Laziness Does not Exist

Carmen: Hello and welcome to another episode of the DevRel Book Club podcast. It is my joy to be here with my cohost, Matthew, how are you, Matthew?

Matthew: 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.

Carmen: Yes, please stay warm. No, here in Vienna, it's quite mild, I have to say. At least it stopped raining. The dog doesn't like to walk in the rain.

Matthew: 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. And I kind of feel like the topic of the book we've got this week is fairly on point for a new year, new start to the work year episode.

Carmen: I agree. It is going to be a really good conversation. I'm really excited. I'm going to bring on our guest now we've got with us, Jess. Hello Jess. How are you?

Jess: Hey. Oh, and hello to everybody out in the, we don't say cyberspace anymore, do we? Do we not do, we do, do do. What I mean is thank you so much for having me, and it's an absolute delight.

Carmen: It is our joy to have you Jess. Jess here has brought with her the book Laziness Does Not Exist by Dr. Devin Price, PhD. I loved this book, but we'll get more into that. But before we do, Jess, I'd love to give you the possibility to please tell us a little bit about yourself. Introduce yourself please. Cool.

Jess: So hey, my name is Jessica Rose, or Jess Rose, or really anything with a 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, specialised in doing early stage startup consultancy and open source consultancy. And this is going to be wrapped up in why I picked this book. 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 going to sell you supplements. I started rethinking my life, but started restructuring my life and actually I'm going to be starting a new perm job next week. So I used to work at the Mozilla Corporation. I'm going to be heading over to the Illa Foundation, different job, same name 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: Before we dive into that, can you tell us a little bit about the Common Voice Project, please?

Jess: Oh, 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 want to pay a 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 keys, SW heli accents, there's a huge database of 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: Well, that's great and thank you for sharing that with us. Thank you. I would like to say one thing before we dive in, and I really want to say thank you to Common Room for sponsoring this episode. So if you're working in devel or community management, you can go to commonroom.io where you'll find a tool to help you measure and understand your community. Okay, should we dive into the book?

Jess: Oh, I do apologise. 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: 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?

Jess: 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 lazy and worthless. I almost work incredibly hard to overcome my natural laziness. Obviously my work is all tied to my productivity. Work is half too high. I need to centre my life, centre, 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, marginalisation from success. How messy I really enjoyed because later in the book they talk about, oh, you know what? 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 feels right.

Matthew: I bet some people listening to this now will have a guttural reaction. 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.

Jess: So one of the things that it talks about early and often is 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 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? Whereas our redemption, where is 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 drive for infinite busyness is a really big theme in the book and talks a lot about, they embed case studies, which I really appreciated and very warm case studies of Hey, here's somebody who tried to do everything, everything and here's how it hurt them or here's how it didn't work for them,

Matthew: For them. And so I'd like to pick up on one of those just very quickly. There was one person mentioned in the book who was 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 dived into the story and that person was a single mother, had all sorts of other responsibilities in their life. And 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?

Jess: I think so as well, like this idea and with the case study example, you suggested the professor, the first professor, the bad professor, the traditional professor, it said, what could be more important than 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. And I think that in a lot of different productive settings, be it work, be it this big conference, 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 prioritise something else or be disconnected?

Carmen: 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 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 how do we prioritise those who need help?

Jess: 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 going to 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: So Dr. Price talks about cyberloafing, which I'd love to get into this need of the brain to switch off and managers are trying to architect ways of fighting against the human need to switch off for a few months. 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 needs to just phase out for a few moments is actively worked against

Jess: 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 going to cite her a couple of times because one of my favourite academics in the space of focus and neuroscience, Dr. Barbara Oakley, is just absolutely fantastic. Does a lot of work on how we learn and how we focus. And I'd argue 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 practises for focus. So I've got a Pomodoro cube and Pomodoro, a lot of folks do. It is the practise of I'm going to deeply focus for 20 or 25 minutes and then I'm going to break from this task, walk around, threaten 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 go ahead and have a context switch for your brain because so far as we understand the brain, we think we need that.

Carmen: So thank you. And 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 just 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?

Jess: So I think this is especially, no, that's lying. I was like, oh, I think this is especially prevalent in tech and especially prevalent. That's not true at all. So this kind of burnout and focus and over max is especially prevalent in folks working minimum 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, or there used to be a great deal of travel, a really, really massive range of different kinds of duties and tasks, all reasonably specialised 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. Those kinds of skills swings are reasonably demanding. I think when I think about DevRel specifically, it's that we don't really do much of this acceptance of laziness thesis after of breaks, but what we do do is burn ourselves out real fast and real often

Carmen: That hits hard and close to home. This pressure to be, I mean we can touch a little bit more on the sort of outward pressure, but I think that inward one as well is very prevalent and especially when it comes to pushing ourselves in terms of how many hours we spend on a thing. If I may share towards the beginning of my career, I was freelancing and it felt real. I used to get paid on an hourly basis. And so it felt real easy to be sitting on the sofa on 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 hamster wheel kind of really got out of control later on.

Jess: I'd argue that it's not a hamster wheel. Is it a treadmill? Is it the hedonic treadmill?

Carmen: Oh please,

Jess: Somebody explained this to me and it absolutely made my life worse and now that inflicting psychic damage

Matthew: On, don't it to me then don't say it.

Jess: That's too late. This is happening, this is going to 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. 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 I used to be a teacher then I worked in tech. It's not right that we pay tech people more than teachers, but what a big surprise. Oh gosh, how fancy. But it says the concept around the hedonic treadmill says, do you know what? When you first have a material improvement or reduction, 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 got to 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 was just chatting to another industry colleague about this the other day, and both him and I had sort of escaped this hedonic treadmill where we had both been like, oh, this is nice, nice things are nice, but they don't seem to return what I want. Maybe I'll just stop chasing.

Carmen: That's really well put and eyeopening, thank you. I think it's something that I'm going to need to read more about and we'll definitely link to that in the show notes. I think it'll be a good discussion.

Jess: But the idea that any material improvement is just temporary plateaus of happiness and that you'll, the theories that you tend to reset to a stable state of happiness, how miserable, how freeing on one hand, it kind of doesn't matter. On the other hand, it kind of doesn't matter. This is assuming that you have housing, food, healthcare. This is past your material, your functional material needs.

Carmen: That's an excellent point. Thank you. And I find that spike of happiness ties in a lot with another thing this book mentions that I've been thinking about personally a lot, especially throughout the last three years as I've spent a lot of my time, perhaps more online than I should, and especially prevalent for Derel, 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, when you mentioned spikes of happiness, I thought I'm definitely guilty of these spikes of joy again, when something I say it resonates with people and of course being that we are sharing as the book says, our best moments and how we can take that back and I hesitate to say mitigate or minimise, but how do we manage this, comparing ourselves with others and our relationship with social media.

Jess: So I think the whole point of having Dere specific stuff is we can get out our spiciest spicy takes. This is not true for everybody. I don't have any value judgements on social media more largely for me, the reduction in ongoing value of Twitter, for example, at least for me, has been marvellously freeing. And this is something I commonly hear from tech workers or very online folks. I had managed to break my focus to the point where I wasn't really reading anymore, sitting down and reading for a couple of hours. I needed just like you said, those little tiny dopamine bursts of tiny content, tiny content. And then there's the built-in expectation to perform. So not only do you consume tiny bits of content, but then you interact with them for the kinds of things that when we talk about social media, we often say this dismissively, oh, for attention over valid, but we're social animals. We love attention where we're designed to and who doesn't. A little bit of validation, at least for me really recently getting less and less of that. And this was something I had a hard time with is, and again, this is stuff that I credit Dr. Oakley and chatting to her about her work was really useful to make hard decisions, kind of realising 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 a bit of a trap. So in recent years have started, the phone is never in my bedroom. More recently the phone is never in my office. There's a little app called One Sec that you can put a delay on the apps, on opening the apps like social media or the web that you use the most. This stuff I thought I loved and this stuff I thought I needed. I'm not preaching, oh, digital detox, I still love my phone, but getting less and less of this really did a lot for focus and not focus in a productive way. I've just been reading comics in a hammock, which feels very lazy, does not exist approved.

Matthew: And that sounds like a metaphor, but you literally do have a hammock.

Jess: This is all comics right behind me. There's a hammock in the living room. It carefully pointed away from the television, so it's sort of like a little tiny reading jail.

Carmen: 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 going to, I have been deeply inspired by the hammock, I must admit, but also to just sort of take a comfy place and just be like, do you know what? I'm just going to 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 good.

Jess: And I think this might be really common with Dere folks, I think. I'm not sure why, but there tends to be folks from a range of different NeuroD divergencies in Endeavour. I've got really, really bad A DHD 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 to 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 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, bring it back. But I was reading a different book recently about nothing but the concept of doing nothing and it looked at pre industrialised societies and said, oh cool. So far as anthropologists can tell, about 20 to 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 piece I had read earlier connect to this where they were saying, oh, I can't even comprehend doing nothing. And 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 how wonderfully freeing. I don't necessarily recommend that for other people. Yeah, I was about to say it's made me very lazy and I feel like perhaps that's not what I would say half read this book.

Matthew: So one of the things that the book goes into, as Carmen said earlier, was this idea of the social media pressure. And that kind 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 that your, 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,

Carmen: There

Matthew: Are a lot of people who want to get into Derel 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 that those people feel the pressure to perform and to demonstrate their performance. And then there's those of us who have been in devel for some time thinking, well, if people are paying me to be an expert in this thing, I better be a bloody expert in it. So yeah, how do you cope with that ongoing pressure to be the person?

Jess: I'm cheating because the thing I did that chilled me out the most about needing to be an expert is actually a project I worked on with Carmen. Carmen and I teach relatively large scale free programming bootcamps that are part-time and remote. And when I say large scale, we teach each a six week cohort and get seven, eight, 12,000 learners per cohort. So large scale. And the best thing about that is web development just changes so quickly, doesn't it?

Carmen: Yes.

Jess: And when I say changes so quickly, I'm talking about stuff like Grid, which has been around for as long as for a while now. But really if I am so, because I do a lot of teaching live, having to model the appropriate behaviour 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 hypnotised myself into being actually chill about it. So they're not even that rush of, oh, I should know this is terrible. 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 dunno this thing, I've forgotten it. We can look it up. It's not the end of the world.

Matthew: My own approach has been very similar. It's a case of, oh, this is a cool new thing that I can learn about and to be happy enough in yourself that you know what, 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.

Carmen: I wholeheartedly agree. And in fact, to both your and Jess's point is this notion that I've kind of come to terms 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 showing one thing that I take. I had an experience during the bootcamps that Jess mentioned where I got super stuck on a problem that I was doing on free and getting the feedback that it was so relieving not to just see how I solve the problem, but also that somebody who's been at this I freelanced for 10 years as a software engineer, get stuck and work their way out of it. Eventually that kind of really sent off a light bulb in me, opened my eyes to the fact that what I'm doing here is showing that, well, that sort of 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 turn of phrase I don't know, but let's find out is, 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 this is something that I've been thinking about a lot in terms of derel as well, I have found when being exposed to a lot of folks who are starting out on their tech journeys, but also in folks who are looking into but also and slash or folks who are looking into Derel as a next step in that journey. I've kind of found that there's been a bit of a conflation, a bit of 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 seeing themselves as lazy. Mind you, I want to be very, very clear that I don't think influence is bad per se, but I think that conflation can sometimes be a little bit harmful. And I'd love to know what's your take on that?

Jess: Oh, I'm going to defer back to the point from the book, which is you don't always have to have a take. So 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 positions around this come from a really privileged perspective. So I've been in DevRel for a long, long time. I've got 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 a weird little guy on the internet. And that worked so far as personal brand influence. So for me it's really easy to say, oh, cool, I have enough attention. I don't really, well, maybe a little too much. 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's still a really, really hard challenge for somebody who's just starting out and says, oh cool, we've got, here's this thread of things about JavaScript, get my ebook. Is this a valid way to get into the industry? Is there professional value in this and 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 not sure anymore.

Matthew: So I think one of the things that social media enables and that perhaps we endeavour enable sometimes too is that influence in and of itself is not a good thing, but those social media techniques and some of the things we do in 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 this performative thing of being an influencer. My issue is this idea that influence is an end goal in itself, and I am a little nervous about seeing that creeping into Dev Rel.

Jess: I am smiling because, so this is weird. This is one of 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 ancient Greek plays with. When movies first came out, people were like, oh, everybody's walking around. They want to be, when TV first came, oh, when streaming first be, oh, everybody wants to be a hitter now. And this goes when the novel was first emerging as an art form. Oh, everybody's carrying themselves. They're the protagonist. I've just really excited because oh, you know what? 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 so historically fundamentally human. This doesn't contribute as much. 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 art since we were making media content. Now it's content, isn't it?

Matthew: 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 cloud?

Jess: I do not. Oh, oh, nobody clipped this for this specific thing, but at the end of the day, I don't see a huge conceptual difference between a try hard doing their thing E Girl and Oscar Wilde at a party, knowing other people can hear its takes.

Carmen: That's a fascinating perspective. Sorry, I'm just blown away by it because for the first time I did feel myself going like, oh gosh, am I the one who's yelling at the proverbial clouds, or of course

Jess: Is very philosophical. I'm sorry to drag us off the beaten path and be like, what is attention? What is media? No,

Carmen: But that's fascinating because it does tie into that, sorry, I interrupted you.

Jess: No, no, no, you've just interrupted me. Being delighted. I always try and leave people with existential dread,

Carmen: But I think there is something to be said. Of course. This is not a generalisation. Not everybody wants this. And in fact, something that keeps coming back to me, the fact that Dere is so wide and so vast to the point that you don't, 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 want to say hubris, it would be irresponsible to dismiss the fact that I fluency does dictate the directions that say, for lack of a better term, money flows, right?

Jess: When attention is a currency, is it not reasonable to acquire the attention of currency or the currency of attention?

Carmen: To be quite frank, the reason I love bringing this topic up is because it's something that I am to this day still struggling with to know how impactful and whether I'm nervous for nothing because I think, well, not everybody wants to be on the spotlight, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Don't think you're, and something that the book does that I love so much, 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: I've had tweets, for example, that accidentally get a few replies and I'm like, ah, more work. I can't reply to this. So I'm the worst social media person. But one thing that interests me that I wanted to raise was the idea that in Dere, it doesn't matter how you dress it up, but our job is to warm up developers to make them spend money with a company that employs us. 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 want to try and tie that up with the fact that you don't have to be an influencer to work in Dere, but you can be more effective in Dere by doing one-to-many things. The one-to-one side is really, really important. And I'll give credit to the person who said this, it was Kevin Lewis who

Jess: I think you both, sorry, I'm just like the biggest Kevin Lewis fan. So just everybody on the call just like, oh, my little heart.

Carmen: Yeah,

Jess: Kevin's great, which sounds very, very patronising. Kevin is so highly skilled and so brilliant and so hardworking. But at the end of the day, I'm always just like, oh, what a solid dude. But

Matthew: His take on this is really, really resonated with me was that we can be really effective one-to-one in Derel, but what is perhaps unique to some extent for Dre is that when we're most effective is on the one to many. So we create an artefact that touches many people, then we're hyper scaling ourselves to use an awful word. I want to get this straight in my head that isn't the same thing as influence. To me, influence is performative. You're both using the word influence, which I haven't heard before, so I'm kind of glad to catch onto that. But being an influencer is something in dere that I think is dangerous, but influencing people is the job. Does that make sense?

Jess: So when we think about being an influencer and having a one to many message, it feels very new, doesn't it? Oh, here's this brand new type of person. This just started to exist. Oh, we're a bit, not we necessarily, but oh, we're collectively a bit suspicious because this newish communication process feels inauthentic, it feels manufactured, 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 want to push a message further, I'm going to put it in a story. I'm going to put it in a recognised type of storytelling medium for the time I live in right now. It sounds like I'm making a really impassioned defence 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 want to be seen very rarely feels new to me.

Carmen: I agree. I very much agree with that because I think, and to be perfectly honest, the reason I keep thinking about this and talking about it's because I haven't figured out how I feel about it. And by the way, if I did make up the term influence by accident, I apologise. I think I've heard it, but I just want to make sure.

Matthew: I mean, if you did, then it's a great neologism. Let's go with it.

Carmen: I will not take credit for it. I think 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 derel as well. And I meant what I said, I don't see it as a bad thing, influence and the 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.

Matthew: But you just made me think of something. Up until 400 years ago, word of mouth was the only way that ideas got communicated. Apart

Carmen: From, was

Matthew: It though clay tablets? I guess was it though? Okay,

Jess: Wait, I've just blanked on his name. There is a Ian Copper merchant, is it Eske? 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 because literally there's so many clay tablets. 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 jokes that continue about the internet. We love to tell stories, we love to coalesce around these. And I think from this book and just from being online less, I've chilled out a lot about influence stuff, 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 look at this. Look how unplugged I'm, I think Tailwind is a CSS tool, fer fer being a highly technical term if no one's heard it. And for me, the more pleasingly disconnected I get from needing to have a take, the more I'm like, oh, it's like that guy who's so 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.

Carmen: I think that the areas under which we influence folks, be it directly or indirectly, can also affect how we communicate and say the things and teach the lessons we want to teach, which extends into, pardon me,

Matthew: The medium is the message,

Carmen: The medium is the message, but also what we're influencing in with relations to developer relations. And I think beyond, and because funnily enough, when I brought this topic up, I never thought of the, for lack of a better term, the hot take. I was actually thinking about the developer education space, how to find a job in 10 easy steps, this sort of thing. And it made me realise that there's much more to it than I give it credit for. That's what I wanted to say and how it ties into how we commoditize. Going back to the book, the book talks about how the gig economy has led us to commoditize our free time, led us to

Jess: Ize. I could always be doing more.

Carmen: Yeah, 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 going to stream it. I'm not going to blog about it. I don't feel like it. And honestly, more power to

Jess: You. This is coming back to something that is not important, was the Babylonian copper merchant. And the reason we know so much about how much he sucked is he saved a bunch of tablets and of complaints and they were found in his house. So not just that you get this community of complaining around this, but that hate reading your old bad press was definitely a thing back in 1750 bc.

Matthew: 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.

Jess: Our people can read

Matthew: The book and with ourselves. Yes, yes. Sorry. How do we apply that to our work in DevRel? I feel like the lesson from the book is applicable to many people, not just devel, but what are the specifics of DevRel? We've been talking about burnout since the very first DevRelCon in 2015 and before that there are I think, structural issues in Derel, which I dunno 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 laziness lie,

Jess: Carmen is significantly more compassionate than I am, so I'm going to grab a drink of water,

Carmen: 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 lend guidance and I said compassion to those that we can, when we're talking about DevRel, when I started in DevRel, it was quite an eyeopening experience for me to realise, and I said this previously, how vast it is of a field where you, for example, within a field like partner engineering, very, very important part of Derel, but not necessarily a very outward facing one that can lead into that self-imposed pressure to, amongst other things, create content. I'm trying not to stay too stuck on that part, but this self imposed pressure to perform. But I think that extends beyond that into 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 moments, but also celebrating our successes. And there were a lot of points during the last DevRelCon in Prague where a lot of messages boiled down to celebrate, vocalise what you're doing, vocalise your successes, vocalise what you're working on, what doesn't work, and all of that. That's something 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 Dr. Price says, we don't call anyone else lazy, just ourselves. That's something I feel a lot. So I'm trying to turn that around and also be more compassionate with myself. Sorry, that was a bit of a messy answer, but I hope there was something there.

Jess: You better not be. Sorry. That was lovely. Thank you. For me, I could give you some nonsense about, oh, 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, please, please, let's not do it now, but oh gosh, where is community management and developer relations different? We're not, we're not going to do that, but one of 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 nonprofit spaces, sometimes in your free time, but my beloved viewer or listener or audience member or content consumer future influencer, I would lovingly beseech 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 is one of my favourite 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 going to say police in a positive tone, but then rigorously police those spaces for expected behaviour. Say, Hey, cool, we want to build this thing with you when have this thing with you, but here are the expected behaviours within the space. Y'all need to be cool. So the compassion to say, Hey, we want to give you the thing that you're looking for anyway, not I want to tell you to use X, Y, Z widget, or I want to tell you that this is 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, but say, Hey, I want to do something that's genuinely valuable and I'm going to extend my capacity 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 behaviour towards not just your peers, but this is the level of compassion and appropriateness that I would also have you bring to interactions with myself and fellow builders. Yeah.

Carmen: Matthew, if I may ask, how about you? How do you see applying compassion to your DevRel work?

Matthew: I think one of the lessons that I've learned since the beginning of the pandemic and 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 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.

Jess: Oh, and I would encourage, this isn't my podcast, but for our viewers at home or in the office, tick, go ahead and sit in Potter. Who was it that annoyed Mr. Revelle who take no, no.

Matthew: One thing is I've got a lot more chilled out over the past few years, and so these days it's no one. Honestly, genuinely, there are some things there are in DevRel. I maybe a little concerned at some of the hustle culture that goes on, but yeah, no, I'm not thinking of anyone in particular.

Jess: I was just brutally conscious that I'm, describe a meme on a podcast years old, 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. 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 stuff that doesn't hurt people. So stuff where folks are being excluded and marginalised or damaged or the big scary things that are hurting us all, obviously still care about that, but if somebody's like, oh, I want to argue about this DevRel hot take. I'll be like, alright, cool. That doesn't look like my business, so I'm going to go put a little cape on a cat.

Matthew: Well, look, I've really valued your time, Jessica, it's been great talking to you again. And Carmen too, hanging out with you for the past hour or so has been great. So thank you and thank you for sharing the book with us. Jess.

Jess: No, thank you so much, and thank you for being so patient about me being excited about early criticisms in the novel and how we see ourselves. It's very rarely relevant.

Carmen: This has been really such an uplifting conversation, such an invigorating one for me. So I'm very thankful to you both and folks for listening. 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 want to get in touch with you where they can do it, and maybe something that you're excited about that you want to shout out.

Jess: So if you want to 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. Actually, I'm so sorry that this thing I'm really excited about this coming up is a secret, but a 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: Great. I can't wait to see it. So thank you. Carmen, where would people find you?

Carmen: Oh, well, I'm hanging out mostly on, you can find all of my good stuff on my website. That's Carmenh.dev as in developer. Yeah, you can find all the stuff there. I'm doing some blogging, doing some social media Inc. And yeah, you'll find it all there. How about yourself, Matthew?

Matthew: Well, I'd like to encourage people to head over to developer relations.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.