PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.

Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.

Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode.

Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more.

Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started.

JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 221. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Damien Burke.

DAMIEN: Hi! And I’m here with Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I’m Casey! We’re all here together with our guest, Wesley Faulkner. 

Wesley is a first-generation American. He is a founding member of the government transparency group Open Austin and ran for Austin City Council in 2016. His professional experience also includes work as a social media and community manager for the software company Atlassian, and various roles for the computer processor company AMD, Dell, and IBM. Wesley Faulkner serves as a board member for South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) and is a Developer Advocate for Daily.

So glad to have you today, Wesley. Welcome.

WESLEY: Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

CASEY: We like to start our podcast with a certain question. What's your superpower, Wesley and how did you acquire it?

WESLEY: I feel that my superpower is connecting with people, empathizing from where they come from, and try to really connect on a personal level. I think that type of connection has spanned different types of groups and I think I got that because I personally have never felt really in a specific group myself. I felt like I never fit, never belonged, which was a bad thing growing up, but it turned into a superpower as I got older. Since I felt equally uncomfortable with every group also means that I felt comfortable with a lot of different groups.

You mentioned first generation American. I also am neurodiverse so I have ADHD and dyslexia. Grew up poor, grew up learning technology from the ground up. So I've spent a lot of firsts, not just in my family, but in different groups being the first and being a minority. So it made me equally uncomfortable at the same time, comfortable with really, really being a social chameleon with people from many different types of backgrounds.

DAMIEN: So Wesley, can you talk about how you apply that being a social chameleon and being comfortable in different areas? 

WESLEY: Well, I think I mentioned neurodiverse so I learn differently and I haven't really been a really best student going to school and college and learning and so, it was a necessity also to meet people who admired, have conversations, learned from their experience from an actual practical standpoint, rather than the theoretical base that you get when you read a book. 

So I think from being in those, spaces with those people, and having the real good conversations of practically how they work day-to-day and how things work from the inside out was something that helped me get a grasp and have relatable stories in my mind to anchor on that knowledge. 

When I understand something and finally get a really good understanding, when I explain that to someone else, it feels to them like I have a really good firm grasp and I think I do because my brain just tries to make things make sense and fill in the gaps with science and logic. It makes me able to tackle a concept from multiple angles coming from talking to people, hearing their takes, and getting the nuance of the problems and the solutions. 

I think that that is something that I feel I'm really good at and has really aided me in going through these different circles, because I feel like their stories become part of my experience and that's what I really, really value. 

JOHN: So it sounds like you did some early on to figure out what was required to help you actually learn in the way that you were going to learn rather than how everyone else thought you were going to be taught. 

WESLEY: Yeah, I was diagnosed late in life. I think it was a freshman in college. Up until then, it felt as if I was kind of living in a lot of shame, thinking I was just a horrible person and I was really bad at a lot of different things. Then when I got diagnosed, I realized that it's not necessarily my fault and that there are some things that I'm really good at. 

When I was in that place, the things that seem easy don't feel like a skill. It feels like I didn't put so much work into it, so it didn't seem like it was anything of value and when I learned that about myself, that the things that come easy don't come easy to everyone and the things – because I was just focusing on the things that were hard, that came easy to everyone else. It allowed me to like lean into those strengths, really use them to my advantage and chart my own path through life. 

JOHN: Yeah. I think that's such an important point and this is something that I have noticed on the learning path where, as you're learning a skill like coding, for example, you're always learning the things that are hard for you and things become easy all the time, but then they sort of recede into the background because they just happen automatically. It's so hard to see that progress without calling it out specifically and noticing oh, wait, all this stuff used to be hard for me a year ago and now it's so easy and finding the value in that and seeing that there's that progress there and those skills that you don't even have to think about anymore. 

That unconscious competence is so valuable because it allows you to see the full breadth of what you're capable of rather than just the things that you can't currently do properly.

WESLEY: Yeah, exactly. I remember just telling stories and coming up with things that seem so duh to me, but brilliant to other people and I felt like I was a fraud. I'm just pretending that I know stuff when it's just like, I'm just saying little things that I heard maybe on a PBS Special when I was a kid or when I was watching a news story and they referenced something that I looked up and then I learned a little bit about. 

Those little things and piecing those together is a real skill and to me, it just felt like I was just stealing from a whole bunch of different people. But I think, especially when you mentioned software, that's kind of what it is, is just taking these pieces, putting in new combinations that aren't necessarily apparent to other people or there is not necessarily a need to do this specific project, but it fulfills a personal need and that can kind of gravitate and glom on to people who are like you or have the same problems. I think software is kind of why that kind of slapping things together is where I'm attracted and why it brought me there because it felt like an environment that was kind of made for me and made for people like me. 

DAMIEN: That's a very cool superpower. 

WESLEY: Thanks. It feels so simple sometimes. It's like when I was at my Mom's place and she needed to hookup a new router and I did it. It just seems so simple but to her, it was magic like, how did you get the internet to work? It feels software is like that a lot when someone's like, “How do you make a webpage?” You’re just like, “Well, here's a template. I just changed the name,” and they're like, “Oh my gosh.” You saved them months of work because they would have to build up that foundational knowledge that you accrue almost naturally over time. It's great to be able to do that for people to make things that seem so out of touch, tangible and real for them.

DAMIEN: And to recognize the value of that and realize that that is an active something you get to do because no one's going to do it for you and for a lot of us in a lot of situations, no one's going to go out and go, “Oh, that thing that's really easy for you. That's super valuable and you're super awesome to be able to do it.” In fact, we get a lot of the opposite. So being able to do that for ourselves and go, “Oh no, I know how to do this and other people don't know how to do this and it's really valuable,” and that's awesome. So recognizing that is super important.

WESLEY: And not only just recognizing in myself, but it's helped me to recognize that in other people that the joy that some people get from helping other people can really energize them and make them feel like their skill is worth having. So it unlocked the ability for me to ask for favors because I recognized it in myself and recognizing what I got from that. 

I think in society, it's almost like a taboo or you have to do an apology sandwich like, “I'm sorry, I have to ask you this. Can you do this? Oh, thank you so much. I'm sorry that I had to bug you,” and it feels it has an emphasis on I'm causing you a problem instead of gratitude, “Thank you so much for helping me,” and me recognizing that as changed, not just how I perceive others to me, but how I perceive myself to others. 

Being able to ask for help when I need it to not feel like I have to take everything on my own freed that struggle that I had, like the hard stuff that was for me could be super easy for someone else and why not take advantage of their skill and then allow them to take advantage of my skill and work together and have a true symbiotic ecosystem of help and support, help and support? That has ultimately strengthened my network because we are all taking care of each other.

JOHN: Yeah. That that's such an important realization where to think that the thing that you're asking for help with is probably something you're not good at doing and is really hard for you—takes a lot of emotional effort or a lot of time to learn or whatever it is—and that you're probably asking the other person because they've already demonstrated that they're good at it. 

So it's probably a no brainer for them to have done and the different levels of effort there are you're not asking them to do all the work that you would have to do. They're just going to do something easy and it's also probably satisfying to them to help you and to be able to demonstrate their skill and to use their skill to help somebody else and realizing that the way that those benefits flow, rather than always thinking, “Oh, I couldn't possibly impose on this other person.” We're not taught that kind of a mechanic as part of a social interaction as we grow up.

WESLEY: Yeah, and it kind of leaks into the workplace. One of the reasons why I like to talk about neurodiversity and talk about what it means for each individual person and to raise awareness and the workplace, especially for people in management, that there's a myth of the well-rounded employee. Each employee that has the same title, has the same strengths and they are responsible for the same amount of work and the same amount of productivity. 

And that instead of having nine people do the same thing, if you get that group of nine people to work together, the productivity can actually increase by just making sure that each thing that they do is truly balanced towards their skillset, not towards each individual task and having them each do it evenly. 

I think we would all be better and less stressed if we could work towards increasing the skillsets that we're good at instead of trying to really struggle with the skillsets that were bad at. Like, why beat yourself up about writing an email to a new customer when your strength is having that in-person phone call or meeting with that customer and someone else could schedule that call? Then someone's like, “I really have this anxiety with speaking with people,” but they're great at writing emails or doing other types of communication or the analytics, like “I'll do the pitch deck and you do the presentation,” or “I'll pull up the analytics for the past three months and then correlate that and put that in a nice chart and a presentation,” and then someone else can figure out how that's best used. 

I think that type of balance between creativity, presentation, artistry, having a long time to plan short – short time to prepare; everyone has different things that they're really good at and if you can just put the pieces together, then we all could play together as a quartet rather than a single player sports for the same club.

JOHN: Yeah. That was the biggest thing I learned from doing the StrengthsFinder analysis. It's a book about figuring out what you're good at. More so than learning what it was I was good at, the primary thrust of the book is find out what your strengths are, lean into those, delegate the stuff you're not good at. Because you could put so much effort bringing the things you're not good at up to some sort of baseline. Whereas, if you can lean into your strengths, then you can do those 10x better than everybody else and then you just shift the work around so that again, the right people are doing the right things and then you get to do the stuff you're really good at. Everybody wins.

WESLEY: Yeah. They said Einstein had problems tying his own shoes, but that's not something that people talk about. The strengths or the headline thing that you're good at is the thing that you're going to be known for. So it makes sense to lean into that. I think being able to delegate is in itself its own skill. Recognizing what's good in other people, recognizing their strengths, and then managing to that, I think helps everyone and makes everyone feel better.

DAMIEN: So the opposite of that sounds like a holdover from the industrial revolution when we put machines and people all in the same place, so they can do the same thing repeatedly and we still have that sort of culture of management, employment, and work. So what do you tell people in management, or people in work environments? How do you help them apply this we're a quartet, not a factory? We're a string quartet, not a factory.

WESLEY: There's a lot that I'm working to try to refine that statement and I think some of it goes to fairness because if my production, if I'm able to turn something over quick, did I do enough – did the same amount of work that someone spent all day on. Is that effort rewarded the same? But if you are recalibrating to this knowledge-based economy that we're now in, for the most part, where your mind and your ideas are what you're contributing to the bottom line, the amount of headroom in your brain to make room for these adjustments, to these things that ultimately, they're artificial in their construct. They're done because this is how we’ve always done it, or they're done because that's what's etiquette or social society norms, even though they are less efficient if you look at the numbers. 

Retention is going to go higher and so, if you're looking at money for hiring and training someone new, that's money saved. If you look looking at health because both mental health and physical health of the employee, those are going to reduce those costs, and then ultimately, your insurance costs will go down as a corporation. If you also are leaning towards the things that each individual is really good at, the things that they're bad at that they have been turning in, that'll go away because everyone will be almost leveling up on the things that are good and you'll able to spike and your work would be that much better in terms of actually be well-rounded because every point is going to be a 10 instead of a 6 or a 3. 

It exposes the problems that you may not know are there. Yes, the emails are going out. Check. Can the quality get better? If person A says, “I'd rather not do emails, but I have been doing emails,” and person B says, “I’d rather be working on analytics instead of presentations,” and then you reshuffle the workforce you already have. You're able to see where you're actually not the best and then hire for that. 

Your interview can be instead of interviewing a product manager or a system analyst, you can actually figure out which of these tasks you want to do and then you can better attack your problems with people who want to tackle those problems. Allowing them to have the headroom, to think of new ways of tackling those problems is actually unlocking creativity and speeding up and accelerating innovation. If you're in the knowledge working space, that is your currency, is innovation. To do things better than the next company or the next group. So if you want to have a stronger future, you need to invest in your people in the way that they want to be invested in.

CASEY: I love this dichotomy between positions and roles, you're kind of pointing out. The position is the project manager, product manager, or system analyst and this is your job, do these things versus roles are giving the presentation or doing the analysis itself and helping people pick the roles in the job. I think that's really helpful and I wish more companies would do it. 

I have one trick; I've done it in some companies. I write it all out on the table. I call it the table of hats where roles are hats and anyone can wear the hat. You can move the hat around, it's fine. I just write out each hat in a row and each type of position in a column like, engineers can run standup. Sure, they can, absolutely, can do. But an external stakeholder running the standup, not as good, I wouldn't want that. So making that explicit and it's the kind of thing that could change over time. 

I wonder what other things have you tried to help people talk about the roles instead of just positions.

WESLEY: This is a hard topic and it goes down to the core of what you're paying someone for. So if you're really good at writing documentation, but really bad at doing tests, you could do the tests, you write the tests, but the tests may not be as good and also may take twice, three times, ten times as long. If the tests are that important, maybe have someone do the tests that aren't the person writing the code. If the documentation is that important, have someone focused on that. If someone is willing to do half-ass work and you're willing to take it, then it makes sense to do it that way. 

Like you're mentioning the hats, if you see a lot of job openings, it's almost like a laundry list of every duty that they want in that department to do. I once saw an ad for someone to do social media—this is back when I did social media work—and you had to write the copy, do long-form newsletters, do short-form tweets, do TikTok videos or Instagram videos, which means you had to not only do the acting, but you had to do the post-production, the editing, and you had to do the visual effects, then you had to amplify it. Then you had to buy ads on different networks like Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Now you have to be a money manager and then you have to come up with the budget, then you have to come with the content calendar and it's just like, this is one role. As these roles become more, I would say, established, putting everything in it feels as if you should be able to do that and if you don't, then oh my gosh, you'll just have to fake your way through it or force your way through it.

I think we're early in the struggle to getting employers to realize that packing these roles is a bad idea. You don't get more bang for their buck; you just get more burnout over time. So it's early on and I think more people need to be talking about this and more people need to actually enact this. 

I’ve got to say that at my current role at Daily, they fully believe that and that's one of the reasons why I ended up as a developer advocate for Daily is because they really do invest in people. They understand people's strengths and try to really focus their tasks to what they are excited to do so they don't just feel like it's work, but it is a personal passion and I'm lucky that I'm here, but I really do wish that other companies would take on that mantle, too.

DAMIEN: There's a huge resistance there because what you're talking about throws a wrench into labor markets, right? People are not commodities. I can't swap in one full-stack engineer for another one, social media management for another; they have different skillsets. They're different people. [chuckles] So if you can't treat your labor as commodities, well, then it's a lot more work to manage them, it's a lot more work to hire them and then you have to pay them better probably.

WESLEY: Yeah. It's work! I mean, people need to take more time hiring people and figuring out how people work. I know it's kind of weird, but the more work you do on the frontend to actually understand your own needs and prioritize the actual tasks that are needed to get a job done will also make you a better company. 

I don't know how many jobs I've looked at the job description and then day one to be like, “Well, this is what you actually do,” [laughs] and they're like, “Oh, okay. That was just the job description.” So that bait and switch goes both ways because during the interview, then they're asking you, “Can you do all this stuff?” Because if you say no to any of these questions, you may not have the job and so people have to say, “Oh yeah, I can do that. Oh yeah, I've done that before.” They're both lying to each other, ultimately because of that false job description that they're both holding up saying this is how we do things. 

Yeah. Work on figuring out what you actually need, how well the person actually needs to do it, and then I think you'll get a better fit.

JOHN: Yeah, or even you could be evaluating each candidate on like, what are the strengths? How would they fit into the team? How would it balance out with the rest of the things that we're doing? And then that's how you find out that they're a good fit. Not because they ticked all the boxes in the thing that was written six months ago about what this job is. [chuckles]

WESLEY: Yeah, and there's also that movement of getting rid of interviews altogether. Just hire them, see how they do it, do a trial process of a month, two months, and can they do the job, do they like the job? If not, you both walk away without any penalties. But in terms of hiring people and people management, I think tech is notoriously bad with listening to people or listening to certain people. 

If you really, really tailor your work environment to the people that work for you, I think a lot of these other controversies in tech can either be avoided or more transparent to what kind of company you are. Because I don't want to waste my time working for a company that says, “We care about diversity and inclusion,” or “We care about equity around the world and that everyone thrives.” These mission statements aren't accurate.

One of the things that got me is that I was extremely naďve when I started in tech. I was like, “Oh wow, this is a good company. They believe in people. They listen to people,” and then you learn that they believe in certain people, they listen to certain people [chuckles] and it’s so frustrating. 

People's intrinsic value is something that's on a scale, that everyone's being evaluated and some people come in with a stacked deck and others never gain that equity that other people do in terms of reputation and it's extremely hard. People of color, people who are marginalized wash out of tech all the time because of this, because of this false mission statement, this false value system and ethics that we really do need to talk about.

JOHN: And like you say, it's so hard to find out what the actual company values are in practice from the outside. If you're interviewing, knowing whether they walk the walk is really hard there, the signals are weak.

WESLEY: Yeah. All we have is whisper networks, backchannels, Slack groups, group texts, WhatsApp messages, closed Facebook forums, and all this stuff to say, “Oh, don't do that.” Or, “Hey, I know you work there. What was your experience?” Even Glassdoor doesn't really focus on that. 

If you just interviewed for a company or you just left a company, there's still the NDA where you can get legally sued if you say something disparaging about a company that you just left. So the penalties are high if you're one of the marginalized people who have exited a company and less so, for the company itself.

JOHN: Yeah. A couple of months ago, we had Veni Kunche on the podcast talking about her Diversify Tech organization where they have a job board, newsletter, and things like that. She actually does a lot of work to vet companies before they can list on their job board. So it's great to see the work that she and her team are putting in to try and actually get some useful information out about companies that are safer to work.

WESLEY: Yeah, and that's safe, relatively speaking, right?

JOHN: Yeah, safer.

WESLEY: One bad manager, one bad VP away from changing the whole company's culture. One example that I use is that companies usually, from a revenue standpoint, have a chief revenues or sales officer, like a CRO. They are interested in marketing so they have a CMO and they're interested in maybe security so they have a CSO. All of these C-suite executives focus on every part of the business. 

Oh, if you're bringing a new customer, we have to do a credit check and to bring in a new customer, we have to do marketing to bring them in. So they're all touching each aspect of the business, but they don't also have someone who's a chief equity officer or a chief ethics officer that makes sure that every part of the business is ethical.

So are we seeing if our new client that's paying all this money also maybe dabbles in some child labor overseas? No, that stuff doesn't get vetted because it's not seen as part of the company of something that's super important, but then maybe a new story comes out and someone says, “Oh, one of your customers does this horrible thing,” and you're like, “Huh! We didn't know, thanks for letting us know. Maybe we should do something about it” after a couple of months of seeing if this will die down or not before we actually make a change. 

So if these mission statements are really, really important to companies, they should have every part of the pipeline that they do business with. Meaning their customers, their vendors, and even their partners in making sure that they live up to the same standards that they want to propagate.

DAMIEN: Yeah. We didn't know because it wasn't important for us to find out in advance. It's very important to us now because people are making a big stink about it. It's going to cost us money.

WESLEY: Mm hm. Absolutely. We didn't want to know is the answer.

JOHN: Yeah. I've always said that you can tell how important they take it by the amount of dollars allocated to doing the thing. If they have a chief equity officer who has a budget, who has staff, who are doing things, that's one thing versus “Well, we do have this diversity person over off to the side and they're not paid a lot and they don't have any power within the organization to actually influence how things are done or any money to set up programs,” then that's a pretty big difference.

WESLEY: Yeah. A person just becomes a funnel of all complaints. So don't talk to the CEO anymore, talk to the other department so my inbox can be not as high this next month and if that person's not solving the problems, get rid of that person, hire someone else, [chuckles] and then have those complaints attached to the person who left the company. Now everything's good again. 

Yeah, that's so sad. It's just allowing someone to have all of this responsibility, but none of the power doesn't really help. Also, corporate donations where they’re like, “We're going to donate to this other organization. So this is not our problem, but we're going to give money to this other organization. They work on fixing that. Not us. We don't have any problems here.” 

CASEY: This structural change is hard. How do we get companies to change when there's no financial incentive for it? This is a mystery. I don't think anyone has solved it. Do you have any ideas?

WESLEY: The scary thing is there is financial incentive to change it. 

CASEY: Oh, true.

WESLEY: More diverse company, more inclusive companies make more money. I wish it was more of a – enough to convince people to say it's the right thing to do and people do it. But if even the money argument falls short, it is a power and it is a change that people are uncomfortable with. So hiring a new person, training them up costs a lot of money. Having someone who hates your guts that used to work for your company is very expensive because lot of companies make their competitors by firing people that they didn't want to listen to and they end up going out of business. So it is very expensive not to do this, but companies don't want to lose individual power for people who are in power and that is the real barrier.

DAMIEN: Wow, say that again. The real barrier is individuals who do not want to lose power.

WESLEY: That's right. The people in power don't want to be not the smartest people in the room. They don't want to be the person that gets good ideas from everyone else. The originator, good, great ideas and the direction of the company needs to come from within, not from below and changing that power structure is super uncomfortable and there is going to be almost a rejection from a guttural place that prevents this from happening.

JOHN: Yeah. That's a really good point because it points to not only is there a structural system so everything by default is set up in equally, but then you have the people in those systems that have that investment in keeping them the way they are because of that personal attack or that fear of losing x that they have in that. So then they maintain those systems actively rather than fighting against them.

WESLEY: Yeah. The whole incentive structure is built around this; bonuses, promotions, new titles, power, more power come from this current structure and that all has to be rewritten. Even in software, when a system or a server goes down, who gets praised? Is it the person who prevented it from going down or the person who works all night to get it back up and running? The incentive is the person that fixed the problem, not the person who prevents the problem and so, does it matter that you prevented something that could have gone down? Just let it go down, then fix it later after it goes down and then you get all the praise. 

[chuckles]

The structure is not built to prevent problems from happening. It's the let it go, mess up a whole bunch of people's lives, and then stopping the hurt after that happens.

DAMIEN: Wow. This sounds tightly related to something that you mentioned when we were prepping for this episode and I want to talk about. The deplatforming on social media of a particular bad actors. Is that related to this individual power structure and incentive structure?

WESLEY: Well, yes, because the power is having people on the platform. You don't want to off the wrong people in power, right and if you're really – instead of focusing on the mass of people, but only a small subset of people who have power, it is a focus, it is a flashlight and you're focusing on those people. When you focus on those type of people, it's not that they're just super highlighted, but it just means everything around them is dark and so, all of the people who don't have the power are now in the shadows and that's how the structure is set up. 

The deplatforming only really worked when the people who are in this focus decided to exile one of their own and that's when there's the conflict. So when the people who don't have the power just don't have the power and even though, money is made probably on the 80% who are not in focus. The vanity metric are the people of the 20% that is causing most of the attention and that 20% is the C-suite as opposed to the 80% that is the employee base in most these companies.

CASEY: It's all making me think about, I read a book on systems thinking this year and I don't know how to apply it all yet, but this is like layers of how to hack a system to make it work better. The incentives, the structure of it, the people in it—it makes my head spin, but it's powerful. If we can hack a system somehow in some fundamental way, everything will fall into place a little bit better than it was. But as an individual person, I'm not sure where I can put effort today to push things in the right direction. 

Do you have ideas for, especially our listeners, who they want to do something about this, they're feeling inspired? What can they do?

WESLEY: Well, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I think it's somewhat related, still is making your own network, your own system of people that is more interconnected so that when you do need help, specifically that you have a network of people to reach out to and then you. If you all support each other, then it doesn't change the outward system of that we're all in, but at least gives a good support to be sustainable. 

I’m sure that we all have a friend that changes jobs every year, or is always in conflict, or doesn't ever seem to really find their purpose or place. That's because they're overemphasizing some of the things that they're not necessarily good at, or really not leaning into the right thing or just not having that right match. 

As a society, if we all supported each other, we could hopefully promote a system where we take care of each other until the system itself changes. So it's almost like climate change. We tried a lot to do the prevention of the catastrophe that we see on the horizon, but now might be the time where we hunker down together to make sure that we all survive even though, we know that the wave is going to try to wash us over. But if we lock arms, at least we can try to survive this impending doom and be there to help with the reconstruction. 

JOHN: It goes back to what you were saying earlier about the network of people with complementary strengths is stronger than the individuals who are trying to do everything themselves, which it's in your personal life as well as in your work life.

WESLEY: Yeah. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. 

JOHN: So one of the things that also struck me about your bio and your superpower was your ability to connect with and find empathy for diverse groups of people and to connect into them. Seems like it'd be pretty useful in a political career, like running for city council. So tell me about has it applied differently or in the same way in that realm?

WESLEY: Running for office and being a politician is totally something that's kind of changed my life. That's why it's on my bio; I didn't win. It wouldn't be on my bio saying ran if I actually won, but I still leave it there because it was an experience that taught me the interconnectedness of things that seem super important and people who seem very, very oblivious to what's going on in their lives, their city, because of the amount of problems that they have to deal with. That when you're more comfortable, when you have like everything taken care of, you're able to push your problems further away, which makes them feel like you have more say on how you tackle them. 

But the poor people of the city in Austin, some of the problems are so daily that they have to be hyper-focused on getting those taken care of which means that more affluent people in the city have more of a say, not just because of the money, but just being able to focus on those because they have that freedom of looking towards the future.

Knocking on doors, having these conversations, hearing that pain and empathy, I feel that I ran a campaign that really tried to focus on those who didn't have what other people took for granted. Unfortunately, that didn't resonate with people who also had the bandwidth to vote and also, didn't make that pain really relatable to all the other people who were on the ticket. 

So that was a really good lesson for me about not just saying the truth, but really helping people put themselves in those truths and that's something I did not do a good job at. I also ran a fairly lean campaign. My volunteer group was a little bit lower than most of my competitors and I think that's because that is something I chose to do alone—to go faster than take the time to get a group together, a coalition to really have a good concerted effort and that is my mistake and that's something I take with me. 

I was dealing on a short timeline. I started my campaign, I think, in June and the vote was in November. So that was really, really fast getting all the registration and getting the votes in. I mean, the paperwork and to get on the ballot and stuff. So I think what I learned from that is I did the right thing. I'm a person, personally, if you see something wrong, you stand up and you say, “That's wrong. That shouldn't be this way. We should do things better.”

It's another reason why I change jobs a lot. I’m one of those people, because when you talk truth to power, sometimes power doesn't like it and you can really make the ship sound good if you get rid of the squeaky wheel and if you have a ship with wheels, that's a problem. [laughs] But so, that’s probably not a good analogy. 

But yeah, I learned about the systems, the system of government, how things work and that's something I'm always working on personally. It's just understanding how the world around me and how to make it make sense. But it realized that the strengths that I did have around that I was not fully utilizing and it's a good thing. It put me on my current path. It made me realize some of those truths that I've talked about earlier and it's not like I've always had the answer. I'm still learning more about myself and the journey and I hopefully, being on podcasts like this, I can help articulate what I stand for and what I think the world should look like.

JOHN: Yeah. It struck me that if nothing else, that experience would have been an incredible learning experience just because it's such a different world. There's so many different mechanics involved. There's so much, like you pointed out, all the things you've learned about organizing, timelines, people, who needs to be what way, and how the system actually works on the inside once you're in there. Then I imagine once you get onto the city council, there'd be a whole other secret system that works behind this like, how things actually work to get things done in that environment.

WESLEY: Yeah. Politics is about figuring out not just what you want to get done, but how you want to get there and that coalition of people and the things you have to do in terms of to trade off your immediate needs and wants and your own philosophy of a greater good, it's really tricky. 

I'm really glad that I'm not in that position because I will choose what I think is best for every item that came on the diocese or the docket rather than worrying about building that momentum to get the next role, or the next bill, or the next job. 

If you've read the Barack Obama's book, he talked about like, “Oh, well, I want to do more good. I couldn't do this in my current role so I became a Senator and I couldn't do this as a Senator so I became President,” and all of this stuff is just to gain more power, to have more influence to do more changes. It's sad that that's kind of the goal is to keep climbing up, to get into a point where you don't have to make those changes or those compromises anymore. I'm really not built for that.

DAMIEN: Well, the alternative is the thing you talked about a little bit ago, which is building a coalition, building a network, getting together with people who share these values and have different strengths, and being able to do them together.

WESLEY: Oh yeah, yeah. Power in the massive people, even in the power of social media. You talked about the deplatforming. If you get enough people, you can enact changes by just sheerly linking arms. But every time that happens, you have to convince people it's worth their time. That they have to do that calculation of saying, “I know you have all these problems in front of you. This should be another one,” That is a calculation every individual needs to make and if you're able to catalyze all of those people to make it worth it for them, then that's the power to actually enact change.

CASEY: That's kind of change, I always think about user research; figuring out what people are thinking. Like when you're knocking door to door, you're getting information about the people you're trying to talk to anyway. So I like that parallel a lot because that's a skill that we have in tech where we get good at user research, at some companies at least, and to apply that in politics would be a really interesting. 

Did you go from tech to the political campaign there that direction?

WESLEY: Yeah, yeah. I was working for Namecheap at the time. I was their social media manager and that gave me the flexibility to schedule tweets during the day and then go to forums at night and so, I was lucky to have that flexibility. 

What you're saying about user research is really, a good example and I think it highlights that some companies who do the user research, their user research might be to their left and to their right and if they are not in part of diverse groups or around the same people, their user research aren't capturing those people. Or if they put out, “Hey, fill out a survey,” and it only gets to the people who can see that survey or know that call is there, it reacts to that group. 

So true user research needs to definitely do the work of finding unrepresented groups that may not work through general channels to get their feedback especially if the product you’re making is for a general population. Like self-driving cars. Think of all the people who are driving Tesla and teaching Tesla what the roads are and what places need to be mapped. These self-driving cars are people who can afford electric car and then afford this package on top of it for self-driving that isn't “beta. What neighborhoods do they go to? Which ones are going to be more mapped out than the others? What's going to be neglected in this experiment and where they're collecting information? I wish more thought about that was done in tech.

DAMIEN: Yeah. If you're selling a self-driving car, none of your customers are pedestrians. None of them are cyclists. None of them are kids playing in the road. Even if they are, then you're not getting that information from them and so, those people who your product affects greatly are not being heard from and not being considered.

WESLEY: Yeah, absolutely. Agreed.

CASEY: So what I've been stressed this year about the state of democracy in the US. A big topic. I've been looking for ways to help improve it and I ended up deciding that the best way to do it was locally. To do it in D.C. and not try to do anything more national than that because that's where I can meet people and we’ll work on the thing that we can change here in D.C. and it's actually moving. 

There's a movement to do ranked choice voting in D.C., I'm really excited to be a part of. That's bipartisan and anybody who hears about it is really into it. It's really an information spreading thing. If people knew about it, they would love it and it would pass, but people don't know about it and there's not necessarily funding and budget to spread the word. It's all a bunch of volunteers. We're always trying find more volunteers and I'm thinking back to we want to have a diverse coalition of people supporting it. We say that at every meeting and we try and do better than I think the average group would, but some people that we want just probably don't have the time and resources to volunteer and contribute. That's just a tough nut to crack. I don't know what else we can do, but if you have ideas, I would love to hear those. 

How do you include people who don't have time to be included?

WESLEY: That's a hard one. Usually, paid studies allow those people to make that calculation where their time is money and it's a direct mapping saying, “I'm going to lose this much work so we're going to pay for this.” Some of the time also is transportation so you can help shuffle people back and forth, or you could ride with them as they're doing their regular duties, provide childcare, take all the things that they would have to calculate in terms of participating and see how much you can take off their plate. 

The other is the method of feedback of variety different kinds of ways that people can accept feedback, makes it easier for people to participate. Is it SMS messaging like small chunks back and forth and getting answers to questions and letting them bail out in the middle of that process and you might get only three questions in, but you got three more questions that you wouldn't, besides that? Having a phone call, having a video chat, having an appointment where you can lock-in a time so that they can schedule around what they're are redoing and figuring that out. Writing a letter, some people are fine with writing a letter and just leaving it out the front door or filling out a survey if they just have to tick a couple of boxes. 

I say the more variety of ways that you have people to participate, allows them to choose the thing that is going to cause the least amount of friction and least amount of calculation of what to do and when to do it. So if you can decouple those as much as possible and provide so many different varieties of ways, it allows people to choose the thing that they do most. 

Let's say the designated one person in the household, or one family member to help talk to their other family members about, then they don't have to do that calculation of: are you a stranger? Do I need to worry about my safety? Do you have to worry about how this information is being used? All of those things, I think if you can try to really tackle those upfront and not just like, “Well, why didn't you ask?” or “Why didn't you say?” prevent those and just provide every way that's reasonable for people to participate. I think it'll be easier. 

One thing I do need to put in this podcast in context of myself, is that because I'm leaning into my strength in terms of speaking, I do want to also point out that strong opinions don't mean right opinions and so, [chuckles] take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt. These are just my opinions and I don't find myself as being the one true truth for every situation. 

CASEY: Thank you. A lot of great ideas there. 

WESLEY: Thank you. 

CASEY: That’s going to apply to a whole bunch of things like developer relations, too—how do you access people.

WESLEY: Exactly. Like, do you need to have your own forum or making them come into your property to ask their questions or do you find out that they're on Twitter and they're just ruminating on a certain subject and you go to them? You have to figure out what's most comfortable for them to make sure you address their issues or maybe on their podcast as they're listening. 

JOHN: So at the end of each episode, we like to do what we call it reflections, which is just a little summary of what each one of us is going to be taking with us after this conversation. Maybe it's a new idea. Maybe it's just something that we're going to be thinking about for a while. So who would like to kick us off?

DAMIEN: I can go first there because the big thing I'm going to be reflecting on after this conversation really, is the decommodification of labor. The decommodification of people. People are individuals. We're very, very different and we should be treated differently. We should do different things. We should focus on our strengths and that's kind of anathema to where we are as a work culture and that's causing a lot of harm and a lot of lack of value being created from that. So how can we move away from that? How can we sustainably move towards treating people as people and get cool stuff out of that? 

JOHN: Much like what you said, Damien, I'm thinking about just strengthening that same thinking I've had around finding those strengths and leaning into them as a way of amplifying the things you're capable of. Finding those superpowers and leaning on those, how you build your – what you're doing around that so that you can be the most effective that you can be by knowing what you're good at.

CASEY: I think that's close to my takeaway, too, is focusing on your strengths, working together as groups, as communities, leaning on each other, and how to apply it as another thing I need to figure out. Like, what groups and communities I can lean on more, or create if they don't exist to amplify that idea? But I love it. We’re stronger together.

WESLEY: I think the biggest thing that I come away from this experience is reinforcing that skills aren't things you necessarily are born with. You can create and cultivate them and you don't have to feel like when you're growing up, that the role that other people put you in or even you put yourself in, is something that has to be static. It can be dynamic. As you learn more, as you explore yourself and your life creativity and your own strengths, that it's okay to change how you define yourself and to act accordingly. 

DAMIEN: Thanks for being here. It’s been absolutely wonderful.