Coté Doesn't Like Open Spaces --- [00:00:00] Coté: So Whitney, you may not believe this, but, uh, I once was hanging out with our guests recently, and I feel like I'm going to inflate it by maybe two to five hours, but I feel like we had, we had a three hour conversation about how I don't like going to, uh, like, I don't even remember the name of the sessions, what you would call a coffee. [00:00:19] There you go, an open space, you know, I [00:00:21] Whitney Lee: can open space [00:00:22] Coté: and, and, and I don't, I'm not sure now, obviously it wasn't a competition, but I'm not sure who won in that I was not very helpful at being helped. I kept on coming up with excuses and reasons and explanations and, and I was thinking, you know, we're going to be talking with, with Sasha here today and I should update her on my position on, uh, you know, the, the, uh, See, it's even blocked like in Harry Potter, whatever the name is, the open spaces. [00:00:49] And, and I, I'm not really sure, uh, if even what my position is, why, you know, the conversation was. Why don't you like going to open spaces? And, and, and it kicked off cause we were talking, having some beer at DevOps says Amsterdam or, or drinks or whatever. And, uh, I just casually said like, I don't like open spaces. [00:01:08] And I think, I think five minutes later, [00:01:10] Whitney Lee: Does it make you feel vulnerable, Kote, that anything could happen and you might not be planned for it? [00:01:16] Coté: Well, now, now that, that was a discussion point. And I have to admit, I don't remember where we resolved with that because there That's not the [00:01:22] Whitney Lee: question. How do you feel about [00:01:24] Coté: it is the question. [00:01:25] Maybe, maybe Sasha can jump in. Yes, I [00:01:29] Sasha Czarkowski: can jump in. So like, I will tell you what I remember. So first of all, you were doing a great job being open and investigative about your own, you know, affinity towards something, but what surprised me is that you like being on stage. And usually people who like being on stage. [00:01:46] Also like being in a conversation, right. But free flowing conversation, you also like podcasts, which are also kind of, um, similar to OpenSpaces. If I remember correctly, um, you feel like you have to be leading the conversation. And because OpenSpace is such an open concept, like. It's an uncomfortable situation where you might be not prepared or it might go in the wrong direction. [00:02:15] Or, um, it's also not always appreciated when someone leaves the conversation. In fact, I had sort of similar conversation with Paul and turns out he feels the same way and he also doesn't really like being in that position. Uh, whereas like if I go to an open space and I feel like, like I'm not interested in the conversation, I can feel very free to leave or just not be contributing. [00:02:40] Whitney Lee: For, can, well, why don't you please say what an open space is for those who are listening who might not know? Yeah, go ahead, [00:02:47] Coté: go ahead. [00:02:48] Sasha Czarkowski: So this is a very important idea to DevOps Days, which is why we do them a lot. We talk about them a lot. Um, and DevOps Days is a particular kind of conference, but one of the things that was sort of required in the Um, you know, if you have a DevOps days, you must do these things. [00:03:06] What is having sessions named Open Spaces? And what this means is you propose a topic and people basically vote if they want to show up to talk about it. And then whoever shows up, shows up. And the conversation goes whichever way. It needs to go. And there's no, there's no objective leader. There's no objective, like no one's lecturing, like you just have a conversation that may end up in any direction. [00:03:30] It's a really, really good way to learn about, about things and like kind of get a temperature for certain conversations, like across different organizations in the industry. Um, So like, these are, these are really nice. Uh, but, but definitely we've through, through the years, we did discover that not everybody likes them. [00:03:50] So like, I can see, [00:03:53] Whitney Lee: yeah, someone with like social anxiety, the fact that there aren't like super strict social rules going into it, like it could be anything and you have to read a lot of social cues to figure out how best to fit in, I could see how that piece of it would be stressful. [00:04:07] Sasha Czarkowski: Because it's not like it's not a fishbowl, it's not usually we try to send someone like at least one experienced person so like they could kind of rescue the situation if something goes terribly wrong but like there's a couple things that could happen. [00:04:20] People could show up and not say anything or someone could like sort of forcefully lead and just sort of like become this like person who talks over everybody. Um, not everybody's comfortable. I think over the years at DevOps at Chicago, we discovered that like about 30 percent of people don't like open spaces because they would, they would leave and they would fill out the survey and just say, like, we're not interested. [00:04:46] Um, so we started having like one or two. Smaller room sessions so that these people could like go to a talk and learn something instead of just leaving the conference. [00:04:57] Whitney Lee: That's nice. During an open session, is it socially acceptable to lurk? To like watch everybody talk but not speak? Or you put, is there pressure on you? [00:05:07] Sasha Czarkowski: So you, you're absolutely fine to be quiet the whole time. And also one of the laws of open spaces is that you can leave at any time. So if this is not working for you for whatever reason, or you just wanted to check out another room, because usually there's four or five of them happening at the same time in different rooms, like there's. [00:05:25] Um, you can just get up and walk away and no one should feel offended that you left. [00:05:31] Coté: Well, that's a good refresher because I, I totally had forgotten that the point that I was making that you're saying your, your husband Paul makes is like, I feel like I'm going to take over the conversation, which, which sounds a little like hubristic, but it's also, it's more of like, and I, and it was interesting. [00:05:49] Now I'm replaying in my head, this whole chain of thoughts that I had after that. But like I have, I have a. Cause I'm always very conscious of that in, in my, in my workplace meetings and conversations. And it's often, there's also a source of frustration where there's all this, like this corporate meeting going on. [00:06:09] And I always wanted to be like, you know, we just need to write the blog or, you know, like there's all this talk and I just, it's, it's hard for me to sometimes just, um, do whatever it is you're supposed to do to like collaborate. And like walk people towards something. So I'm, I'm, I'm not really sure how to resolve that, but, uh, you know, so, so far it's turned out fine. [00:06:32] I [00:06:32] Sasha Czarkowski: think it turned out fine. But I, I think I have two modes. I have the, I will lead the whole conversation and push everybody to the direction that I want. And I will just. and kind of listen. Um, yeah, I kind of, I kind of don't have [00:06:48] Whitney Lee: I identify as being a reluctant leader. If no one's leading, I'll do it, but it's not my, it's not my go to state. Intro to Sash --- [00:06:55] Whitney Lee: Will you tell me about who you are and what you do? [00:07:00] Sasha Czarkowski: That's an intimidating question. Um, no, I'm Sasha. You pronounce my last name Tchaikovsky. The way it's spelled. So, you know, I'm, I'm confusing people on the internet. [00:07:11] I used to go by Sasha Rosenbaum, so that's how people might know me. Um, so I decided to, you know, perpetually confuse everybody who was ever searching for me. Um, and, um, I lived in multiple countries. I have basically my entire career been in software development and sort of DevOps related stuff. Um, and I've been in. [00:07:37] I think over 20 years now. I don't know. [00:07:39] Whitney Lee: It's hard to [00:07:40] Sasha Czarkowski: count. Um, and yeah, I, so I'm, I have a small business and I, um, we're consulting people on how to improve their IT operations. Um, it's the first time I have my own business and it's, uh, kind of a very different situation than working for large companies, which I've done for the previous 10 years. [00:08:01] Um, so it's been, it's been fun. Sociotechnical System Consulting --- [00:08:03] Whitney Lee: So the consulting about how to improve IT operations sounds like a super duper huge umbrella. Like, are you consulting tools? Are you doing like, uh, organizational, uh, reform, like socio technical? Yeah. So [00:08:19] Sasha Czarkowski: socio technical is the key word. Um, so we mostly talk to people about how to improve their humans working with technology. [00:08:29] So a lot of times people, like tools are easy. Right. Tools either work or don't. Um, and then people are difficult and it's difficult to make processes better. Um, especially the organizational scale. Um, and, and a lot of times, like people think they need more tools. Um, like basically the reason we started business, because we were kind of tired of selling people's software, because it's like, you know, for, for 10 years, I would walk into a conversation and be like, you buy this. [00:09:00] And it will solve all of your problems. Kind of never did solve all the problems, did it? So I'm like, can we do better? Can we, can we do something better [00:09:10] Whitney Lee: for folks in IT? Yeah, this, this software isn't going to get rid of Steve's ego, you know? [00:09:18] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah, but it's, it's rarely an ego. I like, I think there's much more, um, problems with like sort of learn helplessness and, and that kind of thing. [00:09:27] And kind of the. Lack of communication across the organization or lack of prioritization across the organization or like processes being calcified to where everything takes very, very long when it shouldn't. Um, that rather than, you know, some, someone being a bad apple and that happens too, I think, but, um, you know, luckily not as much. Learned Helplessness --- [00:09:51] Whitney Lee: Will you describe the learned helplessness phrase you just said? [00:09:55] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah, so, I think the original study was from dogs, and they put dogs in cages and electrocuted them. And some cages were open and some cages were closed and the dogs who were in closed cages stopped trying to escape. And then you open the cage and they still don't try to escape. [00:10:16] So that's coined, the term was coined as learned helplessness. And it basically means that once you try an action for a number of times and it never works for you, you just stop trying, even though like you might no longer be In a, in a, like in case you might have agency, you don't realize it because you're not trying. [00:10:39] Whitney Lee: I can relate to that from a dating perspective. Putting intution into practice --- [00:10:42] Coté: Well, sort of, uh, there's no segue from dating perspective. I was going to say from a corporate something. Anyways, I, I was, I was in, uh, uh, uh, I was at a conference in Bucharest a couple of weeks ago, and, and I saw that the former CEO of Porsche. Was, was, uh, speaking about something. And now I was like, I got to go see what the former CEO of Porsche is doing at this weird little tech conference, right. [00:11:08] Where, where I'm speaking on the DevOps stage. And, uh, it was this guy, uh, Kevin Gaskell and like, you know, I'm sure, I'm sure we've all seen former CEOs talking about things and especially when they talk about how they've gone on an Arctic expedition with their son, you know, And sailed across the Atlantic ocean in a row boat. [00:11:28] I'm like, Oh man, what's going on here. But I kept watching and, and he, he, he pulled off the magic trick of these kinds of talks where he, like at the end, I was like, I can go do it. You know, like I, I was inspired to like change the way things were going. And, and, and so I want to walk through, I think the basics of, of his things and, and kind of like run it by you and see like, what's going on with it. [00:11:51] Cause it seems. Oh, so simple. Like, so first of all, he gets called into Porsche, which is like, The bottom of, of market leadership or whatever. Right. And, uh, he, uh, he, he based his, his trick, his one cool trick is you basically first, and he kind of says this really quick first, you get rid of half of the people now moving on. [00:12:13] I mean, I'm making fun of that part, but you know, it was said much more artfully like you've got to go ask people like, you know, do you want to be involved here? What do you want to do? We're going to go through some hard things or whatever. Uh, but then once you get past that, you've kind of gotten rid of the people. [00:12:27] Most of the people know actually what they should do to improve. And they're telling, they're always telling you what's holding them back. And so you've just got to go to them and have them, uh, you know, remove these barriers to, for, for what's holding them back and then also, you know, be inspiring. And there was, there was that whole, um, I forget the name of this kind of thing, but you remember when it was a big, uh, management consulting revelation, revelation that like UPS doesn't actually deliver packages. [00:12:53] They deliver dreams or like, you know, that kind of like that, that kind of talking. So, you know, like Porsche isn't about just a car. It's about like this lifestyle and this thing that you have. And so we had to, we had to think about what were our customers buying? Not just a car, but a blah, blah, blah. And, uh, you know, it was basically that kind of school of stuff, but at the end, like it did seem like. [00:13:18] A new thing that he had kind of introduced and by new, I mean, it's not just the same old, like Dale Carnegie wrote it however long ago, it was like, people actually know what they should be doing. So the executive should just go like, yeah, what, what should we be doing? Let's write down all 50 of them and we'll pick the top five and do those things. [00:13:37] I mean, is that, uh, Is, is old Kevin Gaskell on to something or is that just a kind of like paint by numbers thing? [00:13:44] Sasha Czarkowski: As a consultant, I think a lot of times I walk in and like when I start having conversations with people, people know it hurts, right? And people, Pretty much have ideas on how to fix it. And if you let them fix it, they would. [00:13:57] Um, but, but it's like, there is a disconnect. So like you walk in and like people at the top, I usually invested in something that's like the market shiny thing. So it's like developer productivity, or we need to push code faster or like whatever. And I'm like, once you start having conversations with them, it's like. [00:14:16] You do not need to push code faster. Like, like that, that is not your problem. Like you have problems that is not one of them. Um, and I think, you know, it's, it's easy to go after what's easy and it's easy to sort of like, we bought this new platform, so therefore everything's going to work now, or we, you know, measured the store metric, therefore everything's going to be good now. [00:14:38] Um, I think it's hard to actually listen to people and it's hard for. Executives to. Like, it's hard for people on the ground to know how what they're doing is connected to what executives are thinking, right? [00:14:54] Coté: Yeah. And, and may maybe, I mean, you, you said something that I guess is the thing that, um, that clunks in my head is how, how do you actually listen to that and do something with it? [00:15:05] listen to the, like, here's how we need to improve and do things and prioritize. And then, and then, you know, I'm also now remembering the other, the other, uh. I say this jokingly, technology that he introduced, we've seen this many times was the wall full of sticky notes and, and, you know, kind of using that as a way to list things out and prioritize it. [00:15:24] And, uh, I, I, I don't know that that was about it. I guess, I guess maybe to answer my own sort of quandary. Maybe what he would have said is like, the way you listen to them is you listen to them or, or to some sort of, I don't know if that's Tanzu or Buddha, but you know, like, Learning how to learn --- [00:15:40] Sasha Czarkowski: Well, so I think, and you've seen me do the learning talk. [00:15:44] Um, and my biggest pet peeve is that people, like people don't know that they don't know how to learn, right. And like, especially organizations don't know that they don't know how to learn. And, um, like anyway, but the, one of the problems with executives listening is that nobody tells them things. It's not, it's not even a day, like even humble executives that actually are intending to listen, the problem is people don't tell them what's going on. [00:16:13] Um, Andrew calls it watermelon reports. Right. But like it's, it's all, you know, red inside, but it's all green on the outside. That's your report. That's how it tends to look. And. [00:16:26] Whitney Lee: So do people not tell them because they don't feel safe to tell them or is there another reason? [00:16:31] Sasha Czarkowski: So we all defer to authority, right? [00:16:33] Um, like this is, this is automatic and also cultural and we're like, this, this is ingrained in us in every situation. And so what happens is, let's say a big executive says, we're doing this project, project X, right? This is the North star. We're going there. And then. It goes down, gets propagated to people on the ground. [00:16:56] And someone on the ground goes like, we, we absolutely cannot do this. Like, here's the five obstacles. Like we don't have the tools, we don't have the people, we don't have the market, whatever, can't do it. Maybe I'm, I'm saying like very drastically. Right. And then he, that person on the ground reports it to their manager and the manager goes, huh. [00:17:17] List the five problems, goes, well, you know, there's some challenges, we're looking into it. The next manager up the line goes, huh. List two challenges, goes, well, you know, there's a couple things, but people on the ground are trying to figure it out, whatever, whatever. By the time it gets back to the executive, There is a timeline and there's a promise. [00:17:35] And there is a, everything's fine. We're going that direction. And then what happens is the executive has no idea that there is a problem, right? Cause no one ever told him or her and the person on the ground goes, I clearly screamed at the top of my lungs that this is a problem and literally no one paid attention to me. [00:17:56] Right. So that's your learned helplessness. Like once you try to do this a number of times, you just give up because you're like, ah, No one ever listens, right? So like that, that is super endemic. Like this, this happens and you have to work really hard to correct it. And, and [00:18:11] Whitney Lee: what, how do you correct it? Like as much as you can say in a podcast format, how do you begin to correct it? [00:18:17] Sasha Czarkowski: So I think, I think it begins with leadership. So like, like, I mean, while you can do some things as a middle manager, like the leadership really matters and you sort of having this culture of. Productive reasoning, right? And like actually making it, making sure that your people know that it's safe to bring bad news that like, you actually want to defer and different opinions and like stuff like that. [00:18:42] And then, um, the stuff I like to preach is I call it hypothesis driven development. Cause we're in software, but it doesn't have to be development per se. Think of the scientific method, right? So [00:18:55] instead of an executive making a decision, which direction we go, instead, we set a hypothesis and we say, okay, we think like we're making widgets. [00:19:07] We think that we've, if we make green widgets, it's going to sell more. Yeah, but, but it's not like Sasha. The CEO thinks that because I, yeah. If Sasha, the CEO says green widgets are the best, then everybody will give me data that proves that I'm correct and yeah. [00:19:26] Whitney Lee: Right. It, it's like the possibility of failure is wrapped into the, the idea that's coming from up top. [00:19:33] So therefore it's okay, like it's green-lighted from the beginning, like for it not to work. Yeah. [00:19:38] Sasha Czarkowski: Once you have a hypothesis. You're not failing. Like if you, if you make green widgets and actually sold less, you didn't fail. You learn, right? Therefore, you're going to make green widgets. Whereas if, you know, if it's someone's opinion invested in it, then like you've failed. [00:19:56] So therefore you have to sort of save face and make sure that nobody knows that, uh, there was a problem. [00:20:02] Coté: Yeah. I mean, I think like, like at least the way I'm thinking about what you're saying is, is, uh, Instead of saying, you know, CEO, Sasha wants green widgets, CEO, Sasha wants the learning to happen. So when, whenever you like demonstrate that learning has happened, then they're, they're, they're, you're using the instinct to always tell the boss things are going well. [00:20:22] To say like, yes, we are doing the activities of learning. And of course, with anything they could falsify is the wrong word, but you could be learning the wrong things, but at least. You're rewarding behavior instead of a, uh, business outcome, which, which may not be exactly what you're going for. [00:20:39] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah. And a lot of companies, sorry, they sort of like do this, right? [00:20:44] Like the, the big companies we think of like, right. Like they do AB testing and they roll out a new feature to a tiny subset of users and they see how it does. Like all of this stuff is like, essentially that like the scientific method applied to what you ship. Um, But it's funny because we, like, we're in this industry that some people are doing amazing things and some other people are, like, still doing runbooks on paper and it's just, like, the disconnects are sometimes very, very, very wide. What are the problems --- [00:21:14] Whitney Lee: I have a question about something you said earlier, which is that organizations don't know that they don't know how to learn. So my, that makes me wonder if they don't know. What the, that, that they even have the problem, how, like what pain points are organizing or organizations experiencing that are causing them to reach out to you and your company? [00:21:36] How do they find you? What's, yeah. [00:21:38] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah, I, I think you just kind of have to happen to have someone in leadership who is invested in learning or invested in improving the organization. And, you know, sometimes it happens and sometimes you, you go and give a talk at a conference and someone gets inspired because they saw something that connected the dots for them. [00:21:58] Um, but, um, yeah, I, I think, I think it's a big problem in terms of, in terms of learning because like literally every organization on the planet has learning as one of their key, uh, values, but like when, when people have done actual research, like, 80 percent of them don't actually, like, no matter what scale, cause there's different, different studies and different scales and different questionnaires, whatever, and no matter what scale you look at, most organizations are not learning organizations. Marketing a consultancy --- [00:22:30] Coté: So, but you know, on the other side of that, uh, being discovered, I mean, now that you're, uh, uh, uh, let's see, uh, as you say, have a small business. That that's a consultancy. Like what? How, uh, how's the marketing going? Like, like what, what have, what have you learned that works? I mean, like, cause you're marketing to, uh, tell me if I'm wrong, but a pretty small set of people that seem to be difficult to get at and, and yet here you are. [00:23:00] It's been two years? I think how I forget, yeah, yeah. So like, like what, what are you, uh, do you say ergonomics? I forget what you call. [00:23:10] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. [00:23:11] Coté: Yeah. Yeah. What, what, what, what are the ergonomics doing marketing wise to like get the, uh, get to the customers? [00:23:18] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah, we're, we're, I, I think we're mostly trying to be inspirational and like our, our theory is that if you. [00:23:25] Connect enough dots for folks, then they will get inspired and sort of seek the enlightenment. Right. Um, I think this is, um, like, it's interesting how often like I when, when I speak to people, I'm like, What I'm going for is you being like, Oh, I never thought about this. Right? Like, like that moment. And that moment is what kind of brings you like, Oh, maybe I can improve my company. [00:23:52] Maybe I can improve my team. Maybe I can improve how I'm doing work. Um, so that, that to me is the best. [00:24:00] Whitney Lee: What's an example of something you might be teaching that makes a light bulb go off for people? [00:24:04] Sasha Czarkowski: So like the learning talk is, is personally one of my favorites, right? And so like, I talk about personal growth mindset because organizational learning doesn't happen without individual learning and then, you know, how organizational learning is connected, but also how you need sort of both And then the other thing is like the very big, um, sort of thing that I think people need to improve is measuring like how they measure stuff. [00:24:33] Um, and there's so many things that go wrong with metrics. And like, there is such a thing as having all the dashboards in the world and not knowing what's happening. Um, there is such a thing as like. Metric overload or like, you know, lots of noise, no signal. Um, there's also such thing as toxic metrics, right? [00:24:51] Like you can very easily screw it up. Um, and then a lot of times people just don't measure things that matter. Um, so sort of going into that and figuring out how to set up metrics in a better way. Metrics --- [00:25:05] Whitney Lee: I've heard the phrase, um, whenever a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. [00:25:12] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah, so that's good hard law, and that one of the things that is majorly wrong with metrics is, so if you have a single measure, um, I have a, I have a visual in my slide that came from Sketch. [00:25:28] It's a website. They do excellent sketches for business concepts. Um, but anyway, there's like, if you say you want a lot of nails. You may get thousands of really tiny nails that are useless. If you say you want big nails, you may get like ginormous nails that are useless. And it kind of becomes obvious that like, if you want good things, you need to at least measure the two things, right? [00:25:54] I want a quantity, but also a quantity. Like quality metric, right? And in development, this is also true, right? You kind of want to balance the metrics across the, like, so if you said, I only want velocity, you'll get velocity. Like you get so much velocity. That's amazing, right? Um, and it will be partially because people sort of fake it, game the metric, but also partially because they drive towards what you're asking for, right? [00:26:20] And so the best way to contradict that particular thing is to balance the metrics. Also, like, GoodHeart law is, like, very big in education. We keep measuring more and more things in education. And, like, actually teaching is becoming harder and harder. And, uh, results of education are becoming worse and worse. [00:26:37] Coté: So, so what is the, I mean, how would you, uh, uh, I feel like there's a phenomena associated with the, the GoodHeart's metrics, et cetera, thing where we all know, I don't know who all is, but many of us know that if you have a metric and you work towards the metric, that's bad. But we all do it? Like, like, it's kind of like the why, why do we keep hitting ourself sort of situation? [00:27:02] Like, I don't know, there's something strange about that. But if there's nothing, [00:27:05] Sasha Czarkowski: nothing strange about that, if I, if I tell you that your bonus depends on X, you're gonna do everything in your power to maximize X. Like that, that's exactly what happens. And oh, [00:27:16] Coté: sure. I mean, I guess, I guess more of the, the people who set who the, the, the telling person, like, it seems like. [00:27:23] The people doing the metrics would be more clever than to kind of like braid their own noose as, as far as what they're doing. (Misaligned) Incentives --- [00:27:31] Sasha Czarkowski: So you often, like what often happens is you have different departments that have different metrics that drive towards actually different outcomes. And then you have these clashes like. [00:27:41] What is it about DevOps, right? Because ops are incentivized to keep the lights on, right? And keep things working and keep them from breaking. And dev is incentivized to drive fast and break things, right? And like you, you're paying people to do a thing and they're doing everything they can to do the thing you're paying them for, right? [00:28:01] Um, And this often happens in across different departments, not just Dev and Ops, but like you have sales and marketing, you have some sort of like, you know, even security, like you have people driving towards different incentives, and that creates different outcomes. I think for people setting the metrics. [00:28:19] So first of all, like, Department has like your, your CMO might not be talking to your sales, um, head of sales, right. Um, or your, you know, COO might not be talking to whoever, like, I don't know, wherever ops lands in the business versus dev, it's not always the same metric. Um, Also, we like, we, we overdrive. I think in my opinion, at the current market, we super overdrive developer productivity, um, and I think the gen AI craze is not helping this. [00:28:48] We're all talking about how to increase developer productivity and it's almost, it's almost like we're converging on this. Like we're, we're like measuring lines of code that people are like delivering and like, I don't know. I think. Overdriving developer productivity --- [00:29:01] Whitney Lee: What's the consequence of overdriving on developer productivity? [00:29:06] Sasha Czarkowski: I think a lot of times what I see is that operations, so like operations in the sense that people like SRE or people running your software are suffering, right? [00:29:15] Because like essentially what happens is Developers incentivize to push out features. They're not incentivized for those features to be really stable or working or whatever. And so they keep pushing stuff onto ops. Like you, you, Here's my stuff, run it now, right? No one's like, there's no feedback loop in the opposite direction. [00:29:36] So, you know, you start seeing more incidents, you start seeing less reliability, you start seeing, and for organizations that don't consider themselves tech organizations, often they don't talk to customers. There's no feedback loop from customers either. So they don't actually know if their software, like, does this new feature improve anything for anybody or does it improve anything for enough people? [00:29:59] Like a lot of times people will end up with extremely customizable software that isn't really working for anyone. And everybody already forgot how to customize it and stuff like that. Like that, for instance, or like, I don't know, silly thing. I fly a lot, right? I use United mobile app all the time and it, like, it's. [00:30:18] Pretty well designed, like in the sense that it looks good, it works, it doesn't fail, but it does not do what I want it, like my, my first use case is show me like where this, when is this like, when, when does it leave and when does it return, like the times and the dates all on the same page, it is, you need to click like five times to get through it. [00:30:39] Screen that displays that information. I know, but I want to know when I get back here. Like, you know, like not just when I get on this particular plane, right. Every time. [00:30:50] Whitney Lee: So it sounds like, like, so many things can go wrong in so many places, like, how do you begin to untangle that? Where do you start? [00:31:00] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah, so, like, from the beginning of DevOps is, right, like, I feel like you start where it hurts the most, right? [00:31:07] Okay. You try to figure out where people are spending time, people are People are unhappy. Um, a lot of times people will not make a certain change because it's like, Oh, like, it doesn't matter. It's like, well, like 30 percent of your support calls are about this. Like, again, you don't need to push code faster. [00:31:29] You need to fix this problem that people keep like software keeps breaking for folks. Um, You know, so like find what hurts and I'm like, I'm a big fan of theory of constraints. I'm a big fan of sort of values to mapping type approaches to sort of like go to the gamble, like figure out what people are doing and what parts are not working for them. Bottlenecks --- [00:31:53] Coté: So I, I've been, I want to, I want to, I want to have you, uh, vet that I can run around saying this, cause, cause, uh, uh, I, you were talking about developer productivity earlier, and, and I think I'm remembering like that, what you want to do is find the bottlenecks in your process and. [00:32:12] You know, how does the saying go? If you're not working on the bottlenecks, you're working on nothing or something, right? Like you're, you're wasting your [00:32:19] Sasha Czarkowski: time basically, because you can't push faster. I think, I think a lot of times what happens in development in with new tools. So like, I think, you know, you take it. [00:32:29] 10 ish years ago, right. When we didn't have CI, CD pipelines everywhere. And, and like, we, we didn't have good tools for sort of that part of the life cycle, and I think we improved a lot. Like I was a big believer that like, if I just help people, you know, put code in source control and then build a pipeline that goes into some sort of staging environment, and then they test it automatically as much as possible. [00:32:54] Like, and then you to prod like, like, I think we're improving lives here, right? Like you, you know, introduce some sort of the rollback procedure. Like these are, these are all sort of really good things. I think where we settled is. A lot of organizations have the CICD pipelines, but it's like, like, no offense, but like it just pushes crap to production. [00:33:16] Right. Cause like, like there's not necessarily checks and balances. Right. There's not necessarily automated testing. There's not necessarily any kind of gated process for stuff. And so like it just, and then again, they still still think that they need push faster. Right. Cause like, Oh, it takes two weeks to push. [00:33:33] To, to push and not, you know, 20 times a day or whatever. It's like two weeks is okay. Let's like, look at what you're actually like. Have you talked to a customer in the last two years? Operator Productivity --- [00:33:44] Coté: That's interesting. Cause that, that, that kind of adds to, to, to the, the next thing I was thinking is, you know, it seems like, it seems like we do have this industry obsession with developer productivity. [00:33:58] And, and, you know, as always, it, it depends on what you mean by that, but I'll just swim past the depends there and, and just say like, it seems like developers are pretty productive. Right? Like they're, they're very developer, application developers generally work as fast as they can, if, if, if that makes sense. [00:34:18] And so like getting an individual or even a team of developers to be more productive seems like a distraction from like finding these bottlenecks that exist further down to like getting a user to actually use it and the, the, the. Delightful confounding is like, like the, the, the fun, the fun, like, you know, uh, sprinkles that you added to that idea is, well, what if you've removed bottlenecks and now your bottleneck is that you're pushing crap, right? [00:34:47] Like, [00:34:47] Whitney Lee: and [00:34:48] Coté: so, and so like, it's actually really fast to get things out, but there's this, I mean, I don't, I don't know if that's a bottleneck, you'd have to really work to call it a bottleneck, but there's something else that some other problem that you've now created. That also isn't necessarily developer productivity. [00:35:04] It's not operation stuff, but something is going wrong that like whatever you're putting out there is just not helping. [00:35:11] Sasha Czarkowski: Right. So, I mean, usually, usually manifests itself. It's just some sort of customer satisfaction problems. And then in a lot of times in operations problems, right? So like, um, if, if you have, so the major shift that happened in our industry is we used to like put software on CDs and give it to people. [00:35:31] Right? So you would, you would get a instance of Photoshop or something, whatever, and then you would install it in your computer and it'd be yours and it would be your problem to run and configure it. Even if you worked for a big organization, you would get an exchange server on a CD and you would install it and that would be your problem, right? [00:35:49] And then like, you know, you would manage it for a thousand people. So anywhere from one person to, I don't know, 5, 000 people in the organization, maybe a hundred thousand if you're working for a giant corporation, but like now we're running SaaS. Like so such different levels, right? So like you no longer, like when you get Photoshop, it's now a SaaS product. [00:36:14] And reliability of that product is no longer on you. It's on the person who's running the SaaS, right? So we're all essentially converted. Most of our software across the board converted into software as a service, but we haven't, I don't think. Changed the approach. So like we have all the, like, we have all the ideas. [00:36:35] Like we have, we have the SRE book and it's really good. And we have like other stuff, like that's coming out of different companies that like, we've learned about how to operate software in the longterm, but a lot of people are just like renaming teams. That's one of my favorite slides. I basically put it in every presentation of it's like, we've renamed like Support into sysadmin, into like ops, into DevOps, into SRE, into like, I don't know, we're going platform engineering now, right? [00:37:02] Like whatever. And then like, nothing changes. Like we, like you talk to these people and a lot of, a lot of times they're basically support, like they're doing the same things they did. When they were support, right? So like if you're not empowering people to have to be part of that feedback loop, um, and unfortunately, like a lot of times people kind of don't care about the, the, the personal experience of people in operations, right? [00:37:28] Like, uh, you work long weekends, tough luck. That's what you signed up for when you took this job, right? Uh huh. So I, I think this is one thing that I haven't found how to convince people of is like, how do I convince people that they should care about the operations experience, right? Cause like everybody seems to be caring about, and again, I spent. [00:37:50] Satoshi is in development, right? I'm a developer and I, you know, I don't think developers need more catering and more improving their lives. And I think they're doing fine. [00:38:01] Whitney Lee: And that's because they're directly related to the value stream and operations are not. Do you think that's why that disconnect is there? [00:38:10] Sasha Czarkowski: I think because like new features are easy to justify, like everybody wants new stuff, right? Everybody wants new features. Everybody wants innovation. It's easy to get budget for. It's easy to say, rah, rah, we did a good thing. Also, the way organizations are budgeting, they're budgeting for projects. We're still budgeting for projects, right? [00:38:29] Because again, we converted into software as a service, but how do you get money for developers? You say, ah, I'm going to ship these new features. Do you need the new features? Like one customer told us that if we did this, it would be better. Okay. Have you talked to any other customers? Is this customer 20 percent of your revenue? [00:38:49] Maybe you should be shipping for that customer. I don't know. But like a lot of times it's, you know, it's easy to sell, but in the long run, anything you've built, if it's successful, the operations budget exceeds the development budget, right? Imagine if you're shipping software as a service. Right. And like you, it is successful, which means people are using it long term. [00:39:11] That means that 20 years from now, like, I don't know, let's not, let's not go there. Five years from now, you still want it to run. So like the features you ship today, you still want them to run five years from now. Now you need maintenance, maybe you need to replace them with new features, whatever, but your operational budgets should be matching that, uh, paradigm. [00:39:33] Whitney Lee: Absolutely. One thing this conversation has taught me is like, I definitely. I have heard over and over again to ship quickly, like ship fast, but I, I didn't, I'm now thinking about the assumption that we're making that like, or the, the specification we need to say is like ship quality software fast. It's not enough to ship fast. [00:39:53] Coté: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, maybe also we haven't updated that phrase since like. [00:39:59] And, uh, I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe we need to, uh, maybe we're shipping fine now. [00:40:04] Whitney Lee: We did it. Good job, [00:40:05] Coté: everyone. Some confetti [00:40:07] Sasha Czarkowski: falls from the sky. No, I agree. And, and, and it's, it's also funny because I think, um, you know, One of my friends says like, you know, we've improved the DevOps, so like now we need to go back to improving the dev. [00:40:22] But like, I disagree because like, we didn't improve the DevOps, we like, we improved the CICD. Right? Like, I mean, maybe we, we have better on call operations, like on call, um, apps and stuff, but like, do we really improve operations? Like, I'm not sure. [00:40:39] Whitney Lee: Like, if improving dev is like dev experience, the speed and quality of software delivery, what, what does improving ops look like? [00:40:48] Like, what does success look like? [00:40:50] Sasha Czarkowski: So, I'm going to contradict myself, but like, um, after Running DevOps for a bunch of years. I had this moment where I was like, Oh God, like nothing's changing, right? We're having the exact same conversations every time. And every time there are people who are like, mind blown. [00:41:08] Oh my God, you know, we've learned so much from this. And I'm like, God, I, at one point I went and I saw the original, like, agile, not the manifesto, but one of his books and like, he listed principles and like, this is continuous delivery, like, and that's like 10 years before the continuous delivery book, I'm like, we, we keep rediscovering the same thing. [00:41:30] What the hell? Um, and then I was like, I was talking to my friends, like my, my co organizers and like, no, no, no, our lives improved. Like our lives got better because, you know, we used to be paid, you know, Pretty low compared to developers. And we used to be treated like click monkeys, right? And now we like write software and we're appreciated and our salary is better. [00:41:49] And we have a say and you know, all that stuff. And I. That's cool. And I, and I think that did happen, but in some organizations, it's still sort of discovered that like operations is this like neglected part, right. And still like very much not operating, um, according to like the principles. So I think, where do you start is like, I think I would read this or ebook. [00:42:15] Like it's good. Um, um, and it's. Success in operations --- [00:42:19] Whitney Lee: So success for operations is more like they have plenty of budget. They're well paid, they're well respected. Is that what success looks like? [00:42:28] Sasha Czarkowski: So it's part of it, right? But I think also, so well respected is interesting. They have to be able to push back on developers, right? [00:42:38] Like that, that's the core part, right? So like when a developer gives me an app, I should be able to say, Look, this is poorly architected. It's unmaintainable, right? To hold it together, I need to burn many, many hours or to deploy it. I need to burn many, many hours. This is unacceptable. Go fix. These 10 issues, so it becomes maintainable and runnable so that it's not my team, you know, being awake in the middle of the weekend, but it's developers fixing it or, you know, doing better architecture that that's a, for instance, on how we improved, um, operations lives and it, like it is in the SRE book, right? [00:43:17] Like there's concept of production readiness review and SRE can push back on dev and say, no, we're not going to run this. Whereas in most organizations, that doesn't exist. That's not a thing. Okay. Staying sane in chaos --- [00:43:28] Coté: Well, so you lived through one of the bigger transformations of, I think, our lifetimes. The transformation of the USSR. [00:43:36] And you wrote about, like, this crazy, Get some all amount of cash out of your bank accounts when possible. Uh, I think I didn't even put it in air quotes, monetary reform. So, you know, that was just one thing, but I imagine having lived through it yourself, uh, like, like there's all sorts of interesting experiences you had. [00:43:57] And like, one, one thing I'm curious about in the context of transformation is like, um, let's say when you're living through a crazy transformation, like what do like individual groups of people do to like, Stay okay. Insane. Like I, whether it's like a big giant company or a big giant country, just going nuts, like how do you take care of each other despite what's going on externally? [00:44:24] Sasha Czarkowski: Um, well, I, I think that like a lot of people. Um, I'm like, you made me think about myself and what do I do in these situations? And so, like, I think there's one option is flight. So you just run away from a bad thing. Like that, that's a, there's an option. A lot of people are afraid to take, but I find it very valuable. [00:44:46] Like if you, if you're in a really bad situation, sometimes it's. It's better to leave. Um, Willis said that to me years ago, if you can't change your job, change your job. And I'm like, that's, that's very smart. Um, [00:44:58] Whitney Lee: the door of the electrocuted cage is open. Yeah. Yeah. In [00:45:02] Sasha Czarkowski: most cases. Yeah. Every now and again, you can't leave, but, um, most cases you can. [00:45:08] Um, the other thing is like, a lot of people are just like, nothing's happening. I'm just going to focus on this thing I can control and I'm not going to worry about the other stuff. stuff. Um, the other thing is like, if you are, um, in some sort of like leadership position and can be an ICO can be middle management or whatever. [00:45:26] You can create sort of psychological as psychologically safe environment as you can for your people, like kind of, yes, you can't fix the entire organization, but you can try to be as good as possible. I mean, crazy transformations are hard because it's interesting because I've seen it kind of done both ways. [00:45:48] I've seen it where like. Leadership doesn't share what's happening and that's really difficult, but I've seen it also where leadership shares what's happening, but they change their mind because like situation changes and they change their mind every 10 minutes. And then like, you're like, that is also really, this is also a lot of uncertain. [00:46:05] I'm not sure I wanted all this stuff. Right. So, I mean, uncertainty is very difficult for people. Um, uncertainty, uncertainty is worse than, um, bad news. Client perceptions --- [00:46:18] Whitney Lee: Is part of your role at SoC like going into organizations and making these big changes? Do you, are you seen as the bad guy to some people or, or you're the agent of change and big transformation, I imagine. [00:46:32] And how does that feel and how do people react to you? [00:46:35] Sasha Czarkowski: I don't, I don't think I have had this reaction at all, like being seen as a bad guy. Um, you know, we, we try, like, one of the things we do is we try to listen to people and, and like, it's, it's amazing because it's amazing how much people tell you, right? [00:46:52] Because no one ever listens to them. So they eager to tell you in there, like, can you please tell my manager's manager or whatever that like, this is happening, like, please. And I'm like, yep, I can't like not going to quote you not going to, you know, whatever. But like, we can talk about it. Um, so like, I think I think we usually are seen as helpful and we, we all like, it's, it's often comes that like, we, we come in the middle of the transformation and we try to rescue the transformation that's already underway and it's like perceived as failing or is actually failing. [00:47:27] Um, and we try to kind of. You know, find the bits that are actually good and, and, um, you know, focus on them and solve the bits that are not good. [00:47:37] Coté: You know, I, I don't know, I don't know if this is like me cultural, my group, or like Western cultural, but, but, but I'm, I'm almost, I don't know, let's say 90 percent certain that in that role you're talking about where you're an outsider going in trying to help people, right? [00:47:53] That. You like have to start with some self effacement of some type, right? Like, like I think, you know, like, like in your learning talk, you kind of walk through this, like how I ended up watching sex in the city instead of studying for finals. Right. And, you know, and, and like, I definitely trade in this sort of like, what a goof ball I am. [00:48:13] And like, you know, look at me. And even, even that, that Porsche CEO I was talking about, he kind of like, You know, in, in the way that someone would, he sort of like took some jabs at himself here and there, but I don't, I don't know if I've encountered effective change agents who are like, I know what I'm doing. [00:48:34] I mean, I mean, I can't even say what they would say in a tone that doesn't sound dismissive, but like, I don't know. Do you, do you think you have to like, start by like bringing yourself down somehow, [00:48:43] Whitney Lee: showing your humanity? [00:48:44] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah. So, so I think, Interestingly, I think it's easier as a consultant than as a leader inside the organization. [00:48:52] Um, because like humility, leaders have this double bind where they're expected to lead, right? They're expected to know and, you know, be sure and confident. Confidence is extremely important to humans and whatever. And then you add this kind of expectation that you need to be, um, You know, accept different opinions and stuff and you kind of end up in this situation where it's difficult to navigate, uh, for a leader. [00:49:22] I think for a consultant, it's much easier. I've, I've always disliked the type of consulting where like someone walks in and like, all of your stuff sucks and we're going to make it all better. I feel [00:49:31] Whitney Lee: like I feel much better when I come [00:49:33] Sasha Czarkowski: in and I'm like, Oh, this is good. And this is good. And this is great. [00:49:38] And this really sucks. And it's not your fault. And you know, let's dig into how we can do this. Presentation rules and styles --- [00:49:44] Coté: On that topic of conference talks, since, since all three of us do this a lot, uh, you know, I've seen a lot of your talks and they're great. And when you're, let's see first for yourself, and then maybe we could get to it if you are advising other people, but like when you're doing a talk, when does it like, Pop into your head that I should break one of the, the, the rules of conference talks, like one, one of the taboos. [00:50:07] Cause it's gonna either because, well, first of all, when you do break one, like, why do you do it? And then also how, how do you decide to tactically, not tactfully, but tactically do it? [00:50:17] Whitney Lee: What, what are the rules of comfort stocks? Yeah, first, [00:50:21] Coté: well, for, for example, the number one rule that I break all the time is you're supposed to have your text readable on a slide. [00:50:27] And so I usually am like, I'm going to have a slide where you can't read anything. Right. That, like, you know, what do they even call it? A, um, an, an I slide. There's some word that people use for that. And, um, I don't know. There's also like, uh, what, what are some other rules? Like, this is a good, make [00:50:46] Sasha Czarkowski: eye contact. [00:50:48] Coté: Like, I guess, I mean, a big one would be, you shouldn't have your back to the audience. I mean, like, you know, there's all these things and, and maybe that's also part of the question is like, I don't really, I can't, as I'm demonstrating, I can't tell you what the rules are, but I know there's rules, right? [00:51:00] Like there's things that you're supposed to do. [00:51:03] Sasha Czarkowski: So I think most of speaking advice sucks because if you like naively Google speaking advice, it will tell you like, make eye contact with the audience, but not too much eye contact. So you're not staring, never look at your site, never turn back to your audience. [00:51:18] Like don't put your hands in your pockets. Don't do this. Don't do that. That is awful because if you walked up on stage and tried to think about Even 5 percent of these things, you would be absolutely terrible at presenting, right? So my favorite book, if you ever wanted to read one, is, um, Presence by Amy Cuddy. [00:51:40] Um, and she talks about basically being on message. So like what you want is sort of. And you want to be focused on your message and doesn't like you can put your hands in your pockets and you can look down and you whatever. And as long as you're authentic and you care about what you're saying, people will relate to you and people will understand, um, you know, what will perceive you as the authenticity that you're displaying. [00:52:06] Um, yeah. So like, I, I think the. The best thing to do for conference speaking, of course, is practice. But of course, um, not all of us, I do know people, I do know excellent speakers that practice a lot. Um, I myself fall into the speakers that don't practice a lot every time I think that I should, and I don't, that part of the problem is I change my slides every time I look at them. [00:52:30] So like, I envy people who don't do that because you can like write a talk and then deliver it and then get really good at delivering, but I'm like, no, no, no, I'm going to rewrite all the flow and do this, do other things. Yeah, every time. Um, so, you know, um, that's how it works. I don't know that I, Um, I don't really decide on purpose to write conference rules, um, or speaking rules. [00:52:54] I just, I think they don't matter as much as people think. [00:52:58] Coté: Yeah, yeah. I agree with that. Maybe I need to do more analysis of, of what the rules are. Cause, cause I feel, I feel, you know, you know, one of them, for example, is like, you should start with a story, which, which, you know, is good advice and people do that. [00:53:12] But like, I, I don't know, I, I often don't like talks that start with a story and I'm always kind of like pulling at for like, all right, when are we going to get to the thing? What's the thing? Like what, how, how does, how does like that one time that, you know, you, uh, you, you made a pie. Configuring servers. [00:53:31] Let's get there. [00:53:33] Sasha Czarkowski: Well, I know, I think I'm kind of tired of talks that are like what blah taught me about DevOps. [00:53:39] Whitney Lee: Uh, yeah, [00:53:41] Sasha Czarkowski: there's a lot of them, a lot of blah about DevOps or whatever. Um, I think, oh no. You go, I totally lost my train of thought right now. Oh, [00:53:50] Whitney Lee: I wanted to ask Kote why he chooses to break the rule of not having too much text on a slide. [00:53:56] I hate when there's too much text on a slide, Kote. [00:53:58] Coté: Yeah, uh, well, I'll get to answering your question, but that raises up another point I was interested in talking about, which is, you know, we, we talked with, uh, uh, someone from the CNCF, Katie Greenlee, last, uh, Episode, which for us was yesterday, but for the listeners will have been two weeks ago. [00:54:16] Uh, but anyhow, you know, she, she offhandedly brought up the point that, you know, part of management, uh, one of the things that she would tell people is you should be brief in, in your emails, right? Like in your communication, which is certainly true. And that's also kind of a thing for conference talks, this like brevity and clearness. [00:54:34] And I guess I really don't like those rules. Like, like I've, I've been on the receiving end of brevity so many times. Like, like I was complaining about all you have to do is ask the employees what's wrong and then a problem solved next slide and just like, Whoa, we could talk for three hours about that. [00:54:54] Or like, you know, this, this single line email should have been a five page document, I guess, to put it another way. And so like, I'm always like, I don't always do it, but I, there's oftentimes where I think. Like the, the way, the, when, the, when that I do it recurrently is like, I suggest you should have a developer survey, which has like 50 questions and I like put the font size at eight and put all 50 questions on the slide. [00:55:17] And, you know, there's a bit of a joke too, which is rhetorically fun, but it's also kind of like, maybe you would like to see what they all are right. That it's not just like. Here's three sample questions, but you know, I don't know. So that's, that's an example. Brevity often drives me nuts. Like I want, I want to know there's a lot more detail that, that, that I could get to. [00:55:39] Sasha Czarkowski: So I'll say, I'll say, first of all, I do brief slides. I, my rule is 20 to 30 seconds a slide, but that I do this. for the audience as I do this for myself because if I have a slide and I talk to 10 minutes, I'm going to forget a point I was going to make, and it's much, much easier for me to just say, yeah, one point per slide. [00:55:58] And I can. You know, go through 200 slides, who cares? Um, but then on the part of brevity, I do believe in brevity, but it's more readability, skimmability, if you will. So like, people don't read, we're all like, whether or not we're ADHD, we're like, In the world full of distractions. So you give someone a three page document and they're just incapable of reading it. [00:56:25] Um, you know, myself included. And so what it should have is the ability to quickly skim. So like, you know, the proper headlines, the proper formatting, the proper like, you know, bullet list somewhere. So like. Something that tells you where things are. So like, if you don't go around it in order that, um, someone created initially, um, it still works for you. [00:56:47] And then I do think that how you read, how you write, um, communication really matters and like, we should all kind of strive to be better at it because like the, the goal of communication should be to. And yeah, a lot of times we just sort of focus on what we want to say rather than what people need to hear. [00:57:08] Coté: Yeah. Yeah, no, that's true. And, and, you know, you know, I, I, I do, uh, uh, I have noticed that either the earlier in the morning or the later at night that I write corporate communications. The longer they are and the more I wish I had just emailed them to myself the next day, like, like that I could have just concise things down that I'm, I'm kind of seeking out free therapy, kind of, as you were saying a lot of communication is just talking to yourself by talking to other people. [00:57:34] I, I, I, Well, [00:57:37] Sasha Czarkowski: you know, a therapist would tell you to, you know, email it to yourself, sleep on it and email it tomorrow when you had the chance to, um, but this is sometimes also a wash down advice because sometimes you, you need to say something. And like, if you again, follow all the rules all the time, you'd be an unhappy person.  Louisville, Kentucky --- [00:57:55] Coté: Yes, indeed. Well, so, so the last question I had, you moved to Louisville. Recently. And, uh, I like what's, what's been like, uh, like an unexpected delight of, of the Louisville scene. Not, not that it, uh, counted your expectations, but that it was just like, Oh, look at this, I had no idea. [00:58:14] Sasha Czarkowski: Well, um, last week we actually went to lights under Louisville, which was like a Christmas display. [00:58:20] And it's in this giant former mining cave. It's just like, we drove through it for like, 30 minutes, I don't know. And it's one of the best Christmas lights displays I've ever seen. Like, it's really, really cool. Um, the zoo was also really cool. They had a polar bear and stuff. I've been to a lot of zoos and I was like, ah, Louisville Zoo, whatever. [00:58:40] Um, but no, it was really cool. And every now and again, like, things delight me like that. Uh, like, I'll discover a good restaurant, or I'll discover a good, I don't know. Playground or something, um, and they'll be like, oh, you know, this is this is really cool. Um, yeah, the thing I pine over because I moved from Chicago, which has every restaurant imaginable to humans, like, there's not. [00:59:06] As many restaurants and there's not as many sort of like cuisines from all over the world type of thing. So like finding a good Vietnamese and Mission Impossible or whatever. Um, so yeah. Why, why Louisville? Um, you know, we kind of wanted to change and we like actually visited a couple of different states and we, we came here and like, you just, was nice and spoke to us and like, I definitely am enjoying myself. [00:59:39] It's like, this is very much like, it's very different in a big city. I kind of, I've kind of always lived in a bigger city and, um, you know, this is, this is quite a different experience in a, in a good way. [00:59:53] Whitney Lee: Nice. I definitely have the urge to move to the Midwest. I grew up in the Midwest. So sometimes I look at, uh, you know, enlistings for Cincinnati, Ohio. [01:00:02] Like what houses are for sale there? So it's cool that you did it. [01:00:07] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah, proper city. Yeah. And I mean, Louisville has like a million people, um, in Metro. I don't, I don't know if it's in the city or in the Metro, but it definitely like, It feels small compared to Chicago, which I think Chicago is 9 million in Metro, but like, it feels a hundred times smaller, not 10 times smaller. [01:00:27] Like if that makes sense. Absolutely.  Ergonautic & The Learning Talk --- [01:00:31] Coté: Well, so we we've, uh, to close out, we've alluded to it several times, but to, but tell people about your, uh, your company, like, uh, what, what is it? Where is it? How could they look it up? [01:00:40] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah, so Ergonautic, which means navigating work, um, and you can look it up on the internet, um, or you can, you know, look for my name. [01:00:48] It would be pretty easy to find. Um, also, Andrew Clay Schaefer and Jay Bloom are my co founders. Have heard of one or both of them. Um, yeah. I think we're pretty easy to find on the internet. Um, Gen AI can now tell you what we do, which is kind of cool. We've been indexed, so [01:01:10] Whitney Lee: You've made it. Um, another question we've alluded a lot to. [01:01:15] Y'all keep saying the learning talk. What do you say when you mean that and where can we find it? [01:01:20] Sasha Czarkowski: So, so I've actually just given this talk a bunch and it, like, again, it keeps evolving. I've been giving it for about five years. I think it's quite different now than when I started. Um, I gave it twice this year, probably. [01:01:32] I don't know. Uh, DevSays Amsterdam and Antwerp. Maybe somewhere else. I don't know who remembers. Um, but it, it kind of is, uh, about both personal and organizational learning and growth mindset and all sorts of studies about what, um, what encourages people to learn. And, you know, um, how, how you can make sure that people are open to learning and open to new information. [01:02:01] Coté: Yeah, it's, it's a great talk. I think, I think it's a, it's, it's good, good for good for everyone to watch, but you know, I'll, I'll, my personal experience with it is like, uh, You know, uh, I'm like, oh, I'm at a DevOps days, another talk talking about how learning's great, like, but, but I'm going to watch it anyways. [01:02:17] And then right away, it's like, ah, this is finally getting to what I want. You know, uh, I think, I think as I was saying to you somewhere, one of those, those, those Benelux places, Sasha, like my problem is I, I know I need to have habits, but I don't have the habit of forming habits. And like, I think, uh, I think there's, uh, there's several things in that talk that you went over. [01:02:34] And I think, uh, I think there's several things in that talk that you went over. Uh, that I think were good ways of defeating that. Like the best to give one preview was like, you know, a lot of people say, you know, uh, they get frustrated at learning or like they're, they're lazy or they don't want to do anything. [01:02:49] And then, and then like, you know, why don't you try sitting down on the couch? For like five minutes and see how long it takes you to go crazy. Like you need something to do like, and, uh, you know, so you can see how that would help boost people in the learning that, uh, actually you, uh, you got to do something with your hands. [01:03:06] Sasha Czarkowski: Yeah. I, I think, you know, the, the joke I make is that, you know, growth mindset is like DevOps. Like 10 years ago, the problem was that no one knew what DevOps was. And now the problem is that everyone thinks they know what DevOps is. So like growth mindset is the same. Like 10 years ago, if you mention it, people are like, what now? [01:03:25] And now they're like, Oh yeah, I know. I know what it means. Like, can you tell me? Can you tell, so the, we're at time, we're we'll save it for some other time. Outro --- [01:03:36] Coté: Well, great. Well, thank, thanks for, uh, thanks for being on here. It's fun as always to talk. Uh, I'm sure we'll see each other out this year somewhere. [01:03:43] And as always, this has been Software Defined Interviews. If you want to get pointers to the learning talk and other things like that, you can go to softwaredefinedinterviews. com slash 91 and bring that all up. And we'll see everyone next time. Blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Bye bye. [01:03:59] Whitney Lee: Blah, blah.