JOHN: This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab - a modern financial services firm that stands apart from the industry, where you can go as far as your ambition and unique talent take you to create a career worth owning. Hi Jyothi, thank you for joining us today. As a person with a tech background, what made you consider working for Schwab? JYOTHI: I think although it's a financial company, it is technology driven. They are up on all the technologies, and pretty much everything that's out in the market, and the standard to be used, they are there. I think, yes, their domain is finance, but I think they are pretty technologically strong, as well. I would like to tell other programmers who think that Schwab is not a tech company, you are wrong. They have a very complex tech stack, and it is going to be really interesting and very fulfilling to work here. JOHN: To learn more about the technology career opportunities at Schwab, visit SchwabJobs.com. JESSICA: Good morning. Welcome to Episode 131 of Greater Than Code, the podcast, where we talk to people who know about fun, about stuff, more important than code. I'm Jessica Kerr. And today, I am thrilled to be here with my co-host, John Sawers. JOHN: Thank you, Jessica. And I'm here with Avdi Grimm. AVDI: Thank you, John. I am Avdi, and I am here with my friend and my favorite penguin aficionado, Cat Swetel. CAT: Greetings. JESSICA: Cat, what is your penguin superpower? CAT: My superpower, I think, though it's hard to tell what your own superpower is. I think my superpower is knowing what other people's superpowers are, potentially even before they do. JESSICA: That's my superpower! CAT: [Laughs] You have more than one and you know it. [Chuckles] AVDI: When did you discover this superpower? CAT: Probably when I started working. I started working when I was in junior high in high school. I bus tables when I first started. And I rolled up silverware in napkins. I put a little wax piece of paper around it to keep them all together. It was a very engaging work. JESSICA: Did you get to exercise your superpower? JOHN: [Chuckles] CAT: I think I did, yeah. People think when you're doing that kind of work that everyone is kind of interchangeable but they're not. There's some people that are a lot better at some things and some people that are a lot better at other things, like people that are really extroverted and good at engaging people are probably great in the front of the house. And people that are really meticulous and organized are really good in the back of the house. And so, everyone has a place. JESSICA: Do you still use that superpower today? Oh, by the way, what do you do today? CAT: Today, I work at Ticketmaster and manage the core ticketing platform. And of course, I still use that superpower especially with the platform that I work on. It is very old; it is 43 years old. JESSICA: Wow! CAT: Yes. [Laughs] JESSICA: That's older than me. CAT: Yeah. It's, for sure, older than me by a long shot. JESSICA: So what was that like managing a platform with such ancient value? CAT: It is great, and it's especially cool at Ticketmaster because there's tons of people who were in the first round of employees ever hired, tons of them still work there. Like the other day, something happened and we found all of these weird configurations and things that we basically didn't even know that they existed. It was so exciting because we got to actually go find the people and ask them why you haven't configured this way. JESSICA: And they remember? CAT: Yes. JESSICA: Oh, my God! CAT: All of it except for one weird thing. We found someone who remembered all of it. Just their stories are so great. Like one guy was a delivery driver or something and he ended up managing all of the storage for all of the core platforms. And another guy was the owner of a record store and he ended up being like the king of operations. Two of the engineers on my team, they started in the call center. Another guy was a Blackjack dealer that everyone from the office knew and he ended up working there. Just all of these great stories. It's cool to have that history and be trying new things. And the fact that they're also open to trying new things like, "You were the seventh employee ever. And what have you been working on lately?" "Well, I've been tinkering with Kubernetes." I just love that. That's the kind of technologist I want to be in 20 years. JESSICA: Yeah, that's cool. And as an employee, as part of that company, there's value to that history and there's value to the stuff they're doing now. Oh, do their superpowers change over time? CAT: Yes, of course. And that's another really cool thing as the company evolves that you can see people's superpowers evolve. One of the engineers that I work with who is amazing, I know I've talked about him before, at least to you, but he is just so great. His superpowers have definitely changed over time. I think before I was there, his superpower was kind of bringing people together from all these different teams. And now, he's really deep into the technical stuff. And so, I find that really interesting that he's able to swing the team more of a focus on people skills and more of a focus on technical skills. I think that's great. JOHN: It strikes me as a pretty unique experience at a nominally technology company that you would actually have that history available. Typically, it's just, "Well, Founder X left 10 years ago," and you have to piece it together. So, that's actually really cool to have that kind of context. CAT: Yeah. And it's also really cool that the founder of that company will often be seen roaming around. He's very open. You can just flag him down and say, "Hey, I always wondered why this exists." And he'll tell you the story of it. JOHN: Wow! That just pondered up in my mind this sort of fantastic, like the oral history of an application especially one that's got as much history as that one. You could tell it as almost like a performance. Like, "In the dark ages, a server was forged in the darkness and you put the code that did this and this and this. And then came the trials of scaling and we had to do all these things." It would be so fun to write that. CAT: That would be an amazing epic. But that's the kind of stuff that I love and I feel like we're so quick in our industry to kind of mock history and say, "How could they be so stupid to think it's right to do this or that." And I feel like it's so important to have respect for the history of the industry, of specific platforms. It's really important to me. JESSICA: Yeah. These stories are big deal. Avdi and I were talking this morning about telling stories within code and how history matters. I thought it was interesting that you said, "Something happened and we found all these weird configurations that we didn't know existed." There's so much in the system that's working and you have no clue why. You have no clue. CAT: [Laughs] Yes. We get to find that story. And a lot of the why isn't even related to the goals, it's related to the history of what we tried before and who tried it. That, for me, is really interesting, the things that we take for granted. It's ready to hand or whatever the phrase is. And it only becomes conspicuous when it's broken. Unfortunately, at least for me in my career, what I found with most of these platforms, I suppose, most of these applications, that you don't have the history. It's stripped of context and you're left trying to get into some person's head that you're never going to know. JESSICA: And as you point out, it's hard to even have respect for that person when you don't have enough context to understand the decisions that they've encoded. CAT: Yeah. And it's often not just one person. It's a collection of contributions of people over time. So, that's a lot of context that it's usually impossible to grasp. And maybe if we had ethics like that, like the story of this platform that we passed on, then maybe we can build and even have some of that context. JESSICA: Yeah, you need a bard on the team. [Laughter] CAT: You heard it here first, folks. AVDI: I'll be waiting for the first time I see somebody with a business card that says 'software bard'. JESSICA: Richard Campbell is writing a history of .NET. AVDI: So, he's a bard. JESSICA: Yeah, because he knows it because he did this podcast of like a thousand episodes at .NET Rocks! JOHN: Oh, yeah. JESSICA: That makes us like level two bards. [Laughter] AVDI: I'm kind of curious where your career has taken you in between the bussing tables and the Ticketmaster periods. CAT: It's been a wild ride. My dad worked always in some sort of operations functions, like network or whatever, just a bunch of different things like that when I was growing up. And he would bring me in to work a lot probably more than he should have. So, I always really liked technology and it made sense to me. It's just logical and I liked that a lot. So, I sort of knew that I wouldn't end up bussing tables. From there, I went and got a Finance Degree because I was told that's what people do. They go get a Business Degree. My dad kind of told me that he watched a lot of the women that he admired in his career get treated not very nicely. And so, maybe I should not do that thing that I like and do something that he thought would make me more money and maybe people would be nicer to me. But I'm an idiot, so I got a Finance Degree which is all men, as well. JESSICA: Are people nicer to you? CAT: [Chuckles] When you're getting a Finance Degree, just no one's nice. It's just very different than anything, really. So, when I graduated and I got a finance job and I had that for eight weeks, I ended up in the application that this company used to manage calls in their call centers. I sat there and watched people go through all these workflows. I suspected that there were workflows that weren't exposed to the users in the call centers just based on, I don't know, clues, kind of. And so, I found some other workflows and exposed them to the users and I got an award and the promise of a lifetime supply of popcorn in the cafeteria. And then, I quit because it was clear to me that I should not be working in finance; I should be working in technology. And so, the rest is kind of history. JESSICA: What were those that weren't exposed to the users? CAT: Yeah, the call center employees. JESSICA: What is that? CAT: Like navigating between the screens. They navigate through the screens in a specific order, I guess. And some of the orders didn't make sense and I knew that there had to be some other way for them to navigate through the screens. So, I found other ways. JESSICA: And those were already present in the software? CAT: Yeah. I'm sure it's the same thing. I'm sure that someone, years before, there was some reason. But again, the application was ancient, like a bazillion years old. And I'm sure someone at some point saw the need to lock down those workflows and not expose them to the users. And then at that point, it was not smart anymore. JESSICA: Did you change settings in the app or something? Or did you just teach the people, "Hey, click here." CAT: Well, I found ways that they could use keyboard shortcuts to make it to the other. After that, we realized that it made them much more efficient. So, it became like a proper thing. JESSICA: Wow! That's just really interesting that the technology was already there but you explored the corners of it. You found the secret passages. CAT: It felt like a game, yeah. AVDI: Does that make you a rogue? [Laughter] AVDI: You say that the rest is basically history. But I want to pick your brain a tiny bit more on this before we go on to other stuff because I know that -- I have this impression of you from talking to a conference is that your route kind of went very differently from mine and what a lot of technologists I know. You know about things that I just don't, having to do with the world of consultancies. CAT: Oh, yes. AVDI: I guess I just want a little more detail about what that route looked like. CAT: I kind of just bounced between consulting and being a proper employee. I have been doing that for like the past 10 years, I guess. So, when I first quit my finance job and said I can't do this anymore, I did go work for a short while for a consultancy that needed someone that had both business and technology knowledge. And so, that was a good fit to work there. And then I just kind of bounced back and forth between consulting and being an employee. It's been quite interesting. As you may have guessed, I'm not your typical consultant. And so, my encounters with some of the larger big name consultancies have been interesting. AVDI: I don't know which ones you can tell on the podcast, but you've definitely told me some interesting stories. CAT: Yeah, I get it. When a company chooses to engage my services, they're typically looking for someone to see those things that aren't immediately obvious and to be exploring things and sort of treating their systems as a game, a fun challenge. And that's not why you would be engaging one of the big consultancies. You would be engaging them till you probably find something unique and see if it's more broadly applicable to other portions of your business. JESSICA: I think it's cool that you get paid to explore the systems and see them in a new way. CAT: It's been really fun. And the fact that you can kind of just say, "I'm done," when you're done exploring. You kind of prepare the report and say, "These are my recommendations. Do you need any help getting started with that?" But then if you say, "This is now boring to me. I think I'm done here," people are never like, "Oh, but we really wanted to pay you the rest of that money. Please don't go." That happens pretty infrequently. So, I like that a lot about consulting. JESSICA: Yeah. You get to see the problems but not on them. CAT: I mean, you want people to succeed and things like that. But once they've started implementing solutions or they have an idea of how to treat themselves, I guess, you don't have to stick around and hold their hand. I think that's not great, anyway. You don't want people to develop a dependency on you. JESSICA: Yeah. And in a [inaudible], the solutions really have to come from inside. CAT: Yes. JESSICA: So you can like tickle people, you can be like, "Hey, look at this and think about this." But then, they have to look at it, find the idea in their heads and then make it part of the system. CAT: Yeah. Really your whole job is just to sensitize people to things that they couldn't observe before. AVDI: Sort of perturb the system. CAT: Yeah. AVDI: Speaking of seeing systems in a new light, there's a concept that I think you were the first to introduce me to. And then recently, you gave a talk on it. That is the concept of Wardley Mapping. CAT: Yes. AVDI: Can you talk about that a little bit and about why you're interested in it? CAT: Wardley Mapping. I don't know how much people know about it but... JESSICA: I know nothing about it. JOHN: Nothing. JESSICA: At least some of us know nothing about it. CAT: I'm certainly not going to be able to teach you everything about it in a few minutes. But generally, it's examining value chains, all the things that have to come together to provide value to a set of users. And it's mapping those genes on two axes. The horizontal axis would be evolution. So, things either evolve or die. So, that axis goes from genesis to commodities - the things that are brand new, no one's ever done this before, to things that have become things we take for granted. And then the vertical axis would be how visible it is to a user. So, things that the user interacts with versus things that the user doesn't see. So, that's Wardley Mapping and you take the different components of your system where systems have to come together to provide value to the user and you map them on those axes. And then you map movement as far as evolution or how this [inaudible] thing is to a user. And the reason I like it is for exactly the theme that we have been talking about here. It puts context around decisions that we make. It's context around our strategies that we're employing, it just gives us context in general and it gives us a way to keep grounding in that context as the context continues to evolve. I think that's really important. So often we end up with these artifacts that some consultant made for us or we generated at an off site that's like set in stone and you never touch it again, whereas a Wardley Map invites you to continue the conversation over time as things change, and I really like that. JESSICA: Can you give us an example of using a Wardley Map to make a decision of [inaudible]? CAT: Yeah, I can give you an example that my mom and I went through. My mom owns a business that hooks on endurance cycling events. She was debating whether she should, or she and I, if we should create our own system for timing, for the timing of riders. So, that's typically like an RFID chip on their number and they cross the line basically read by the sensor and go, and then they cross the line again and you know they're finished. So, we were debating if we should make one of those ourselves from scratch or if we should find a company to do the timing for us, outsource it basically. Or if we should take it real old school and just pay people to sit at the finish line and mark down when people finish. And originally, of course, because my mom and I are nerds, we were like, "Yeah, we're going to make our own thing. This will be so fun. We're just going to play with RFID all day long. It's going to be great. And then we'll own it and we will even license it out to other people, give it away for free," or all of these things. Then we start looking at what it would cost in terms of our time investment to actually create the thing and then ordering the chips all the time, and do we actually have a place that can get us chips. And then that would also mean that we would have to integrate with the registration system so that we can match the number plates to the riders and to their emergency contact information. And then we realize that probably we also have to integrate with these other things. And so, we mapped out all of that and it went from being one dot on the map to then being many, many, many, many, many dots. And so, we started seriously looking at just paying people to sit at the finish line because that'll be really cheap. We can just pay them to sit there and mark down the numbers. But then we match that and it's not just paying people to sit there and mark 10 times on the numbers. We still had to do all the formation for the number plates. We still have to create some sort of integration with the registration system to match the numbers to the riders and on, and on, and on. All of these things we had to pay the people sitting there, all this stuff. So, we created those [inaudible], realized it was a lot more complicated than we initially thought and would cost a lot more money than we initially thought. And so, then we went and just got bids from several different companies, so we can outsource that too and it ended up paying way less cost. At first, we had like sticker shock at the cost of getting one of those companies. And so, we had our three different maps. And we said, "This is stupid. Why are we doing this? This is not a brand new thing. We shouldn't be making it ourselves. This is a product that exists out in the world that we should just go purchase." So, we did. JOHN: How do you quantify evolution in this context? CAT: There is a ton of stuff out there about diffusion curves and all of these. What is the total available population to decide when something is diffused and there's definitions for the categories that Wardley uses: Genesis, Custom, Product, Commodity. But I tend to think of it as how much do I think of this thing. For Genesis, that would consume all of my thought. My brain would be tinkering with that, even when I was thinking about something else. And Commodity, I never think about. The other thing that I think is really important when you're thinking about Wardley Maps is you should be asking yourself how does this ecosystem, how does this industry treat this component versus how do I treat it. I've been in lots of places where each server is a precious sweet little baby that we care for with all of our hearts or whatever instance of whatever. But that's not how we should treat [computers]. [Computer] is a commodity. So it's very interesting when there's a mismatch there between my perception or my company's perception versus the industry's common perception. There's kind of a mismatch on the adoption [inaudible]. JESSICA: I like the part about the sticker shock there. There was a solution and, "Oh my gosh, that is way too expensive. We could totally do it cheaper," until you actually thought about all the stuff that went into doing it. CAT: And that's the points in my career where I have been [inaudible] of people and someone comes to me and says, "I want to do this. It cost this much." I always ask myself what is the opposite of that. How much does it cost to not do that? And I think Wardley Maps kind of force you to consider the flip side of everything. JESSICA: Yeah. And how much does it cost and the things you have to think about? CAT: Yeah, exactly. And then there's also, when you're looking at things that should be considered as a product or a commodity, you have a contract with the suppliers of those and they have to live up to that contract. You don't pay for what you don't use. But if you are the one who owns whatever that thing is, you're responsible for the maintenance. You don't get anything back when it doesn't work. JESSICA: Yeah. And when it goes down, it's your problem because you have to gain enough understanding about that software to figure it out. Whereas if it's an external company, you can call [a human]. CAT: Yeah. So ideally, when you start in Genesis to provide that piece, that component, you'd need a lot of people relative to the output. But for Commodity, what you're shooting for there is a relatively small number of people in relationship to the output. So if you see that you have the same number of people allocated to components all across that spectrum, then there's probably some sort of mismatch there. JESSICA: Oh, OK. So you can use the Wardley Map to map people according to their superpowers? CAT: Yeah. I do a lot of skills mapping on my Wardley Maps and there's a guy based in Scotland, Chris McDermott, who's done a lot of work with mapping. JOHN: I like that you've discovered this tool that makes all these implicit things explicit, so that you yourself [inaudible] much research may have in your head, it's like various ideas about people or systems and how available and commoditized they are. But being able to put up the map and say, "Here it is. This shows everything you need to know about this system," is certainly a very powerful way of communicating the conclusions you've reached about something and what should be the next steps. CAT: And even just having the common language kind of forces you to ask yourself what do we mean by these words and having that common language. There's an engineer on my team who's blind and you still benefit a lot just from having that common language because he can hold a very complex model in his head. And I can't do that. And so, he can describe it to me using that language so that I can understand why he's kind of charting the course that he's charting. JESSICA: Cat, tell us something weird. CAT: Oh, I'll tell you some unpopular opinions that I have. AVDI: Oh, those are good. CAT: Janeway is the best captain. JOHN: Duh! CAT: All right! The Deep Space Nine is the best series. JESSICA: By best, do you mean like most fun to watch or most competent? CAT: Janeway was up against a very large challenge and I think she handled it very well. There were people challenges and also challenges with just in the situation that she was in and I think she handled that very well. So I guess, for Janeway, for Deep Space Nine, it was like the best examination of what it means to be a human or a collection of humans, in my opinion. JESSICA: OK. For our listeners, we're talking about Star Trek and the [inaudible] Star Trek, and I feel that earlier we used D & D references with levels and classes like bards and rogues. So, that was from D & D, sorry if you don't play D & D, because we make these assumptions that all developers play D & D and they all watch Star Trek. So, it's so totally cool to use those references. You just have to give people the background. So Cat, can you tell us like what show Janeway was on and what those challenges were? CAT: She was on Voyager. She and her ship got flung into the Delta Quadrant very far away. She couldn't reach home. She couldn't communicate with home. And her crew was made up of people that hated each other. They were on different sides of the battle, I suppose. JESSICA: I like that in Star Trek, people is a much wider category than human. CAT: [Laughs] Yes, true. Yes, beings of all sorts. JESSICA: I wonder if many people feel like that when they start a new job. They're like, "I am so far from what I know and these people all hate each other." CAT: Of course, starting a new job is a lot like that. Especially if you're going somewhere where people have a strong culture or have been around a long time. You're the other, you're new. JESSICA: Do you have any advice for that? CAT: I don't know. AVDI: So, what would Janeway do? CAT: What would Janeway do? She would be her authentic self, Avdi. JESSICA: I think the worst that can happen is they fire you. And if they don't want your authentic self, then you probably don't want to be there anyway. And we're lucky in the development, we can probably get another job. CAT: Yeah. We're so lucky in that regard. Makes me feel like I have an obligation to use that privilege for something meaningful because I can't just go get a job anywhere else. JESSICA: What [inaudible] in the past [inaudible]. CAT: I guess I feel an obligation to speak up when I see something happening that I don't think should happen to let people know that it bothers me and I don't think it's right. JESSICA: To sensitize people to things that they couldn't observe before? CAT: Yes, I suppose so. JESSICA: That's a superpower. JOHN: Sure. I was actually talking to someone the other day about the whole, "Oh, we have a flat organization. There's no real power structure here." And of course, that's [crosstalk]. I wonder if you could use the Wardley Maps to map the implicit power structure that actually exists in the organization? CAT: Yes, there is this Buddhist monk who has been traveling around, mapping [crosstalk]. He's been mapping power structures using Wardley Map inspired maps that he calls [inaudible] maps. JESSICA: Do you want to talk about the penguin thing? CAT: Yes. I had a very traumatic experience with penguins. Avdi was there to witness [inaudible] penguin pills, I believe, that I incurred. So we were in Australia going to these conferences in Melbourne and someone says, "There's penguins." There is a collection of penguins. And you can go see them when they wake up in the evening to go out and catch whatever. So we went out to see them. These little itty bitty baby, they're not babies, but they are itty bitty and they look so cute and snuggly penguins. We went to go see them and they start waking up, and more and more people are coming. There are so many people. And there are like penguin guards that are wearing reflective vests and carrying bright lights and stuff like this to protect the penguins because there are just so many people. And one poor little penguin popped it's little head up and yawned or something like that. It's just waking up and the crowd descends on this penguin and they have to be, I don't know, moderated by the penguin guards. I don't even know how to describe it. And there was one penguin that got up and it comes to the edge of the little path where everyone's supposed to stay. And it was obvious it wanted to go somewhere but there were a bunch of people in its way. So, it couldn't cross the path. And then more and more penguins started lining up with this other penguin. And so, I looked across the path, what could be on the other side of the path. It's a huge rock with penguin doo doo all over it. JESSICA: Oh, no! They blocked the path to the penguin potty? CAT: Yes. So, it's obvious they wake up in the morning then they do their business -- or their morning, our evening -- and then there's all these people walking the penguin path to the penguin potty. And finally, I'm trying to like alert the guards to this penguin potty situation and finally the guards come over and the penguins moved across. And they do but it was just so -- I really had a difficult time with it. They can't even use the bathroom, the penguin potty, in the way that they would like to because we're there, just all over their business in more ways than one, and it was extremely upsetting. But then, lots of people brought up to me, "Well, penguins choose to keep living there." They must have access to like a lot of great food. And it must be worth it to have to wait for the penguin potty or something. I don't know but I can't deal with it, I left. But I did really like how the penguins kind of emerged from their slumber. They did this cool stretching thing where they put their wings back, like really took up a lot of space for a little tiny penguin like just really out there. So, I've learned a lot through consulting about these power poses that you take where you like put your hands behind your head and take up a large space, and you cross your ankle over your knee and spread your legs out or something. I didn't say I was good at those poses but I have learned about them. So I thought I'll adopt this penguin pose as my power pose. And then I believe you were there to observe me in walking onto stage in a penguin manner. AVDI: For the record, I was very intimidated. CAT: Everyone in a whole room, it was obvious by the looks on their faces that if I had wanted to part the crowd to go use the penguin potty at that point, I would have been free to do that. JESSICA: The lesson today is that there is such a thing as too cute. CAT: Yes. JESSICA: Maybe this is one reason babies use diapers because they're just too cute to go to the bathroom in the morning. CAT: Too cute to poop. [Laughter] JESSICA: OK. Episode title. [Laughter] JESSICA: The people in the path, didn't they empathize with the penguins? CAT: Or look around, but this is the same thing again. They're so focused on the penguin that they don't... JESSICA: Then take a wider view of that step and say, "Why am I standing in the way?" CAT: Yeah. They're so in their experience of the penguin that they're not thinking what's the penguin after. It seems a little weird for a penguin to be here facing the land instead of facing the sea. I think that's what penguin did. [Crosstalk] JESSICA: Because penguins just don't give you good error messages. CAT: No, extremely lacking in that regard. JOHN: E2Cute1400. [Laughter] CAT: Also, how do you not notice when you're damn near about to trip over just a giant poo-covered rock. That's my career, looking for giant poo-covered rocks. [Laughter] JESSICA: Unfortunately, you couldn't just give the penguins a keyboard shortcut. [Laughter] CAT: That would be great if I could. Maybe we could make something that they can just step on and it does something to scare the crowd out of the way or like illuminate a little path with flashing lights, like 'get out of the path'. JESSICA: Yeah, like 'pooping penguin crossing'. CAT: Or even if it just alerted the penguin guard, like, "We're ready. We're gathered here." "It's time." JESSICA: You need to send the alert to someone who can do something about it. Somebody who has the context to understand both the objective and to seek [inaudible] the obstacles. CAT: Yes, give the penguins the tools to help themselves. JESSICA: At least self service. [Laughter] AVDI: Can you think of any particular giant poo-covered rocks that developers are failing to notice these days? CAT: There's so many. It's so hard to just pick one. JESSICA: So much poo! CAT: I think more than any specific poo-covered rock, I think it's giving people an opportunity to observe things like that, like a break. You know what I mean? Everything we've gone from like let's make things shorter. Let's do iterative and incremental development and we'll have these short time boxes. Now, everything is continuous and that's good in that it helps us ingest information more quickly. But it's not always good, I think, in terms of providing this with a chance to think and examine, not just the system in which we exist but also how we participate in that system and our own bias or the kind of muscle memory that we develop. And so, I just wish there are more things that would prompt us to have a moment to think. If we were giving ourselves a moment to think, what would that do to our users. I have to believe that that would manifest in the systems that we create, kind of like [inaudible]. And so, we provided ourselves these moments to reflect, then maybe we provide our users with moments to reflect and then maybe we get people participating in these ecosystems and movements that are facilitated by the platforms that we're creating. Maybe we give them the opportunity to participate more thoughtfully and responsibly. It's really easy to share something on Facebook, and it just keeps getting easier. Maybe that's not right that it's easy good. JESSICA: I guess we want to make the good things easy but what we've made easy is share on Facebook. It's not sit back and [inaudible]. It's superficially ironic that it's not ironic at all that people that I know in the agile movement and in the little [inaudible] agile movements are now talking about how do we stop and think. Because when all we were doing was big upfront design and trying to [inaudible], we needed to move to something more continuous. But now that we're obsessed with continuous and iterative and daily stand ups, we need to move to something small. CAT: Regardless of how quickly we are going, we need to come to terms with the fact that we are creating systems that will have a life of its own. Like the platform I work on is 43 years old. So, we are creating new systems that will exist for an amount of time that we're not even sure. They'll continue to evolve and it just scares me that we're doing all of these things so, so, so, so quickly, just as fast as [inaudible] go and use it as fast as you should go. Is it OK to go fast if you are able to zoom out and have a very large presence or zoom in and have a very compact presence? I think these are important things. In my consulting career, it's been very scary. Some of the times when you go talk to an executive who's talking about what are we doing today, what are we doing for the next month. I think to myself, "Who's thinking about the next five years or longer?" Because your contributions, especially for us right now, computing is so new. We love to act like we're very mature industry, we're engineers, all of these things. It's all very new. And so, each one of us is going to have, relative to future generations, a much greater impact because in future generations, there will be more people participating in technology ecosystems and creating them. So each one of us just sheerly being numbers, but there are still a few of us, we will have a greater impact. And I don't think we take that as seriously as we should. JESSICA: Yeah. Like you said, it goes back to the history. Why should we care about the history of our systems? Because we care about the future of our system. I think that's one our superpowers as humans is that we're able to zoom in and out like you said, the large [inaudible] and one day think about the five years and the next story think about this week. AVDI: I'm gathering from what you're saying, Cat. So this kind of reflection retrospectives aren't enough. CAT: No, I don't think so, in the way that you create actions. Through that, you need time to reflect and be conscious of how you arrived at those actions, how you personally arrived at those actions, how you constructed that option set. JESSICA: Who and how, not just why because why describes the objectives but how [inaudible]. CAT: And we all start with [inaudible] circumstances and then we get socialization and it again filters what we're able to perceive from the facts of our reality. So we need time to examine our own blind spots. JOHN: Yeah, that's one of the things I enjoy about bringing a new person to the team is after a month or two, asking them, "So, what seems really weird here? What don't you get? What are the whys that you're missing out that we could use your newness as a way to look back at ourselves and see what we're missing?" CAT: Yeah, I totally love that experience when you get to see yourself through someone else's eyes. JESSICA: I just love that. You mentioned blind spots. We act like blind spots with the exception of we see everything except this particular poo-covered rock. No. This is a common case. Our perceptions are very normal and they have to be because we can't look at the whole system while we're trying to make a decision about what to type in this function. We're focused on how cute that penguin is. We're trying to appreciate the fact that it's right in front of us. Isn't that wonderful? No, get out of the way. CAT: Yeah. It's exactly that. It's scary too that you know that so much of the world is stuff that you cannot see. And that's why I just don't know how people aren't terrified of that, how leaders aren't terrified of that. I do not feel this strong urge to get people who have a different socialization so that you can more frequently have that experience of seeing yourself, your systems, through those fresh or different eyes. The best team I've probably ever been on was an economist, a former mainframe developer turned program manager. It was just such a weird group. A designer who just had all of these interesting experiences and then each of the developers is just so different. One of them had gone from being a sysadmin to a developer and it was just the strangest collection of people. And it felt like you have that feeling when you miss something where it's just like your heart seems [inaudible] your stomach and you're kind of just like, "How did I miss this. It's so obvious." I just didn't find myself having that feeling even when something would get messed up or something would fail. We'd still be saying, "Yeah, we kind of knew that was a possibility." You can't upfront have these [inaudible] for everything. We just felt like we were making informed decisions about what we were going to prioritize. JESSICA: Cat, that sounds like a [inaudible]. CAT: Yeah, I know. We all still keep in touch. JESSICA: That's fantastic when you welcome someone to do different great things. CAT: Yeah. JOHN: That was a company you were working at? CAT: Yeah, it was during my consulting time. It was a ragtag bunch that we assembled. JESSICA: [Inaudible] talking about something similar team that was just like people from really different backgrounds and how that launched his career. That's another person we need to get on the show. So John, I agree with you, it's time to wrap up and move to reflections, if we have reflections. There's so much good talking here already. I just feel like if we keep going, we'll overwhelm it. John, do you have a reflection? JOHN: Yeah. There are two things that are striking me. One is the sort of history of an application. I'm working on an application that's close to 10 years old now and it's got a lot of history and there are things that I don't know because I was not there at the beginning. I'm wondering what would be involved in having part of my role be, like maintaining history of like, "This is what we were doing and this why we decided what we were doing. This is why this is the way it is. And then this thing happened, and then we reacted to that by doing this." I just imagined that that would be so helpful (A) to socialize people into the team with the history of what they're working on when they join but also as a debugging aid to sort of be like, what was going on in this part of the code six years ago that it's now shaped like this. JESSICA: Wow! I like that. I don't think this episode needs any reflections. I think it is already shining and bright. I love the quote about 'so much of the world is what we can't see'. And darn it, there's value in those poo-covered rocks. And I love that we took that analogy so far. I know on this podcast, we are going to continue coming back to that and we'll have to explain it like we do when we reference. You heard it here, people - Greater Than Code, penguin and poop. AVDI: Yeah. I think that's the thing I take away is just where I see a bunch of people trying to get somewhere that I don't understand, look for the poo-covered rock. JESSICA: [Laughs] CAT: Something that I'm just going to keep thinking about is what it would look like if we had a platform bard or some sort of poet or historian and appreciated that ability and captured those things. What would happen if we made that part of onboarding or any of that. That's such a great idea. It's like a counterpart to what we can deduce from the code. JANELLE: A librarian. CAT: Yeah. JESSICA: Janelle popped in. We didn't know she was here. JANELLE: Well, I came into the show late and so I've been kind of hanging out listening to all this. And these last few minutes, I've really just been blown away by thinking about how we get so caught up in this game of making everything faster and faster, and got to go to continuous, got to shorten and shorten the moments. And what happens in that when we get so caught up in that place that we can only see the emergency that's right in front of us, is we lose our ability to step out of the system. We don't see the box that we're inside. We can't see the boxes. We can't see the poo-covered rocks because we're like stuck inside the system. And one of the practices, I think, we need to start adopting is scheduling specific time to take a step out of the system, to stop and think, to look at the boxes and reflect on what we independently think. What we see inside our own brains is where we talk to other people. And that when everything is a group discussion, it's so easy to listen to what other people think and go, "Well, that makes sense." And then just adapt that story as our own. And so, you don't get that [inaudible]. You don't get that magical synergy that comes from seeing in 10 different ways because we lose the power of our individual uniqueness when we reflect within a group. And I think if we set up deliberate reflection processes, just step out of the system to stop and think. And we set up practices to do that as individuals and then came together as a team after we formed our individual ideas, we will get so much better, so much better at improving the quality of our decisions in both the moments, the things that we're making decisions with right now, but also really thinking about our future in the direction that we're going as a team, as an organization, as a community, as a world. And especially right now, I think it's really important that we all take a step out of the box and really think about the direction that we're going. JESSICA: Yey! This has been Episode 131 of Greater Than Code, with special guest Cat Swetel. Cat, thank you so much for joining us. CAT: Thank you for having me. JESSICA: Where can people see more of you? CAT: I'm Cat Swetel pretty much everywhere. So, if you want to get a hold of me, I'm @CatSwetel on Twitter or CatSwetel@gmail.com. JESSICA: Give it a chance to watch some of Cat's talks. JANELLE: Thank you, everyone.