Harm reduction for DevRel teams

Voiceover: DevRelCon Deep Dives.

Knut: I don't want to have this talk. I think it's unfair that we even have to take the measures that I will outline in a couple minutes. But the fact is that being a public person on the web comes with risks for your health and wellbeing. And especially if you're not like me, white, cis male, it's fundamentally unfair that whenever I go on a video or Twitter, whatever and present something like a demo, some coding, I met with questions about what font I used or what CLI settings I have or some follow up from the code.

While colleagues in industry from underrepresented groups are met with outright harassment comments about how they look, their competence brought in question in public, unwanted attention in dms stalking, all of these things, and it's fundamentally unfair that for them, this is normal. It's expected, it's something you have to guard yourself against every time you put out something as part of your job. And for me who are running a developer relations team, this is concerning to say the least.

And if you have employees in Darel who are expected to be appearing in public, this should worry you too. Because harassment and unwanted objectifying attention are sources for burnout, it can really suck the joy out of educating and spreading awareness about technology and that is not what we want.

When I figured out what was going on in my team's dms after they posted anything really, I started to ask around asking other companies with develop relations teams how they approached it. I didn't succeed in getting many answers. And my impression is that it's usually up to an individual to figure this out from themselves. And typically people will form informal private group chats to come like them and share their frustrations. And in developed relations circles, for example in our developer avocado slack, you'll even find dedicated channels to burnout. You will find ad hoc advice about how to deal with this stuff, but you have to go to the slack, right people in DevRel and will tell you to be frivolous with a block button.

Again, it's not up to you. You have to control this yourself and this isn't sustainable. It leaves the responsibility to those who are getting abused.

So I have together with my team and my leaders try to figure out how to address this with some practical strategies and we call it harm reduction. And it might be useful to go into what harm is in this context. In most cases, we are talking about psychological harm and threats to your personal safety. And this comes from attention that trends addresses your boundaries and happens without your consent. It comes from messages that are hateful and diminishes your role as a professional.

Harm reduction is the masters and strategies and practises we put in place to reduce this and maybe even prevent it. So we hope we can spark a conversation on how we can promote better environments for technical educators to do their best work because that is what this is ultimately about, right? It's about keeping people who are underrepresented in tech around. They are crucial in inspiring and relating to people who are trying to get a career in tech who aren't given the same privileges as others and opportunities. And it is important to see someone who looks like you and is like you, be successful and treated with respect and doing the right thing because of humanity and kindness and empathy. It also makes sense from a business perspective, making sure that people who are representing your company and product are safe to do their best work directly ties into your ability to grow.

In other words, there should be a lot of incentive to follow up on this. I go to therapy and I do that because I've struggled for many years with recurring depression.

I know that many, if not most of us have something that makes life a bit harder than it could be. And most of us, if not all of us at some point in our life can use therapy. And it's not that long ago since that wasn't a thing you could be open about in a professional setting and in many other professional settings, it's still not kind of okay. What makes me proud of working at a place like sanity is that one of our benefits is access to mental health services and therapists. And we support having a work and home life balance. We have mandatory vacations and we are building a culture where we aren't expected to be available and at work all of the time. Because to be able to grow and to scale this up, we need people to stay for the long run to not be burned out. It makes just sense.

And I should know because one of my development areas a couple of years ago was to work less. This all promotes psychological wellbeing and that's important.

And part of that is also normalising going to therapy. So as managers of Dell teams taking part in that normalisation can be helpful. It means that you're clear about that going to therapy is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. You're taking responsibility for your own health. It's awesome. And as a manager, you can at least be open to having that conversation and proactively remove the stigma around it.

Of course, it's an individual choice. You can't force it up on anyone, but you can make it easy for them to accept that one might need to get help and that it's okay and you can't ever become a therapist. That's not the point. And it can be useful to learn some basics about common mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, and trauma so you can recognise it at least so you can know what's going on.

And this is part of just being invested in your team's emotional work. Being called incompetent in public on YouTube requires emotional work. Even if you have a thick skin, receiving marriage proposals or being contacted by the same person across several channels takes emotional work. You have to shrug it off, you have to deal with it.

You are not giving the choice. You'll get you at some level. One negative comment can ruin your day. It's impossible probably to avoid shitty comments on the web, but it helps if you can share it with someone. So being inquisitive about your team's experience when they have shared something on the web can help. It gives you an opportunity to validate their feelings that yeah, it sucks, but look at all the great stuff as well. I know it doesn't help. I know the shitty comments gets you, but yeah, now we can feel bad about it together at least.

And you know that I am aware and that I care and we can say it out loud. We can say it that these comments aren't speaking the truth and that there's a good reason you are working here because you're awesome.

And of course, for most people, this requires a level of trust. You're very used to saying, oh, it's okay, doesn't matter. Well, it's really not. You have to be vulnerable and it requires a level of preparedness from you as a manager. Fortunately, there are clever people who have written about this like Laura Hogan written about how to share in your team's emotional work and at the same time set your own boundaries as a manager. I do think that bringing awareness and building a support system are the most important things you can do as a manager, but there are some practical things we can do as well with technology.

One of them is choosing the right tools. Many of you are probably part of or responsible for communities. There's a lot of attention on community led growth and there's a lot of tools to provide and accommodate communities. Inviting people into a space on the internet, especially if you plan to have a large crowd also comes with responsibility. There are good reasons. Large social media sites have measures to block people to report and wanted content and so on. And as a company you want to have the controls to do the same for your community.

Having a code of conduct isn't enough.

A code of conduct is like the terms of services is like something that people might skim through and forget, but it's your contract that you have to enforce with your community through actually picking up trans discussions to model the behaviour you do want and to remind people in a accessible way about the code of conduct. And no, it's not posting the link every month. You have to break it down. One of the decisions we made almost four years ago was to start our community in Slack. And Slack doesn't give you great controls. You can't block people on Slack and you can't moderate content really. And if we were to choose again, which we might have to do at some point, we would probably go with something like Discord or Discord Better that are built for hosting communities with necessary controls. So to compensate, we have to be diligent.

We have to follow whatever goes on in our slack closely. We have to make it really easy for people to report ions so we can deal with it. And we have to remind people about our code of conduct and we have to be present and model the behaviour we want to see in others. And that helps. And speaking of large social media sites, if you have a developer relations team who are active and are growing an audience on Twitter, that will certainly be a source of harassment.

While Twitter makes it relatively easy to block people, if you are good at your job and you create something that gets a lot of attention, that also comes with an influx of unwanted attention. So doing a good job sets you at risk. At sanity, we have started to use a service called Block Party app, which is great.

It automatically filters and mutes things you don't want to see, and it gives you better tools for blocking accounts. And the cheap premium edition even has a help review so your team can go through messages and make a judgement if they are shitty or okay, so you don't have to do it for yourself. And speaking of moderating comments, another channel is YouTube is commonly known that the common section of YouTube aren't great. And that's also why we have set our common sections to be pred by default for every new video we put out. And we are not the only ones. Jason Langsdorf, VP of developer experience over at Nullify and host of Learn with Jason did the same on behalf of his guests.

And it's not ideal. We want Commons, we want engagement.

It's probably great for YouTube algorithm, all of that stuff, but making sure that we are not accommodating and hosting hateful and harassing content is part of our enforcement of the code of conduct. And this is not only for the wellbeing of our team, it's also for the wellbeing of whomever we have on as guests. And it's just easier to have it all pre moderated than to allow anyone to just post anything. In preparing this talk and reflecting on past experiences, there was another approach that also came up Often in developed relations. We are the guests, we collaborate with other channels and content creators, and we are often beholden to their audiences and sometimes there's even transactions involved. We pay to get in front of an audience. And with those kinds of transactions, there are agreements, there are contracts, and in those contracts you can set some expectations to how comments are treated that they are moderated, that we can request unwanted content to be removed.

And this brings another kind of awareness.

It brings the kind of awareness where if you want to do business, you have to actually follow up. It also lets your report focus 100% on their content creation because the other stuff is taken care of. I don't think we at sanity or we as a several community has figured this out yet. I'm not sure if we are even doing a good job, to be honest. Still feels early, but what I do know is that this is something we need to talk about to address and to think about and take it on as our responsibility as de leaders. And the first step is to become aware. It is to ask your team what they experience whenever they put out something. And if it turns out that they are not experiencing any harassment, that's great.

That's awesome. We do not want people to actually go through this. However, if they do, then you at least have some things you can start implementing and you can even share this talk with them. And I was like, is this something that resonates? Is this the case? And you can start the conversation from there.

Also, if you have any questions or reflections or even criticisms of this talk, I do want to hear about it. You can reach me on email.

I'm sanity io, I'm also on Twitter. My dms are open. Yeah, but let me know what you think. Even though I believed that I was relatively tuned into this stuff, even I was surprised when I actually saw the kind of things that my team received. And for the past years we have seen recipients of harassment being more vocal and share more about their experiences and that's good. But now it's time for us as several leaders to step up and take our share of that work and figure out how we can be more accountable and set some higher standards. We are often in a position where we can make a difference. So let's take that opportunity and thank you for staying with me for these 30 minutes of a pep talk.

I hope next time I can be back with a bit more fun, talk about some awesome DevRel related thing. But yeah, I felt like this has to be said. Thanks for watching.

Matthew: What are the steps that each of us can take in a role as a DevRel manager or leader to help protect the teams that we're looking after?

Olia: I think as mentioned about awareness is a great space to start and I'm glad you're having this conversation here today. I think it's very important to bring awareness to the subject and to involve more people. So I know everyone here we are trying to have an impact and make our community more inclusive, protect those who might need that. But I think the more we share that passion about protecting our communities, the more chances we have in succeeding.

Suze: For me, I think it's about, we know that a lot of these places are not safe spaces and that's why the abuse occurs. So can you talked about spaces that we can control? So our own community spaces like Slack, discord, we have control over that. If you have a bad actor in there, you can deal with them. But a lot, I would say most of this abuse occurs on the third party platforms. And so they are not safe spaces for a lot of people. And what we need to create within our own organisations if is safe spaces for people to be able to talk about this and voice their concerns and for us to be able to protect them and say, look, I'm not going to make you go on these channels and do content there because I know that it's highly abusive and it's not a safe space for you to be.

And I think it kind of goes right up to the top leadership of the organisations because if the organisation doesn't feel like a safe space or it doesn't particularly feel that woke and you don't think that people high up in the organisation are necessarily going to understand it, I don't think that helps you to protect your team because how are you going to then justify, well, we're not going to do this anymore because it's okay, everybody else is doing it, all our competitors are on there.

It's really difficult. And just on the point of third party platforms, it's very much a symptom of just the bias in tech generally. So we all know about the bias in ai and because it's the people that this stuff is designed for are not minoritized, they're not marginalised. And so therefore these platforms are not designed to deal with abuse and there's no interest in controlling that because it means less money for the people that make them. So just the whole in baked bias in tech doesn't help us. So we need to use the tools that we've got, the limited resources that we've got and make sure that the bits that we can control are really tightly controlled.

Joe: So on, I guess I note about third parties. I think the platform is obviously one being platform control is one thing, but then there's also just, I don't really know how I'm framing this, but I guess do you as dev managers and DevRel folks, does the pressure to be your own persona in those spaces and to have your employees have their own persona in those spaces and to have their named handles and their pictured handles rather than being able to use a company handle, how do you navigate that?

Have you had a situation where someone has said, Hey, this piece of content is obviously going out with my name because of DevRel authenticity and blah blah blah. Is there a way it could go out with something else? I

Olia: Feel strongly that there shouldn't be an expectation of an individual to use any personal handles at all. And I know certain people would probably prefer to do it in that way, but a lot of people actually are on none of those platforms and it really shouldn't be an expectation. So I think anything with a company handle, it's okay, but it's not okay to expect anybody else to use their personal network.

Joe: In saying that, as I'm making that point, it is also, there is also the other side I guess, of that axe, which is like we shouldn't expect people to do it, but then that themselves also disadvantaged folks, they don't get to build their personal brand and have that thing. So I think it's totally right as managers to not expect that. But then again, to Ken's point about so much of this process, especially in fair pipe platforms is individual risk and individual mitigations, and there's not really, it's hard for anyone else to do a lot for you.

Those decisions also continue to have you do make the decision to not have a personal profile somewhere that's one less place you're visible for whatever.

Suze: Yeah, that is a really interesting point you just made about personal branding. Joe and I know of a lot of people who really, really want to use their personal handle. Say for example on Twitch,

You're

Going through Streamy Yard, you're beaming to YouTube and Twitch, and then you might be doing it to the company Twitch and your own one at the same time to build your personal brand. And if the only people that feel really safe doing that, I like your archetypal tech bro, then they're the ones whose brands are going to get bigger and then it just perpetuates the problem and that other folks can't get seen, doesn't it? So yeah, I think that's a really interesting point

Bryan: And with the thought about it, it's really platforming the folks that need the platform the most. And so instead of punishing those who are making the platforming happening, the people who need the platform are getting punished. And that just doesn't make any sense.

Suze: Yeah, it can harm people's careers too. If you're hiring for somebody in de role, the first thing you're going to do is Google them and you're not going to not hire them because you can't find them. But if you can find them, it makes your job a lot easier to see what they've done. So yeah, the whole thing is so self perpetuating.

Joe: So that I do have, I don't know how to classify this thing, I guess it's a service. I'm going to drop it in the talks in Progress Channel and Discord, but it's called Tall Poppy. And I think it's interesting to a bunch of this stuff. So first of all, it is a service aimed at companies, which I want to point out for point that a lot of the protections here usually fall on individuals and non companies.

But yeah, basically what they do, it's a digital safety company run by, founded by Lee Honeywell, and I can't remember the other co-founder's name unfortunately, but they essentially provide personal online safety services. So they basically do an audit of your employee's digital presences to make sure to check for where there might be revealing information, where there might be information that might put that employee at risk, where they pick up online harassment.

They give lots of advice and tips on personal cybersecurity, hygiene, this kind of stuff. They have a fantastic resources page, which I'd really recommend checking out as well, which is LinkedIn the footer, if you want to get a lot of this information. And you are not a company of the HR department, so you can't buy this. There's things like a security and stuff in there. But yeah, I think this service, the fact the service exists is really useful. If you are someone like or a manager and you're thinking, how do I protect my employees?

It gives you, it's something actionable to do. You can, you can't step into employee's dms and delete the terrible messages before they read them, but at least if they do become the focus of harassment, there is limitations to the damage that can control and there is support there. So I think this is a really interesting service, and I think this might be to what we were just saying about not being able to run personal handles and the limitations that might cause I would feel a lot better being on a lot more platforms. I, well, not me personally, obviously for the usual reasons, but I would feel a lot better knowing that my employees were on a lot of platforms if I had this as backup for them.

Matthew: Just give us the name of that again, Joe. Sorry.

Joe: Yeah, sorry. It's tall poppy tall poppy.

com. That is in the talks in progress chat. It does also have an app that I believe has a similar function to block party for subscribers, which couldn't have mentioned. Again, I posted their resources page, which has a bunch of interesting personal safety resources. But another link about that that I would call out is this blog post by Mint Laika on online privacy. That just has a great, I mean, one the headings since blog post is reducing your attack surface area, just cutting down all the different ways that someone could get at you online, which I think is just a set of really useful things if you're going to be an online person.

Matthew: We've spoken about online quite a bit, but in person is just as much as an attack surface, if you want to say it that way. And I'm not going to call out individual names, but we've all seen stories that people have posted where they've been stalked at physical events or they've been the only person who looks like them at a tech event.

And so I wonder how up until two and a half, three years ago, DevRel was a career where it seemed to be about how many airline points you could accrue in one year. And I'm glad that we've kind of moved away from that to some extent. And I think that's happening anyway despite the pandemic. But my point is how do we make sure that people are on our teams are physically and emotionally safe when we're sending them to goodness knows where to go and be a very public person. It's not like in DevRel you can very easily just go to these events and sit in the corner or get an early night because your job is to be public and present.

Suze: That is a really tricky one. I mean, you can look at the track record of the conference. I know some of them have got a really, really shady record, really shady reputations, look at the code of conduct and find out how they've been enforcing them, things like that.

I know some events keep names of people that they know to be problematic and they don't allow them at their events and things like that, but anything like that, it depends on somebody actually doing that transgression in the first place. And we dunno what's going to happen in the future. And I think it's about being okay with saying to people that you don't have to go to this. We don't need to be present at this conference. We're going to make a statement that we're not going because we know that it's harmful and try and change things that way because it's only really by calling things out that we are going to change anything. I think if we just quietly just not boycott things, but if we just quietly just reject things, it's not going to change people's thinking and actions.

Matthew: But is there also, one of the things that Joe and I have discussed that came up in the management round table yesterday was that I think companies are a bit mean in terms of financially mean. And Joe, I'll let you talk about this, but I wonder if we should have a buddy system.

You only go to a conference if you can take a colleague because that would also stop it from being horrendously lonely. There's nothing worse than being jet lagged and lonely what there is, there's being jet lagged and lonely and not a straight white male like I am. So yeah, I can take that back.

Joe: Yeah. So my perspective on this comes from the GitHub campus experts programme. That's kind of a student ambassador programme that I used to be involved with. And I used to have honestly a really tough time convincing these students who were going to events for GitHub. It was a thing that we were supporting them in doing and funding them in doing.

They were going at it with a student mindset and they were coming back from these events to the hotels and the dead of night and go and buy buses or walking through God knows where places they've never been. There's these kids who if something happened, they don't have the resources to get 'em out of themselves. And companies being mean is one thing. If your policy prohibits getting cabs at peak hours or that kind of thing, that's one thing. But even if that your company, even if you know it's pennies to your company and it doesn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things, just a lot of people don't, especially having an aversion to unnecessary spending. And so I think there's an amount of normalisation that everyone needs to do in this industry, but particularly managers of your team, which is like if it is dark, get the cab. If you are a underrepresented minority, get the cab of someone else, right? It does not matter about the expense.

Safety is obviously much more the concern and I feel like that is codified to the point about companies being mean. I feel like that is codified formally in a lot of companies' expense policies, but in corporate language. And so it's not put in their empathetic human terms. It's not someone saying to you like, Hey, I care about your safety. Please optimise your expenses for the safest thing. Please don't get the long chain of economy flights that leaves you waiting in an airport on your own for 12 hours. Please get the expensive direct please, et cetera. Don't get the shady hotel.

And it's an endless list of these things. And on the one hand, it is corporate responsibility to make sure that the money is there. If you can't afford to have people travel safely, you can't afford to be doing events with travel. It's the long and short of it.

But there's that part of it. But then there's also just the psychological safety and reassuring people that you are okay to spend the money that is expected. It is your job to spend that money. It is not a reflection on you that you haven't been frugal enough.

That is the cost of doing business, please do it. So yeah, I guess that's my mildly spicy opinion for the day is that if your employees are having to be making any expense based safety trade-offs, you can't be, you as a company cannot afford to be doing that activity and you should stop.

Matthew: Absolutely. Any closing thoughts as we're coming to the end of our time and it's yet another topic that I want to revisit because I feel like we've barely touched the surface.

Suze: Yes. I would like to highlight something that somebody just mentioned in the chat. So they would like to see Derale events, conferences, meetups, et cetera, that they're designed to not decrease safety. For example, they don't see why we need alcohol events given often there's a drunk dude who ends up being just enough abusive to do harm, but not enough for a potential report to be taken seriously by the organisers.

I completely agree. Not only that, but if your booze is flowing, there are a lot of people who just don't want to be in that environment and maybe their faith doesn't allow them to be either. So you are excluding quite a big chunk of the community as well. So I think that was a really good point there.

Joe: One thing I do want to mention because called it out and it's my favourite topic, choosing optimising for platforms with safety features built in. If you are interested in moderating your community spaces and would like great resources on how to be a better moderator, I cannot recommend Lead Dom's community manager repository enough. Lead dom is or was the community manager for Electron and Atom at GitHub. He's done numerous community management roles for a really long time.

This is a fantastic resource. He breaks down moderation in such an effective way. And also it's just useful. So one of the articles in there is called Conversational Work Keto, which is like you're in a conversation that's getting difficult. How do you redirect that energy and keep it at a good level? It's just good for interacting with humans. It's a great, fantastic repository. Could not recommend it enough, but vital if you are managing a space where people's safety is at risk.

Suze: I love how you bring all the great resources. Joe, thank you.

Olia: Taking notes. I think, I mean this topic is huge and I also talked a little bit about psychological wellbeing and the culture and the support that we can provide to our teams as managers. I think there's a lot more to discuss there, and I hope we continue this conversations.

Matthew: Absolutely. Feels like we need another discussion on this very soon. Okay.

Well look, thank you very much for taking part in this discussion, even though we didn't get far enough into it for any of our liking. Let's arrange talk again. So Sue's Alia. Joe, thank you so much for joining. We'll say goodbye for now.

Voiceover: DevRelCon Deep Dives.