Hey everyone, welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Gatrell. This show exists to help developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. That is not just lip service. It is what I do in my career as a software engineering manager, in the past as a director, even when I was a lead engineer, this is what I care about. This is what I do. And in today's episode, we're going to use a mental model or a metaphor that will act as a mental model for you. Why? Why do we do mental models on the show? It's something that we do very often. An entire episode based around this concept of a metaphor, a mental model, is because it's incredibly powerful and memorable. If you can reach for this, if you can remember this, then it's so much more useful because, frankly, because it's available, because your ability to reach for it is not compromised by other information. This is why mental models are so useful, is because they operate as these kind of heuristic, you know, highly available. pieces of information or ways of thinking, lenses on the world. You know, if I were to give you just facts and figures, if I were just to tell you the data, you might remember the point of the episode, but to be able to use it is a different story. And so finding clarity, perspective, and purpose in your career, this helps you not only find clarity, but create clarity. I can't know your specific situation. I can't understand. I can't understand what you're going through, what you're facing in your day-to-day job. Instead, my goal in the show, the thing that I try to do in every episode is provide you with the tools, not answering your specific questions, although we love answering questions from listeners when they come in, but to give you the tools to answer your own questions, to give you the tools to find your own clarity. Rather than somebody giving it to you directly. And so that's the whole point. That's the idea of providing you with mental models. Mental models are these tools that you can carry with you in your career, well beyond listening to this show, and they're available to you. So today is this metaphor, this mental model that I want to share with you. So this week, my wife and I, we have a home here in Tennessee. We're having a little bit of work done. To the home. We're having some stairs added to our back porch. When we originally built the house, we didn't realize we want the stairs. In any case, I've been watching the folks working on the house in and out of meetings. I'll glance outside and watch what they're doing. And the concept has stuck out to me as I watch how they work together. If you were to intuitively try to decide how to... Two workers should maximize their productivity. Very often we imagine the most productive thing we could do is work in parallel. And sometimes that's true. Especially for tasks that are not particularly demanding. But sometimes a task is, let's say, precarious. In the case of putting stairs on the back porch, maybe you're in a position where you need to climb up on a ladder and reach for something that's a little bit... Further than in your comfort zone. And so what is the best option here? Of course, some of this depends on the age-old question we talked about maybe a hundred times on this show now. What exactly are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for sheer throughput? Or are you also considering the safety of your work? But the interesting thing here is a little can go a long way when you work together. More specifically... How does one person work to support the efforts of another? In this case, this specific situation where you're climbing on a ladder, a huge safety measure that you can take is to simply have another person put their foot on the base of the ladder. This may sound obvious, but I want you to think about the implications of this simple act. Or the absence of this act. Imagine that one in a hundred times. You... You... You put the ladder on a less stable surface than you thought. Maybe it's a little bit more slippery underneath. And as you're climbing, the ladder begins to slip. Now, you're not entirely certain when it will begin to slip. Perhaps it slips in the first step, which means that the fallout's probably not that bad. But if you're at the top when it slips, this is potentially deadly. What were the trade-offs? Well, the other person may have been cutting another board, for example. And so, for the want of a single board being cut a little bit faster, a very simple task could have been undertaken to improve the safety of your ladder climbing by a drastic amount. The amount of pressure needed to foot a ladder is not very much at all. So, let's think about the utility of these actions. The utility of cutting another board could be considered kind of a linear utility. The effort is pretty much directly correlated to the outcome. But the utility of footing a ladder, especially on that one out of a hundred chance that the ladder slips, the utility is incredibly high. The effort is extremely low, but the outcome of that effort is extremely high. There are a lot of things in our career that take the shape of footing a ladder. For example, if you provide a reference to an old co-worker, this increases their chance of getting hired by 700%. They are seven times more likely to get a job through a reference than they are through a normal job board. Now, this reference may not be the most accurate, but it is. It may take you all of, say, 10 minutes to write. Or you might have a 15-minute phone call with their hiring manager. But the impact that that one reference could have on your previous co-worker's career is enormous. There are other obvious examples like reviewing another person's code or acting as a pair programmer to watch over the shoulder of someone while they are completing a task. These are footing the ladder. There are other types of efforts, especially in situations where you are changing something that is critical. Maybe you're changing a production variable. The cost, and this is kind of the shape that you want to look for for these, the cost is very low. Usually, the cost is as simple as showing up. Sometimes there's some small action that you need to take, but the cost is as simple as being the second person on the scene. Being the second person to reinforce what another person is saying. Supporting your teammates' opinions in a meeting. This is another way to foot the ladder. Covering someone's on-call shift for 30 minutes when they have an unexpected situation to deal with at home. These are ways that you can foot the ladder. Usually, once again, this is less about adding sheer work. You're not just... adding your muscle to the situation, your time, your brain power. Instead, you are forwarding the efforts of another person. You're forwarding the efforts of another person. We can kind of understand this intuitively. If you were to imagine how much you could improve on any given metric, let's say improving your delivery speed as an engineer or improving your accuracy, improving your typing speed, whatever it is, whatever it is, improving your bug rates, all of these things, generally speaking, humans don't improve in massive percentages if they are sufficiently experienced in that area. In other words, if you're a new engineer, then yes, you will have major improvements. This is a feeling of acceleration that you have early on in your career. But if you are a well-seasoned engineer, then your improvements are going to be less, relatively speaking, than they were before. So you may double your knowledge in your second or third year as an engineer, but in your seventh or eighth year, you may only grow as an engineer by, let's say, 5%. So you're 5% better at any given task. Well, if somebody comes in and says, and assists you, it's very possible that their assistance provides you with, let's say, a 10% improvement, a 15% improvement. So for that one specific thing that you are doing, you're going to have a much better outcome. Now, this is very different than the additive effect of taking two separate tasks. And this is very critical. Two separate tasks, and each of you performing at, let's say, 100%. 100% of your normal. Instead, if you were to say, okay, we're going to take the time, we're going to do the small effort help to improve this other person's efforts, right? So I'm going to improve their efforts by 10% by doing this small thing to help them out, by reviewing their code, right? We're going to improve the accuracy. We're going to reduce the bug rates by having better reviews. I'm going to spend the extra 10 minutes to do a more thorough review. This kind of footing the ladder increases the quality of each task that you are collectively doing with very little input. This is a very high leverage opportunity. And this is something we've talked about on the show many times. High leverage opportunities are what we want to seek out. Because all that really means is it's a very high ROI. You're going to spend much less, much larger benefit. So here's what I want you to do with this information, with this mental model. I want you to watch out for both sides of this equation. Okay, watch out for both sides. Watch out for opportunities to foot other people's ladders. Watch out for opportunities to help people out in low effort ways. There's nothing wrong with this, by the way. Low effort ways that make a huge difference. We've already mentioned some of them. I'd be curious to hear from you guys. I'd be curious to hear what fits in this category for you. But watch out for those opportunities. And then watch out for ways that others can help you in this regard as well. So, for example, if you're going into a very important meeting where you are sharing your opinion, having someone foot your ladder and backing your opinion up as a second voice in the room is going to have a much better effect. It's going to have a much more convincing effect if you are not the only person voicing that opinion. Right? So, look for opportunities to have someone foot your ladder. Remember, if you're the one that's climbing the ladder, right? If you're the one that could stand to benefit or lose based on the ladder slipping, then it makes complete sense for you to be incentivized to find someone to foot the ladder. So, watch out for these opportunities. On both sides. People are going to be more likely to foot your ladder if you have done that for them in the past. If you have given a referral to someone in the past, they are much more likely to give you one in the future. Right? This is just basic psychology. If you are helping other people out, they're going to help you out. And we do much better work together. Remember, it doesn't take a lot of effort to get that 10% improvement from another person. It would take an enormous amount of effort. An enormous amount of effort for you to improve by a commensurate amount on your own. Okay? Think about this. For you to improve your chances at a job 700%, how much effort does that take? How much effort does it take for you to be seven times more likely? Okay? That is potentially years. Years of effort. Depending on how good your resume is. All right? Now we're talking about just as a baseline. Okay? So there's very few things that have a higher ROI than helping someone else out with an effort with something like footing the ladder. A low ROI, high output, you know, helping action that you can take. I highly encourage you write down five of these. Try to do one of these a day. They're so cheap and inexpensive on your time and on your effort. The real kind of skill to build is identifying them when they come along. What ladders are around me that I could go and foot? Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Developer Tea. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We're going to continue with our weekly schedule right now. This is the most doable schedule for me in this season of life. The show is not going anywhere. We have no plans of stopping and I'm so excited for the fall season and on into winter with all of you and hearing about your stories of growing as an engineer. If you want to share those stories with me, you can always email me at developertea at gmail.com or you can join our Developer Tea Discord community over at developertea.com slash discord. That's free and always will be. So please come and join us in that community. Thank you so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea. Bye.