool things: look at the sunrise, see the things you want to see.


Until next time on the Acima Development Podcast.