When I onboarded people for a job, not just as a consultant, I would, I loved the days where I had multiple, like people from multiple teams so that we could facilitate discussions about this and say, you know, what do you think people in HR do? What do you think people in marketing do? And we have such bad understandings of what people do every day and how they spend their hopefully eight hours, hopefully not 12 or 16. But, you know, we don't necessarily know how the other half lives and that would help us ship better products, right? It would help us develop a company that truly appreciated everybody at the company. How much do you know about your job? How much do you know about your co-worker's job? And what does it mean to onboard someone and teach them everything that you know about your job? That's what we're talking about in today's episode. This is the second part of the interview with Kristen Gallagher. I highly recommend you listen to the first part if you haven't. In today's episode, we're talking about onboarding and quite a few other things related to human resources. And we also debunk this idea that HR is a cold term. So make sure you listen through for that. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal is to help you become a better developer. To help driven developers become better at what they do so they can have a positive impact on the people they come in contact with and ultimately a positive impact on the world. Now, here's the key. For this show to be useful to you, you have to be a driven developer. What is a driven developer? We're going to keep on talking about this topic in multiple episodes from now on, essentially. But a driven developer is someone who actually believes in doing work. That goes beyond the bottom line. Someone who believes in doing work they enjoy. Working with people they trust. Building relationships with the people they work with. Wanting to develop expertise. Wanting to empower others to learn. Wanting to lift other people up. This is what it means to be a driven developer. So if you are that. If that fits your personality. This show is specifically made for you. It's specifically made to help you jump some gaps that you may have in your thinking. And perhaps enlighten or inspire you in ways that you otherwise wouldn't be able to be enlightened or inspired. So if that description matches you, then I want you to subscribe. I want you to subscribe and become a part of the Developer Tea community. We want to make sure that we make strong statements about our values. And I want you to join us in that. Today's episode is all about... It's all about learning and sharing. And we're talking with Kristen Gallagher. She created Edify. Go and check it out. Edify.edu.com Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Let's get straight into this interview with Kristen Gallagher. I like to say this on the show. We're all building one thing. There's only one thing that is the result of our collective efforts. And there's different parts. There's different components. But all of it. And that makes up a collective whole. And if we can't see ourselves... And this is another thing that you mentioned that aligns with the traits of a great developer. Is expanding your perspective beyond what you do. It's very simple. It sounds very simple. It's difficult to actually implement. But conceptually, it's very simple. Is seeing the values and the perspectives of other people and other teams. Competing values and understanding why they compete. Right? You probably don't have a company full of morons plus a development team. That's almost impossible to be true. You probably do have a company full of people who have very little understanding for what other people do. That is the average company. We want to understand what we do so well. And especially as developers. We want to, as a general rule, the archetype of a developer is to become an expert. Right? To really nail down and understand things that no one else in the company can really touch. And it feels almost exciting to have that kind of wielding that knowledge as a developer. And less so now than maybe five years ago. But having that information. We want that so bad that we forget that it's only effective if we can use it with other people. Right. If we can actually deliver value in collaboration with other teams. Yeah. The lone wolf kind of lone genius archetype is just not, you know, it might have worked. Even recently it could have worked. But I think the direction that companies are having to move due to, you know, economic pressures, political pressures. All kinds of different things going on in the market. You know, we're, we have. We have to work together. We have to be able to draw ideas from each other. And ultimately, you know, not trying to go right back to onboarding. But it is, it's a conversation about how we take the tacit knowledge that's in our heads and explain that into some explicit format to, to someone else. And, and try to understand their tacit knowledge as well. Yeah. There's, there's something that is, that is, uh, commonly said, and I think it's attributed to Ogilvy. And I agree with it. I agree with this, this perspective. Great ideas come from individuals. So we don't want to whitewash or, or remove this concept that the individual mind isn't, isn't important. Right? That's, that's not true. Great ideas certainly originate with individuals. But great companies, great products, great teams are collaborative effort. So no matter how good the idea is, if it's too big for you to do on your own, then you need someone else. Right? There's nothing. There's nothing super valuable, so valuable about that idea that it supersedes the need for collaboration and for cooperation and for the shared process, like sharing that value output. Right? Um, it's so critical to, to success of anything of, of, uh, uh, significance. Yeah. You know, I, I'm going to kind of make a little bit of a logical leap here, but if you, as a, as a technical team and engineering team, you, if you want to get more support, you need to have a team. Right. You need to have a team. You need to have a team. You need to have a team. You need to have a team. You need to have a team. You need to have a team. You need to have a team. You need to have a team. You need to have a team. You need to have a team. organization, let's presume that you have somebody in HR, even one person. All of the stuff that we've been talking about is so critical because, you know, I've never met an HR person who doesn't want the company to succeed. I think there's a really negative and well-earned, to be honest, well-earned negative reputation for HR. But to be honest, you know, I work with them on a day-to-day basis in multiple companies and everybody really does want the company to succeed. We all have kind of different ideas about how that might happen and how we have to go about it. But let's say that, you know, we talked earlier about, you know, retaining employees and struggling to do that. Let's say that's one of your challenges as your team is growing. Your HR people can help you with that, right? And approaching them and saying like, hey, I want to be your partner in this. You know, they might not know what to do because they've never had an engineering team say that to them, you know? Because I see that happen so much that there's not a collaboration between teams that, you know, it's like technical with technical. And I have problems with this phrase anyway, but non-technical and non-technical. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it is so important to be able to communicate these things and to be able to translate the value. You know, that's kind of the key concept here. It's not doing away with your values. It's not just saying, okay, you know, inherently in order to work with someone else, I have to just kind of forget what I care about, right? Or forget my expertise. That's not it at all. It's creating the interfaces that are necessary to translate the values, right? From one team to another and to be able to say, okay, what I'm doing today helps you accomplish what you want to do tomorrow, right? Or the thing you did yesterday. Helps or hurt me in what I want to accomplish. And I know that you don't want that, right? I know that we want to succeed together. And it may quite honestly be that these teams, you know, is very much so kind of a blinders way of interacting with it's, it's easy to think that your work only affects you, right? And your decisions only affect you and the people on your team at the very most. But that's not true. And the translation happens, whether you're managing it or not. And it's not true. And it's not true. And it's not true. And it's not true. And it's not true. And it's not true. And it's not true. And it's not true. And it's not true. And it's not true. And really what Kristen, I think you're saying is it's worth managing. It's worth putting some energy in managing that translation. It really is. I couldn't, I couldn't have said it better myself. I think, you know, change is happening, whether or not you direct it to happen and information is being transmitted and codified, whether or not you wanted it to be. People are, are creating those perceptions and creating the, the ideas that they have based on how you're working and how they're working. And so we might as well take control of that situation and, and make sure that it's, you know, better optimized for all of us to succeed. Yeah. You have onboarding, whether or not you created a specific onboarding or not. That's exactly right. Like there is a first day. There is. And there, there is a way that your company behaves, you know, there's, so it is important to, to think about these things. And it's not just a, it's not just a thing for big companies either. I want to kind of dispel that for people who are listening. You're like, Oh, well, we only have five people. We only have 10 people. It's not just for, for big companies. Now it becomes more complicated and, and scale. Kristen, your job is to help people scale into that position. But this stuff is still true when you have smaller companies that have multiple teams. And that's, that's the case where I work. We have these same kinds of problems. And, you know, just because we don't have a sustaining budget for an HR department doesn't mean that suddenly we just don't have a need to be more human. Right. And this is something that you're really passionate about. Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, what it means to kind of take away, or I guess reintroduce the human element? I know in your talk, for example, you mentioned that you don't really have Slack on your list of tools for communication. Can you kind of give an idea of how, you know, what kind of elements make something more human, that, that interaction process? How can I, you know, in a small company or in a big company, how can I reintroduce human elements where so often they're removed? Yeah, that's a really good question. And let me cut Slack, some Slack. I actually do think that it's a great tool. It's just not a great tool for managing documentation. And unfortunately, people try to use it that way. So, had the pleasure of being at Slack's Frontiers Conference last week, and it was awesome. Did a great job. But, Like any tool, Slack is one of those things that if you use it well, it can be great. If you use it poorly, it can be terrible. It's so true. It's so true. But from the, if I wanted to give you just a couple of things to try to make your, just make your workplace more human in a way, I would say that you can start with, you know, some of the things we've already talked about with, with empathy. And let's just, you know, from a tactical perspective, think about how you welcome a new person into your company. Let's say that you don't have the budget, you don't have the time, you don't have a dedicated resource to manage a great, big onboarding program. And these things, you know, as they're, they're all relative, right? So great, big can mean, you know, different things for different companies at different scales. But it doesn't, you know, let's say you don't have a 30 day plan that you've made up because you were working 80 hours a week, trying to make sure something happens. And you're not going to something happened last week. And, you know, now it's Monday, and your person has showed up, well, you know, maybe bring a coffee, like, bring, you know, ask them to go out to a cup of tea with you. Or if you're remote, make sure that you're on time for that meeting. You know, it's, it's really the little things to me, it's, it's about being present, you know, it's about putting your laptop down in the one on one or saying, Hey, I need my laptop to write notes. Is that okay with you? You know, it's really little things about, you know, the way that we communicate and making eye contact or figuring out, you know, oh, this is actually really uncomfortable for me. And I think that's something we need to be mindful of, too, is that as our companies become more diverse, not everybody communicates in the same way. And that can show up in a physical sense. It can show up digitally. So it's important to ask people, you know, what's the best way for you and I to get this work done? You know, what do you prefer? You just showed up at this company and I think you're great. And, you know, how are we going to work together? So asking some really open, basic questions, I think is a really good way to get started. Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, you mentioned a few very practical things in there that I think are very often overlooked. And perhaps because of, you know, the surrounding digital culture, you know, I don't want to blame any particular thing, but we very often do. We will pull out our... Yeah. ...our phones during meetings, even when it's like the CEO of the company. We're very guilty of this at Whiteboard. And we've kind of made a concerted effort to stop doing that, right? And it is something you have to be mindful of because it is, you know, one of my favorite quotes on the subject. I've said it on the show probably hundreds of times at this point, but how we live our days, how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives, right? So in every moment that you are interacting with other people, each of those moments is kind of creating your relationships with them. And so if you are off your game one day, right? Like if you're... And I don't... Maybe that's the wrong terminology, but, you know, if you act in a way that is flippant on a regular basis because eventually you think you can fix it, right? One day you're going to be professional again or whatever. Right. Today is kind of the first day that you can start doing that, right? It's not something to continue just putting off or ignoring. That's so true. Somebody just told me a story the other day about her manager who actually called her on her cell phone and the manager was apparently stuck in an elevator, but she had a one-on-one scheduled and she didn't want to miss the one-on-one. So they did the one-on-one while the fire department was coming to... Oh, wow. ...unstick the elevator, right? So, you know, and that's kind of an extreme example, but it made me laugh because obviously that manager had such commitment to making sure that their new hire got the opportunity, you know, and that manager was also mindful. The other part of the story was that, you know, that manager was scheduled for the rest of the week. So they were not going to be able to meet with that person. So they were really mindful of the fact that, you know, this is time blocked out. And, you know, those events are... Most of us who have been both managers and junior employees at a certain time, you know, when you're a junior employee or even a mid-level employee and you have that 30 minutes or that hour with your manager, you know, you're really... Generally speaking, I think you're looking forward to it to say, hey, here's what I've been up to for the last week or the last month and I really need your help with this one thing or what do you think about this? And the manager relationship is one to many, but, you know, we... If you're an employee and not a manager, you're not going to be able to sort of the reverse. And so it's really important to be, you know, mindful of people's time and their feelings. We don't talk a lot about feelings, but I think we really could. Today's episode is sponsored by Linode. You know, some of my most important learning opportunities in my career have been when I was kind of playing around with stuff. I was playing with code, I was making a side project, I was having fun with something. You know, maybe I wanted to learn how to set up a cron job or create a little microservice here or there or learn a little bit about, you know, how to install packages on various platforms. This is something that is so important to the learning process and that is the ability to explore. Now, if you don't have an environment to explore in, if you don't have something to launch these microservices or mini projects, if you don't have anything to launch those on, then you're probably going to stop before you even get started. And if you don't have something to launch those on, then you're going to have something to learn. So, you know, we know that starting is kind of the key to continuing, right? If you don't start, then you'll never finish. So I highly recommend that you check out Linode because Linode is going to provide you with that atmosphere, that learning atmosphere, and you can get started with Linode for $5 a month. That gets you a one gigabyte of RAM server. And one gigabyte of RAM is plenty enough to get started with a side project. But let's say that you decide to scale that project, or maybe you're listening, and you don't fit that beginner profile. Actually, you're looking for a solution to deploy a highly scalable application that you're already building. Or maybe you have an application that is growing, and you're looking for a way to scale it. Well, Linode also provides high memory plans. They're a full service provider. They're intended to support the enterprise, right? That's so important to Linode. And they have robust customer service, service architecture as well. So you can get these high memory plans, 16 gigabytes of RAM for $60 a month. Incredible, incredible deals, better than pretty much any other deal per, you know, dollar per RAM, or RAM per dollar, whatever the ordering is of that ratio. They have the best deal on the market. So go and check it out spec.fm slash Linode. And here's the special part of this is they're going to provide you with $20 worth of credit, just for using the code developer T, 2017. So thank you again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode. Head over to spec.fm slash Linode to get started today. Most managers, and I'm including myself in this, this is your first time doing this just like everyone else, right? I don't have 30 years of being a boss. That's not, you know, I didn't come into this with a bunch of experience. I just, now I am a manager. And, you know, I'm a manager. I'm a manager. I'm a manager. I'm a manager. I'm a manager. I'm a manager. I'm a manager. I'm a manager. I'm a manager. I'm a manager. I'm a manager. You know, it wasn't something that I was trained for. It wasn't something that I, it's something that kind of ended up happening as a result of me sticking with what I was doing. And that's, that's a great thing, right? It's, it's a, it's a fun opportunity. It's exciting opportunity. And it's kind of the way things typically go. The people who are in one trade, the kind of hop parallel tracks and end up being, you know, in managerial positions, because they understand the day-to-day work that those, that the people they're managing are doing. It's a very natural thing to happen. But here's the thing. I don't have the constant perspective that other people are looking to me, right? That's not a natural thing to understand because in no other part of my life is that true. And so you have to constantly be reminding yourself, Hey, this, you know, what I do is different than it used to be. I'm not just, you know, I'm not just working on software on my own and then going home. What I do with my time, it matters to other people now more than it did before. That's so true. Kristen, this has been an excellent conversation and so exciting to hear that there's more energy in this space. You know, I think it's easy to think that this is the kind of thing that's going to get put into the column of cost as we continue to optimize as a result of technology, right? That's, we, we continue to create these abstractions for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for communication. But I appreciate what you're doing by bringing this back the other direction and saying, okay, no, we, we do need to spend on this. And perhaps we need to spend more now than we did before in this area. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And it's been a really good conversation. And if anybody can, can take something away from it, I'd be happy. Well, I'm definitely taking something away from it. I do have two questions that I want to ask you that I like to ask all of the guests who come on. On this show. The first one is if you and I were to go and have a cup of tea, and this is our first time, you know, talking, we just met, what would you hope that I would ask you about? Gosh, I, I am kind of a terrible LinkedIn stalker. So I always like to know what people do. Um, and, but I find sometimes that it's not reciprocated and, you know, selfishly, I think one of the more, you know, things that makes me more interesting is that I come from museums. And so I like to talk about, you know, what's going on in the world. And I think that's a really good talk about museums. So I wish people would ask me more about that. And you have this, this formal background in museums that kind of, so how does that affect, uh, the, the work that you're doing? You know, for example, you do have this, a conference that's coming up. Can you talk a little bit about that and how your work in museums might be changing the way you think about conferences? Yeah, that's such a good point. So when I worked in museums, I was working in education. So it's, it's a little bit of an easy leap, for what I'm doing now, but, um, I am all about like, how can people learn with their hands or physically or, or in a different time and space than sitting in a classroom and watching a PowerPoint because that's what museums are, right? I don't have to make you go to a museum. So I have to figure out how to make something engaging and something that you want to partake in. Um, and that's what really fascinates me about museums. And, and to be honest, there's a lot of, uh, background stuff about the way things are organized and that they're really, really interesting. Um, but I do think that there's a lot of work that's going to be done in the future. Um, but I do think that there's a lot of work that's going to be done in the future. Um, but as it relates to conferences too, it it's really the experiential part. So I am, uh, running a conference called human school in February of 2018, and it is for, um, new and, uh, budding HR and people operations people, um, that could be an admin assistant. It could be an operations manager, maybe, you know, somebody who got tasked with some HR stuff in their startup. Um, but they're not really sure. How to do it. And, but they really want to do it with an eye toward humanity. So that's, that's what human schools for. Um, and the way that it's designed is actually a little bit different than many other conferences. So it's one track. Everybody goes through the same set of, um, courses. I'm going to call them courses, but they're really workshops. So they're very interactive. People will be getting up and moving around and learning things if they choose to partake that way. Um, and there are so many different avenues for engaging with it because I know that people learn differently and they experience things differently. Um, and we're, we're incorporating things like rest breaks and movement breaks and things that will allow people to really show up and be their full self, because we know that, you know, just in the same way that if you're in an art gallery and you're tired, because frankly, it's kind of tiring to walk through a giant art museum, there are benches there and you're supposed to sit on the bench, you know? Um, so simple, but right. Exactly. Sometimes I don't see them being sat on at all. And it's like, you know, you could just sit here and hang out with this art. Um, but, uh, I think that's how it influences human school. And, um, I'm really excited about it and excited to have a hundred, um, budding HR professionals come in and learn how to do HR the more human way. That is so exciting. I love this idea of designing things around the human experience a little bit more, you know, as developers, we very often, uh, uh, we kind of put that to the side as again, uh, labeling that cost, right. Um, that my ergonomics are create more expensive things that I have to buy. Um, a standup desk is, is more expensive than, uh, just a static sit down desk. Of course it is. Right. Um, but, but at the same time, you know, when we abstract that stuff away, or when we try to say that it's not important, uh, there's effects that that's having on our work that we don't even know. And necessarily we can't really measure it very easily. Uh, and so, and I love that you are, uh, you're focused on this data-driven approach too. And that's so exciting, uh, to have somebody who's bridging that gap between, you know, what is very often kind of, unfortunately, uh, displayed, uh, only from a opinion perspective, right. People should be this way because, you know, we value these things, right. Well, for most business owners, just valuing something is not enough. And having that data-centered approach is, you know, bridging that gap between being more human with things like human school and also, uh, accomplishing, uh, business related value goals. That's such a good thing that you're doing there. That's, that's exciting. Thank you. Okay. So, uh, the, the next question that I like to ask, uh, everyone who comes on the show is if you had 30 seconds to give advice to developers of all backgrounds and all experience levels, what would you tell them? I would tell them to onboard their peers. So it's not often your job, especially if you are not that person's manager. Um, but take a minute and think about how they feel. And, um, the best way to do this that I can describe is imagine walking into a lunchroom, um, being the only, you know, you don't, you don't know anybody there. Um, and you're just, you're just by yourself and you don't know which table, which table to sit in. Um, and I also have to apologize. We have a six month old puppy who's coming in. So she wants to talk about onboarding, um, but we're sort of onboarding her to not bite our other dog. Um, but, um, you know, just imagine what's it like to be that person and how could you share just like five minutes of information that could really help them? Yeah, that's, that is very interesting and exciting. And quite honestly, I think a lot of people, um, they, would be excited by this if they thought that they could do it. And, and I do think that some of that barrier to entry is, is the problem here. And really what it means is actually taking the initiative to say, Hey, you know what? This is important enough to me. And I think it's going to be important enough to you that I want to talk about it. Right. It starts with that, that first conversation of, Hey, you know, I want to understand what you need. I want to understand, um, the things that you're experiencing as, as a new, uh, hire or as, uh, even, even somebody who's been here for a while, but you haven't been here as long as I have, you know, how can I help you understand and work better on a day-to-day basis? Exactly. Exactly. Kristen, thank you so much for your time. And, uh, how can people connect with you, find out more about human school and perhaps, you know, go ahead and set themselves up to attend. Yeah. Thank you so much. I've, it's been an awesome conversation. I really am glad to be here. So if you want to find more out about me, you can go to www.edifyedu.com. And if you want to find more out about human school, you can go to human.school. Human.school. What a great domain name. I know. I just love that. That's the thing. We will also put links to that stuff in the show notes, which you can find at spec.fm. Thank you so much, Kristen. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Make sure you go and check out human school. That's human.school. And the other thing is, if you want to find out more about me, you can go to human.school. That's human.school. And the other thing is, if you want to find out more about me, you can go to Christian Gallagher is involved with at defiedu.com. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Again, I'm going to challenge you. If you fit that description that we talked about at the beginning of the episode of the driven developer, I want you to subscribe. I want you to become a part of this community, continue to engage this content and reach out to me, reach out to me. If you feel like this is something that is meaningful to you. If you want to share a story, you can email me at developer. T at gmail.com, or you can find me on Twitter and at developer T and at Jay Cottrell for my personal Twitter. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of developer T. Remember, you can get a excellent learning environment for the cost of basically a frappuccino per month. It's extremely affordable to get started. And on top of that, it's extremely affordable to scale up to massive, massive scales. 16 gigabytes of RAM a month for $60. It's unheard of. So go and check out what Linode has to offer to you. Spec.fm. Linode. Thank you again for listening to today's episode. Thank you to Kristin. A huge thank you to her for being a guest. And until next time, enjoy your tea.