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26 January, 2023
Burnout is a recurring topic of conversation in DevRel circles. In this episode, Jessica Rose shares Devon Price’s book Laziness Does not Exist, which looks at the idea of the “laziness lie”.
Ramon Huidobro:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the DevRel Book Club podcast. It is my joy to be here with my co-host, Matthew. How are you, Matthew?
Matthew Revell:
I’m very well, thank you. Coming to you from a snowy little corner of England right now. And I have to admit, I’m huddled next to a heater because it is rather chilly here.
Ramon Huidobro:
Ooh, yes, please stay warm. Here in Vienna. It’s quite quite mild, I have to say. At least it stopped raining. The dog doesn’t like to walk in the rain <laugh>.
Matthew Revell:
Well, it is our first DevRel book Club of 2023. And to begin with, I can’t believe that we’re already in 2023, but let’s put that to one side for a moment. The topic of the book we’ve got this week is fairly on point for a new year episode.
Ramon Huidobro:
I agree. It is gonna be a really good conversation. I’m really excited and gonna bring on our guest. Now we’ve got with us, Jess. Hello Jess. How are you?
Jessica Rose:
Hey. Oh, and hello to everybody out in the, we don’t say cyberspace anymore, do we? What I mean is thank you so much for having me, and it’s an absolute delight.
Ramon Huidobro:
It is our joy to have you, Jess. Jess here has brought with her the book Laziness Does Not Exist by Dr. Devon Price, PhD. I loved this book, but we’ll get more into that. But before we do Jess, please tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jessica Rose:
Cool. So, hey, my name is Jessica Rose, or Jess Rose, or really anything with the J is pretty laid back. I’ve been in DevRel for about a decade now, which is some time, isn’t it? And for a long time, I specialized in doing early stage startup consultancy and open source consultancy.
But, and this is, this is gonna be wrapped up in why I picked this book, I had a really rough, do you know, everybody had a really rough year in 2020 and started rethinking about how I had, I sound like I’m gonna sell you supplements, don’t I, like, started rethinking my life but started restructuring my life. And actually I’m gonna be starting at a new perm job that’s part-time next week.
So I used to work at the Mozilla Corporation. I’m gonna be heading over to the Mozilla Foundation to do DevRel for the Common Voice Project, which I’m really excited about. I’ve been working part-time for a while, and I spend the rest of my time doing a free programming bootcamp with a very familiar face. And we’ll talk about it as part of this, but a lot of that time I would be spending working, or I had traditionally spent working, I spent doing nothing productive.
Matthew Revell:
Before we dive into that, can you tell us a little bit about the Common Voice Project, please?
Jessica Rose:
So Common Voice is so cool. I forget that not everybody is a big languages nerd. And so if you want to build a digital product with voice, there’s a couple different voice products that you can use, but they tend to be paid and they tend to be rather limited in language options. The Common Voice project is a corpus of community source voices, which are hugely diverse and exciting, and they’re completely open sourced and free to use. So if you wanted to make a voice assistant and you didn’t wanna pay a mon bunch of money for that, or if you wanted to do depends on the kind of research, but you were doing research and you wanted to look at different Ki Swahili accents, there’s a huge da database of the, those voices. Well, so for me, I’m a languages nerd and I am an open source nerd, and this was just sort of the perfect job for me. I’m really still quite impressed that they’ve decided to let me work with them.
Matthew Revell:
Thank you. I would like to say one thing before we dive in. Thank you to Common Room for sponsoring this episode. If you’re working in dev or community management, you can go to common room.io where you’ll find a tool to help you measure and understand your community. Okay. Should we dive into the book?
Jessica Rose:
Oh, I do apologize. I’ve recently adopted some very ugly cats as well, so if you see the worst thing in the world, pop up behind me. Nothing’s wrong.
Matthew Revell:
<laugh> So, listen, we are talking about Laziness Does not Exist, as we mentioned in the intro. And one of the first things that comes up in the book is this idea of the laziness lie. So Jessica, what is that?
Jessica Rose:
I’ve got this highlighted. So the laziness lie says, so it’s this deep seated cultural shared lie that says, deep down, I am Laz and worthless. I’m almost work incredibly hard to overcome my natural laziness. obviously my work is all tied to my productivity. Work is half to high. I need to center my life, center my identity, and anybody who’s not being successful, that’s because of their laziness, that there’s an immorality attached to a lack of success or alienation or alienation, marginalization from success. how messy I really enjoyed, cuz later in the book they talk about, oh, you know what? I the Dr. Price finds a bunch of people who believes that other people don’t have laziness, but they themselves are somehow magically the worst possible. That, okay, I believe that other people have this ability to be redeemed but that I am naturally bad, that the laziness lie applies to me uniquely and oof. That’s savage. But it kind of, kind of feels right.
Matthew Revell:
I bet some people listening to this now will have a guttural reaction of, “Of course, laziness exists!” What does the book have to say to that? Because the book goes into some detail to back up that assertion.
Jessica Rose:
So ,one of the things that it talks about early and often is, so a good fifth sixth of this book are the academic citation saying, oh no, look, we didn’t just make this up. And one of the things they bring up early and often and that I I bring up early and often is, look, productivity. The dollars made per employee hour have never been higher. Lazy does not exist. There is more and more productive output per unit of work being done. Where is our rest? Where is our redemption? Where is like, where is sort of the shared value of that? but they talk about a lot of burnout, alienation, the need to be consistently productive, not just in work work, but in advocacy, in teaching, in your social life. This sort of drive for infinite business is a really big theme in the book and was really, and talks a lot about, like, they embed case studies, which I really appreciated. And, and very warm case studies of, “Hey, here’s somebody who tried to do everything, everything, right, and here’s how it hurt them, or here’s how it didn’t work for them”.
Matthew Revell:
And so I’d like to pick up on one of those is very quickly, there was one person mentioned in in the book who was a, a mature student, one of Dr. Price’s students. And this person’s other professor had marked them down as basically being lazy, whereas Dr. Price had had dived into the story and that person was a single mother, had all sorts of other responsibilities in, in their life. And, you know, there was, there’s a whole backstory. And so this is what I wanted to get to, was the idea that the book puts forward that what we think of as laziness can very often be explained by a whole bunch of other pressures or responsibilities or reasons that take a person away from what they should be doing in that moment. Is that a fair summary?
Jessica Rose:
I think so as well. Like this idea and that the, with the case study example, you, you suggested that the professor, the, the first professor, the bad professor, the, the traditional professor, it said, what could be more important then my class? Whereas we are all three of us world weary and battered and there’s a lot of things that could be more important than a class, right? And I think that in a lot of different productive settings, be it work, be it this big conference here brand, that there’s this shared understanding that, oh, of course this thing that we’re working on right now is the most important thing in your life. How could you prioritize something else or be disconnected?
Ramon Huidobro:
Yeah. And then I remember another case study from the book that was kind of adjacent to that, or if maybe it was the same one and I and I misremember, but they also, when it came to allocating those resources to students, there was a case study about a professor who had been I believe chastised for spending time talking to students that weren’t performing well. That kind of tied into that sort of like, where do we, how do we prioritize those who need help?
Jessica Rose:
I think this book absolutely ruined me. I really enjoyed it. It was while I was making a bunch of different changes in my life. So part of it was sort of confirmation bias. So I was like, okay, cool. I’ve been working 60, 70, 80 hour weeks for years. I’m gonna work part-time and hit this book where I was like, oh yeah, you will absolutely destroy your brain doing that. I really like occupational sciences research, so research about how we work. and it’s wild to me that we see tech is this very data driven, very clinical. We make decisions based on numbers. But every occupational science research around working hours for years since the sixties has said, Hey, 40 hours a week is too much. and if you’re doing, and they mentioned it in the book, if you’re doing 50 hours a week, you might as well just do 30. You’re not doing anything in those extra 10 hours. And then as you add more and more time, you’re actually seeing a decrease in functional work productivity and problem solving.
Matthew Revell:
So Dr. Price talks about cyberloafing, which I’d, I’d love to get into this need of the brain to switch off. And, you know, managers are, are trying to architect ways of fighting against the human need to switch off for a few moments. But the idea that we push everything into this eight hour window and you are meant to be productive. You touched on this just a few minutes ago. You cannot be productive for 40 hours a week or a concentrated period of eight hours. And I find it perhaps odd that there are workplaces where that human need to just phase out for a few moments is actively worked against.
Ramon Huidobro:
Yeah.
Jessica Rose:
And they’re so common. And the thing is, the more power you have in a workplace, the less likely that is to happen. So I’m gonna cite her a couple of times cuz she’s one of my favorite academics in the space of focus and neuroscience. Dr. Barbara Oakley is, it’s just absolutely fantastic. Does a lot of work on how we learn and how we focus. And I’d argue that that that crosses into a lot of work and information. I’d argue that you can never, cyber loaf, you must stay in the queue at all times. Doesn’t really work with sort of, as we understand it, brains are wobbly best practices for focus. So I’ve got a Pomodoro cube and Pomodoro, a lot of folks do. It is the practice of I’m going to deeply focus for 20 or 25 minutes and then I’m going to break from this task, walk around threatened to throw a cat out the window. I would never make a cup of tea, look at something goofy on the internet, but really that here have some deep focus and then have, go, go ahead and have a context switch for your brain. Because so far as we understand the brain, we think we need that.
Ramon Huidobro:
This kind of ties into where the book is going towards as well, which is this sort of concept of rethinking or reframing laziness. I’d love to hear, Jess, in your opinion, how can we apply that for ourselves, not just as human beings, but human beings in tech or human beings in DevRel.
Jessica Rose:
So I, I think this is especially, I know I that’s, that’s lying. I was like, oh, I think this is especially prevalent in tech and especially prevalent in DevRel. That’s not true at all. So this kind of burnout and focus and over max is especially prevalent in folks working in minimum one wage jobs or folks. But this is much more visible for me because I’m working in this space now. I think one thing I see really challenging in DevRel is there’s a huge amount, there used to be a great deal of travel, a really, really massive range of different kinds of duties and tasks, all reasonably specialized that you might do. And then when you see people change roles, they can change subject domain areas relatively sharply. So, oh, hey, I used to work on purple widgets and now I work on blue widget orchestration using Kubernetes. Like, those kinds of skills swings are reasonably demanding. I think when I think about DevRel specifically, it’s that we don’t, we don’t really do much of this acceptance of laziness thesis after breaks, but what we do do is burn ourselves out like real fast and real often.
Ramon Huidobro:
Yeah. That, that, that that hits hard and close to home, <laugh> the, this, this, this pressure to be, I mean, we can touch a little bit more on, on the, on the sort of outward pressure, but I think that inward one as well is very prevalent. And and, and especially when it comes to like pushing ourselves in, in terms of, you know, how many hours we spend on the thing. if I may share towards the beginning of my, of my career, I was freelancing and it felt real. I I used to get paid on an hourly basis. And so it felt real easy to be sitting on the sofa a Saturday watching TV and thinking, well, I could be watching TV or given I was a broke student, I can make a little more money. And that’s sort of like, and that’s of like hamster wheel kind of really got out of control later on.
Jessica Rose:
I’d argue that it’s not a hamster wheel, is it? Is it a treadmill? Is it the hedonic treadmill?
Ramon Huidobro:
Oh, please.
Jessica Rose:
Somebody explained this to me and it absolutely made my life worse. And now I’m inflicting that on you.
Ramon Huidobro:
Don’t say it.
Jessica Rose:
That’s too late. This is happening. This is gonna happen. So it’s a type of hedonic adaptation, and it’s the tendency of humans to adapt our levels of happiness to changes in our material situations. And you say, that’s real abstract. What do you mean? And I say, oh, okay. So let’s think about, I’ve just got my first fancy tech job. I’m getting paid more. So, so I used to be a teacher than I worked in tech. it’s not right that we pay tech people more than teachers, but what, woo what a big surprise. Oh gosh, how fancy. but it says, the, the concept around the hedonic treadmill says, do you know what we, when you, when you first have a material improvement or, or reduction, we, we did this the other way as well, but we first have a material improvement, you get a spike of happiness.
Oh wow, I can shop at the fancy grocery store now, or I can adopt some horrible cats. Oh, I can do these fancy things. You get a spike of happiness and that levels out, and then you’ve gotta go ahead and get another higher high. So you start chasing these material improvements, whereas you continue to plateau on the actual happiness it delivers. I I was just chatting to another industry colleague about this the other day, and both him, Emma and I had sort of escaped this hedonic treadmill where we had both been like, oh, this is nice. Like, nice things are nice, but they, they don’t seem to return what I want. Maybe I’ll just stop chasing.
Ramon Huidobro:
That’s really well put. And, and, and eye opening, thank you. I I think it’s something that I’m gonna need to read more about, and we’ll definitely link to that in the show notes.
Jessica Rose:
But the idea that any material improvement is just temporary plateaus of happiness and the theory is that you’ll, you tend to reset to a stable state of happiness. How, how freeing, on one hand, it kind of doesn’t matter, and on the other hand, it doesn’t matter. this is assuming that you have housing, food, healthcare. So this is past your material needs, your, your functional material needs.
Ramon Huidobro:
That’s an excellent point. Thank you. And I think, you know, I find that, that that spike of happiness ties in a lot with another thing. This book mentions that I’ve been thinking about personally a lot, especially through throughout the last three years as I’ve spent a lot of my time, perhaps more online than I should and especially prevalent for DevRel, is our relationship with social media. it’s not like specific platforms on their current statuses, not withstanding, I feel like we spend a lot of time looking at this. You men, when you mentioned spikes of happiness, I thought I’m, I’m definitely guilty of this, these spikes of joy when again, like when, when something I say it resonates with people and, and of course being that we are sharing as the book says, our best moments and, and how we can take that back. How can I, and I hesitate to say mitigate or, you know, minimize, but how do we, how do we manage this, this comparing ourselves with others and, and, and our relationship with social media?
Jessica Rose:
So I think the whole point of having DevRel specific stuff is we can get out our spiciest spicy takes. this is not true for everybody. I don’t have any value judgments on social media more largely for me, the the reduction in ongoing value of Twitter, for example at least for me, has been marvelously freeing. And this is something I commonly hear from, from tech workers or, or very online folks. I had managed to break my focus to the point where I wasn’t really reading anymore, like sitting down and reading for a couple of hours. I needed just like you said, those little tiny dopamine bursts of tiny content kind content. And then there’s the built-in expectation to perform. So not only do you consume tiny bits of content, but then you, you interact with them for the kinds of things that when we talk about social media, we often say this dismissively, oh, for attention, oh, for valid.
But we’re like, we’re social animals. We love attention. We’re we’re designed to, and like, validate, who does it like a little bit of validation at least for me, really recently, getting less and less of that. And, and this was something I had a hard time with is and again, this is stuff that I credit Dr. Oakley and, and chatting to her about her work was, was really useful to make hard decisions kind of realizing that stuff I think I love was bad for me. I love my phone. when I was 13, the thing I wanted most was to be able to go on the internet all the time whenever I wanted to. and that’s a monkey paw level wish, isn’t it? So now I can go on the internet anytime I want to, and it’s, it’s a bit of a trap.
So in recent years have started, there’s, the phone is never in my bedroom. More recently, the phone is never in my office. there’s a, a little app called One Sec that you can put a delay on the apps, on opening the apps like social media or like the web that you use the most. This stuff I thought I loved and the stuff I thought I’ve needed, I’m not, I’m not preaching, oh, digital detox. I, I still love my phone. but getting less and less of this really did a lot for, for focus and not focus in a productive way. Like I’ve just been reading comics in a hammock which which feels very lazy, distant, does not exist.
Matthew Revell:
That sounds like a metaphor, but you literally do have a hammock.
Jessica Rose:
This is all comics right behind me. I, there’s a hammock in the living room. It is, it carefully pointed away from the television. So it’s, it’s sort of like a little tiny reading jail.
Ramon Huidobro:
You know, when you mentioned that, it reminded me of something the book also talks about, which is this concept of active reading and sort of taking that back as something we do, as, you know, what I am just gonna, I I I have been deeply inspired by the hammock, I must admit <laugh>, but also to, to to, to just sort of take a comfy place and just be like, do you know what? I’m just gonna sit down and read. And this is something that actually, not to get too meta here, that the book club has been really good for me because I am sitting down and reading more and I like it. It’s, it’s good.
Jessica Rose:
And I think this might be really common with DevRel folks. I think the, I’m not sure why, but there tends to be folks from a range of different neuro divergencies in, in DevRel. I’ve got really, really bad a myself and can’t take any of the fun drugs for it. one thing I found about my physical space and attention is we’ve got this idea of progressive enhancement in technology. I’ve been sort of progressively enhancing my environment, so adding extra friction too. The stuff I find distracting or addictive. My computer lives in its own room. My phone’s not allowed in rooms. I hate this, but creating sort of little bubbles of the least comfortable seat in my living room is the one facing the television. so adding extra friction around the stuff I love that’s distracting or time consuming, or like making my work live in a specific room has really sort of chilled me out too.
Dr. Price talks about working with their therapist, and the therapist said, I want you to spend an hour this week doing nothing. And Dr. Price was like, yeah, no one has ever done that in the history of ever. That’s not real. I’m so sorry. I’ll try and find the citation for him bringing it back. But there’s I was reading a different book recently about nothing but the concept of doing nothing, and it looked at pre industrialized societies and said, oh, cool. So far as anthropologists can tell, about 20 14% of the time folks were observed doing nothing. And that could be daydreaming, that could be resting, that could be thinking, but visibly just chilling. and it was really, really interesting to have that, that piece I’d read earlier connect to this, where, where they were saying, oh, I can’t even comprehend doing nothing. when I first started working part-time and working less, it was the same thing where it’s like, nothing, you want me to do nothing. but, but how wonderfully freeing, I I don’t necessarily recommend that for, for other people. I’m, yeah. I was about to say it’s made me very lazy and I feel like perhaps that’s, that’s not what I would say half that you read this book.
Matthew Revell:
<laugh>. So one of the things that the book goes into is this idea of social media pressure. And that kind of then expands into this idea of you don’t have to be an expert on everything. that’s kind of tied up in the social media thing. Not only just the, that you are, because we’re online potentially all the time, you are hyper aware of things that you just don’t need to know about. But there’s also the fact that you see other people like you who appear to be more accomplished, who appear to be more productive. And I remember when I started out in consulting, I thought I had to be an expert in everything in developer relations. And I don’t it’s fine, you can find your niche but I’d love to hear from either of you about your experience of chilling out when it comes to having to be this person who knows stuff.
Because I expect, we all feel that to some extent in DevRel for a couple of reasons. One is DevRel is competitive to get into, yeah, there are a lot of people who want to get into DevRel, and there are a lot of people who are out there saying, look, I wrote this medium post look, I did this Twitch stream. Look, I’ve done this, this and this. Pick me, pick me. And I’m not blaming them for doing that. I’m saying those people feel the pressure to perform and to demonstrate their performance. And then there’s those of us who have been in DevRel for some time thinking, well, you know, if, if, if people are paying me to be an expert in this thing, I better be a bloody expert in it. So yeah. How, how, how do you cope with that ongoing pressure to, to be the person?
Jessica Rose:
I’m, I’m cheating because the, the thing I did that chilled me out the most about needing to be an expert is actually a project I worked on with Ramon. so Ramon and I teach relatively large scale free programming boot camps that are part-time and remote. and when I say large scale we teach each teacher a six week cohort and get what, seven, eight, 12,000 learners per cohort. Yep. so large scale. And the best thing about that is web development just changes so quickly, doesn’t it? Yes. and when I say changes so quickly, I’m talking about stuff like, like Grid, which has been around for, for as, as long as, as Woo for a while now. But really, if I am, so, because I do a lot of teaching live having to model the appropriate behavior for learners, which is, oh, cool, I forgot how to do this, but it’s not a big deal, nobody expects. So having to sort of Bob Ross out, my anxiety about not knowing everything I think I’ve accidentally hypnotized myself into being actually chill about it. so they’re, they’re not even that, you know, that rush of, oh, I should know this as is terrible. Yeah. I’ve performed being chill about it for so long and so often that I’m just like, oh, cool. I have sublimated that into myself and, Hey, I don’t know this thing. I’ve forgotten it. We can look it up. It’s not the end of the world.
Matthew Revell:
My, my own approach has been very similar. It’s a case of, oh, this is a cool new thing I can learn about. and to be happy enough in yourself that you know what, you know, and that’s fine. And if there are other things to learn, that’s even better. But you don’t have to learn them all. And if you want to learn something new, that’s great, but you don’t have to know everything. And that’s just fine.
Ramon Huidobro:
I wholeheartedly agree. And in fact, to to, to both your, and, and, and Jess’s point is, is this is this notion that I’ve kind of come to terms and, and it’s a very slow coming to terms with the fact that it’s not so much what I offer in terms of expertise, but rather how I learn how I demonstrate that learning and how those learning techniques or, or, or showing one, one thing that I take, I I had an experience during the boot camps that just mentioned where I got super stuck on a problem that we, I was doing on free code camp and getting the feedback that it was so relieving not to just see how I solved the problem, but also that somebody who’s been at this, i, I freelance for 10 years as a software engineer gets stuck and work their way out of it eventually, that kind of really l you know, sent off a light bulb in me, like opened my eyes to the fact that what I’m doing here is showing that well, that that sort of like perfect knowledge in my head does not exist, but also that I’m not expected to be an expert in everything. and how powerful the, the, the turn of phrase, “I don’t know, but let’s find out” is.
Yeah. And, and this kind of ties into what I wanted to explore next, which the book does as well. the book when talking about social media also talks about being an influencer and, and is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in terms of, of DevRel as well. I, I’ve, I have found when, when, you know, being exposed to a lot of folks who are starting out on their tech journeys, but also in folks who are looking into DevRel but also and slash or folks who are looking into DevRel as a next step in that journey, I’ve kind of found that there’s, that there’s been a bit of a conflation, a bit of a, like a comparison between developer relations and being an influencer in tech that can sometimes become a little bit muddy. And I fear sometimes a little bit harmful to folks who are looking into that in terms of overworking themselves or being, or seeing themselves as lazy. Mind you, I wanna be very, very clear that I don’t think influenza is bad per se, but I think that conflation can sometimes be a little bit harmful. And I’d love to know what’s, what’s your take on that?
Jessica Rose:
Oh, I’m, I’m gonna defer back to the the, the point from the book, which is you don’t always have to have a take <laugh>. So I, I think that a lot of my positions here I think about the concept of enough a lot, which I quite like. and a lot of my sort of positions around this come from a really privileged perspective. So I’ve been in DevRel for a long, long time. I’ve got enough a body of work behind me, I’ve got and a big part of that is I have enough attention. and I just got really lucky and was just like a weird little guy on the internet. And that worked so far as personal brand influency. so for me, it’s really easy to say, oh, cool, I have enough attention. I don’t really, I don’t really, well, maybe a little too much.
I, I don’t really think about building a brand or what it means to be an influencer or whether or not we conflate these too much. but that, that’s still a really, really hard challenge for somebody who’s just starting out and says, oh, cool, we’ve got these, here’s this thread. I know a thread of things about JavaScript, get my ebook. Like, do, does this, is this a valid way to get into the industry? Is there a professional value in this? And does this, is this pressure real? And I’m so sorry that I’m old enough on the internet and just old enough for the industry where I’m, I’m not sure anymore.
Matthew Revell:
So I think one of the things that social media enables and that perhaps we in DevRel enable sometimes too, is that influence in and of itself is, is not a good thing. But those social media techniques and some of the things we do in DevRel actually reward the act of almost masquerading as someone who knows what they’re talking about and has influence in the traditional sense of being able to make things happen in a certain way. And then that turns into kind of this performative thing of being an influencer. My issue is this idea that influence is an end goal in itself. Mm-hmm. And I’d, I’d, I’m a little nervous about seeing that creeping into DevRel.
Jessica Rose:
I’m, I’m, I’m smiling because, so this is weird. This is one of my, my special interests, this idea that, oh, cool. Right now everybody wants to be the specific type of famous that has just recently started to exist is literally something we can go back to, to to ancient Greek plays with. So when the novel, so we in when movies first came out, people were like, oh, everybody’s walking around. Like they wanna be When TV first came, oh, when streaming first, we, oh, everybody wants to be a hitter now. They’re, they’re, and this goes like, when the novel was first emerging as an art for, oh, everybody’s carrying themselves, like they’re the protagonist. I’m just really excited because, oh, you know what, the, the kids today, everybody wants to be famous in this new specific way. Everybody wants to be a brand. Everyone wants to be the main character is, is so historically, fundamentally human. I, I, this doesn’t contribute as well. Like, I’m just always really excited about this. So whenever somebody’s like, oh, people think of themselves as brands, as influencers these days, I’m like, yeah, but that’s how we’ve done with each different conception of the self through, through art since yeah. Since we were making media content. Now it’s content, isn’t it?
Matthew Revell:
<laugh> Is there something to be said though, for the immediacy and the lack of effort, frankly, required to do a lot of this stuff now that maybe makes it worse? Or am I just an old man yelling at clouds?
Jessica Rose:
I I, I do not. Oh, oh, oh, don’t nobody clip this for this specific thing, but at the end of the day, I don’t see a huge conceptual difference between a try hard e-girl doing their thing and Oscar Wild at a party, knowing other people can hear his takes.
Ramon Huidobro:
<laugh> That’s a fascinating perspective. Sorry, I, I’m just blown away by it because it, for the first time, I did feel myself going like, oh gosh, am I, am I the one who’s like, yell, yelling out the proverbial clouds?
Jessica Rose:
This is course very philosophical, I’m sorry to drag us off the beaten path and be like, what is attention? What is media?
Ramon Huidobro:
That’s fascinating cause it does tie into that, sorry, I interrupted you.
Jessica Rose:
No, no, no. You’ve just interrupted me being delighted that like, I always try and leave people with existential dread
Ramon Huidobro:
<laugh>, but I think there is something to be said. Of course, this is not a generalization. Not everybody wants this, not ev And in fact, something, something that keeps coming back to me, people can like the, the fact that DevRel is so wide and so vast to the point that you don’t have to be a Publix, you don’t have to be a public speaker to be in developer relations. You don’t have to be in outreach to be in developer relations. And it would be, I don’t wanna say hubris, it wouldn’t, it would be irresponsible to dismiss the fact that Ency does dictate the directions that say, for lack of a better term, money flows. Right?
Jessica Rose:
When attention isn’t currency, is it not reasonable to acquire the attention of currency or the currency of attention?
Ramon Huidobro:
To be quite frank. I, I, I, the reason I, I, I love bringing this topic up is because it’s something that I am to this day still struggling with, to, to, to know how impactful it isn’t and, and whether I’m nervous for nothing, because I think I, I think, well, not everybody wants to be on the spotlight. Yeah. And I think, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think you’re, and, and, and something that the book does that I love so much is that, is that sort of like, you don’t have to, and if you’re tired, that’s your body telling you that’s enough.
Matthew Revell:
I’ve had tweets, for example, but accidentally get a few replies and I’m like, ah, more work. I can’t reply to all this <laugh>. So, you know, I’m, I’m the worst social media person, but one thing that interests me that I wanted to, to raise was the idea that in DevRel, it doesn’t matter how you dress it up, but our job is to warm up developers, to make them spend money with the company that employs us in. You know, maybe, maybe not in the case of working for the Mozilla Foundation, but for a lot of people, that’s the job. That’s the reason you’re getting paid. and I’m, I I, I wanna try and tie that up with the fact that you don’t have to be an influencer to work in DevRel. but you can be more effective in DevRel by doing one to many things. You know, the one-to-one side is really, really important. And I’ll, I’ll give credit to the person who said this. It was Kevin Lewis.
Jessica Rose:
I’m just like the biggest Kevin Lewis fan. Kevin is so highly skilled and so brilliant and so hardworking.
Matthew Revell:
His take on this has really, really resonated with me was that we can be really effective one-to-one in DevRel, but what is perhaps unique to some extent for DevRel is that when we are most effective is on the one to many. So we create an artifact that touches many people, then we’re <laugh> hyper scaling ourselves to use a an awful word. You know, I, I want to get this straight in my head that that isn’t the same thing as influence. To me influence is performative being, you’re both using the word I fluency, which I haven’t heard before. So I’m, I’m, I’m kind of glad to, to catch onto that. But, you know, being an influencer is something in DevRel that I think is dangerous, but influencing people is the job does, does that make sense?
Jessica Rose:
So when we think about being an influencer, having a one-to-many message it feels very new. Doesn’t, oh, here’s this brand new type of person that’s just, that’s just started to exist. Oh, we’re a bit su not, not we necessarily, but oh, we’re collectively a bit suspicious because this new, this new, this newish communication process feels inauthentic, it feels manufacture feels very new. it feels very salesy sometimes. and this sort of concept of one-to-one communication is powerful. One to many is big. Isn’t that the fundamental of really the core of storytelling? This idea that I can have intricate communicative acts but if I wanna push a message further, I’m going to put it in a story. I’m gonna put it in a recognized type of storytelling medium for the time I live in right now. I, it sounds like I’m making a really impassioned defense for influencers. And I think I might be accidentally, but I think at the end of the day, the way we communicate and the way we tell stories and the way we wanna be seen very rarely feels new to me.
Ramon Huidobro:
I very much agree with that because I think, and, and to be perfectly honest, the reason I, I keep thinking about this and, and talking about it’s because I haven’t, I haven’t figured out how I feel about it. And by the way, if I did make up the term I fluency by accident, I apologize. I think I’ve heard it, but I just wanna make sure.
Matthew Revell:
if you did, then it’s a great neologism. Let’s go with it.
Ramon Huidobro:
I will not take credit for it. I think what we’re, what we might be in danger of overlooking is the power of say word of mouth, which has always been something that’s very prevalent to DevRel as well. So, and, and I, and I meant what I said, I don’t see it as a bad, I don’t see it as a bad thing. that influence and the as aspiration to be one. and whether that goes into authenticity and all that, that’s a whole other can of worms that I don’t want to take that, I don’t want to take us down because we do have a podcast of a certain length that we have to have <laugh>.
Matthew Revell:
But you just made me think of something, you know, for the <laugh> up until 400 years ago, word of mouth was the only way that ideas got communicated.
Jessica Rose:
Was it though?
Wait, who I, I’ve just blanked on his name. There is a Phoenician copper merchant, is it Esky? and we know that he sucked. We know that there was this guy three and a half thousand years ago who sold copper and he sucked. and we know this cause literally there’s so many clay tablets, one of the largest collections one of the largest topics of clay tablets from this time is this guy right here. I hate him so much. Here’s why. He, and he’s just this guy who sold poorly graded copper back in the, and there’s, there’s, there’s jokes that continue about the internet. We love to tell stories, we love to, to coalesce around these. And I think from this book and just from being online last, I’ve chilled out a lot about influency stuff cuz it’s not my take where folks are like, what are folks mad about this week? I think the last thing I saw folks being annoyed with was tailwind. And I think Tailwind is a CSS doofer. Look how unplugged I am. Doofer being a highly technical term.
The more pleasingly disconnected I get from needing to have a take, the more I’m like, oh, it’s like that guy whose copper was poorly graded. Copper folks are really engaged with this. Some folks are like looking for clout here. But at the end of the day, I’m not buying any copper. This is chill.
Ramon Huidobro:
I think that the areas under which we influence folks, be it directly or indirectly can also affect how we, how we communicate and how we, you know, say the things and, and, and teach the lessons we want to teach. Which extents, pardon me, the medium is the message, the medium is the message, but also what we’re, what we’re influencing in with relations to, to developer relations. And I think, you know, beyond and, and the cuz funnily enough, when I brought this topic up, I never thought of the, of the, for, for lack of a bitter term, the hot take. I was actually thinking about the developer education space, how to find a job in, in, in 10 easy steps, this sort of thing. And, and it made me realize that there’s much more to it than I give it credit for. that’s it. That’s, that’s it. What I wanted to say. And, and, and, and like how it ties into what we, you know, how we commoditize, you know, the, the, going back to the book, the, the book talks about how the gig economy has led us to commoditize our free time, led us to, to,
Jessica Rose:
To, “I could always be doing more.”
Ramon Huidobro:
Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I had a conversation with someone else, a friend of mine in DevRel, who essentially said, you know what, I’m doing something cool tech related. I’m not gonna stream it. I’m not gonna blog about it. I don’t feel like it, and honestly, more power to you.
Jessica Rose:
This is coming back to, to something that is not important. A Nair was the was the Babylonian copper merchant. And the reason we know so much about how much he sucked is he saved a bunch of tablets of, of complaints and they were found in his house. so, so not just that you, you get this of complaining around this, but that hate reading your old bad press was definitely a thing back in 1750 BC.
Matthew Revell:
We should talk about compassion. The conclusion to the book is that really the solution here is to be compassionate in how we view others.
Jessica Rose:
And ourselves.
Matthew Revell:
Yes, and with ourselves. Yes, yes.
How do we apply that to our work in DevRel? You know, I I feel like the, the lesson from the book is, is applicable to, to many people, not just DevRel, but what are the specifics of, of DevRel? You know, we’ve been talking about burnout since the very first DevRelCon in 2015 and before that there are I think, structural issues in DevRel, which I don’t know if that’s too strong a term, but what can we do amongst ourselves as DevRel people to be more compassionate when it comes to the, the laziness lie?
Jessica Rose:
Ooh Ramon is significantly more compassionate than I am. So I’m going, I’m gonna grab a drink of water.
Ramon Huidobro:
<laugh> looking at, looking at empathy, looking at situations, looking at desires, looking at goals as something that by which we measure ourselves, and I hope not others too much, but also let lend guidance and, and I said compassion to those that we can, when we’re talking about DevRel. When I started in Dere, it was quite an eye-opening experience for me to realize, and I, and I said this previously, how, how vast it is of a field where you, for example, with some, within a field like partner engineering, very, very important part of DevRel, but not necessarily a very outward facing one that can lead into that self-imposed pressure to a, amongst other things, create contents, try not to stay. I’m trying not to taste stay too stuck on that part, but you know, this, this self-imposed pre imposed pressure to, to, to perform. But I think that extends beyond that, into, you know, communicating something communicating our successes and what we’re doing.
The book talks a lot about taking the time to be present in what we’re doing and not just in like, not just in moments, but also celebrating our successes. And there were a lot of points during the last decon in Prague where a lot of messages boiled down to celebrate. Like, vocalize what you’re doing, vocalize your successes, vocalize what you’re working on, what doesn’t work, and you know, all of that. That’s something that that, that I felt really applied to how I want to be more compassionate to myself. And I think it kind of ties into the beginning of the book where, you know, Dr. Price says we don’t call on anyone else lazy, just ourselves. That’s something I feel a lot. So I’m trying to like turn that around and also be more compassionate with myself. Sorry, that was a bit of a messy answer. I hope something there.
Jessica Rose:
You better not be, sorry. That was lovely. thank you. For me, I could give you some nonsense about, oh, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m intentionally working less to set a good example, and that’s not even remotely true. I’m working less because I’m really lucky. My life is not that expensive and I really like being in a hammock reading comics, but the things I’m really excited about around compassion, especially in DevRel are things that I used to think about a lot in education. so I know I’m, I, we please, please, let’s not do it now, but, oh gosh, where is community management and developer relations different? Where do they, we’re not, we’re not gonna do that. but what are the things I tend to lightly obsess about is, oh, cool. When you are doing this kind of work sometimes for your company or sometimes for non-profit spaces, sometimes in your free time, but my beloved viewer or listener or audience member or content consumer future influencer I would lovingly beitit you not to do too much community building in your free time unless you absolutely must.
But the thing I’m always really excited about is the idea of building spaces that have genuine actual value. And I think the bootcamp’s one of my favorite examples, Hey, we want you to have this thing, we want you to have a free version of this thing that’s very expensive. and then this is the only time that I’m gonna say police in a, in a, in a, in a positive tone, but then rigorously police those spaces for expected behavior. Say, Hey, cool, we, we wanna, we wanna build this thing with you. Anyone have this thing with you, but here are the expected behaviors within this space. y’all need to be cool. So the compassion to say, Hey, we wanna give you the thing that you’re looking for anyway, not, I wanna tell you to use x, y, z widget, or I wanna tell you that, that this is the, the cool new soda, but oh, cool.
Here’s something that I genuinely think will help. for some people this is introductions and helping people get their first job. For some people this is writing an ebook about interview tips. For some people this is doing education work that say, Hey, I wanna do something that’s genuinely valuable, but, and I’m gonna extend my compassion to say, what do you need? How can we make this better? And I’m going to selectively extend my compassion to say, this is the kind of expected behavior towards not just your peers, but this is the level of compassion and appropriateness that I would also have you, you bring to, to interactions with myself and, and fellow builders. Yeah.
Ramon Huidobro:
Matthew, if I may ask, how, how about you, how do you see applying compassion to your DevRel work?
Matthew Revell:
I think one of the, one of the lessons that I’ve learned since the beginning of the pandemic and you know, those times of enforced separation are to look beyond the persona that people project out into the world and to understand more about the person behind it. Because at the risk of being an advocate for travel, which I’m not really, but if you are able to maybe meet up with people once or twice a year, then I think it helps to remember who the person is behind the, the LinkedIn profile or the Twitter handle or that really weird post that you read and didn’t like and had to hold yourself back from writing a snarky comment on.
Jessica Rose:
Oh, and, and I would encourage, this isn’t my podcast, but for, for our viewers at home or in the office to tick, go ahead and sit and pndder. Oh, who was it that annoyed Mr. Revell?
Matthew Revell:
<laughs> No, no one! I’ve got a lot more chilled out over the past few years. And so these days it’s, it’s no one, honestly. I may be a little concerned at some of the, the hustle culture that goes on.
Jessica Rose:
I was just brutally conscious that I’m “describe a meme on a podcast years old” <laugh>. but there’s a photo meme of Keanu Reeves, and I think he’s saying, oh, hey, these days you can’t really make me argue about stuff. Like, if somebody wants to say one-on-one is four, I say, yeah, good job. Good for you. Okay. and I think I’m there for like, stuff that that doesn’t hurt people, so mm-hmm. <affirmative> stuff where folks are being excluded and marginalized or damaged or the, the big scary things that are hurting us, I’ll obviously still care about that, but if somebody’s like, oh, I wanna argue about this DevRel hot take, I’ll be like, all right, cool. That doesn’t, that doesn’t look like my business, so I’m gonna go put a little cape on a cat.
Matthew Revell:
Well, look, I’ve, I’ve really valued your time, Jessica, it’s been great talking to you again. And Ramon too, hanging out with you for the past hour or so has, has been great. So thank you. And thank you for sharing the book with us, Jess.
Jessica Rose:
No, thank you so much. And thank you for being so patient about me being excited about like, early criticisms on the novel and how we see ourselves. It’s very rarely relevant.
Ramon Huidobro:
This has been tremendous, like really such an uplifting conversation, such an invigorating one for me. So I’m very thankful to you both and folks for listening. You know, this is, this is really meaningful to be able to do this. Before we go, Jess, I’d love to give you the opportunity to maybe tell folks if they wanna get in touch with you where they can do it, and maybe something that you’re excited about that you wanna shout out.
Jessica Rose:
So if you, if you wanna hang out on the internet, I’m occasionally on Twitter at jesslynrose. It’s mostly complaining about cats and showing off comic books. I’ve read very professional, very, very focused stuff. and actually I’m so sorry that this thing I’m really excited about this coming up is a secret but, but project that I’m working on with a very familiar face, which is bite size, educational, relaxed, and has the exact same. Oh, hey, cool. Let’s try something and see if it works. Tone. So watch, if not this space and aligned space, and that’ll pop up in the next couple of months.
Matthew Revell:
Great. I can’t wait to see it. So thank you. Ramon where, where would people find you?
Ramon Huidobro:
Oh well I’m hanging out mostly on, you can find all of my good stuff on my, on my website. that’s ramonh.dev as in developer. yeah, you can find all, all the stuff there. I’m doing some blogging, doing some, doing some social mediaing and yeah, you’ll find it all there. How about yourself, Matthew?
Matthew Revell:
Well, I’d like to encourage people to head over to DeveloperRelations.com. We are planning DevRelCon London 2023. I think I found a venue. It’ll be in June. And we have a whole new series of content coming out on the website soon. So do take a look there. Well look, thank you so much. See you on the internet. Thank you.
