Help! I Need Somebody

Matty: [00:00:07] Welcome to Arrested DevOps, episode 17, Help, I Need Somebody. I’m your co-host, Matt Stratton, otherwise known as @MattStratton on Twitter.

Trevor: And I’m your co-host, Trevor Hess, @TrevorGHess on Twitter.

Matty: Arrested DevOps is brought to you by 10th Magnitude, a cloud services company that figures if you’re listening to this podcast, you are pretty cool. You can find out about joining their cloud services team at 10thmagnitude.com. I also want to remind everyone that CFPs have opened for the first ever DevOps Days Chicago. You can check out all the details at devopsdays.org. If you have an idea for a talk, even if you’ve never spoken at a conference before, I encourage you to submit one.

Trevor: All right, this time around we’re going to be talking about help. You know, why is help important to success? And how do we stop being afraid of getting help?

Matty: This episode is sponsored by PagerDuty. PagerDuty eliminates the noise, chaos, and manual processes across the entire incident lifecycle to decrease resolution time. PagerDuty is trusted by companies like Etsy, Nike, and GitHub. To sign up for a free 30-day trial, visit arresteddevops.com/pagerduty.

Trevor: [00:01:17] This podcast is also brought to you by Datadog, a monitoring tool that brings together system metrics, alerts, and events from over 70 common infrastructure tools such as AWS, Chef, and Docker so that dev and ops teams share the key data and alerts in a single place and collaborate on issues in real time. Datadog is available for a 14-day trial at arresteddevops.com/datadog17.

Matty: So my voice is pretty much shot from talking to a billion people last week at the Agile 2014 conference in Orlando. So I’m sorry to tell you loyal listeners that you probably won’t hear a lot from me in this episode. I’ll be doing mostly listening. But I’m going to let Trevor introduce our panel.

Trevor: He’s going to let me.

Matty: I’m going to allow it.

Trevor: So let’s start. We have a returning guest. I think, if I’m not mistaken, it’s our first returning guest. It is. Welcome back, Sasha Rosenbaum. Would you introduce yourself again, Sasha?

Sasha: [00:02:17] Thank you for having me. And the fact that I’m a recurring guest has nothing to do with the fact that I’m friends with both of you. So I work as a senior consultant at 10th Magnitude, and I’m very excited to be here tonight because this topic is very— I feel like it’s very, very important in any team that’s working together, being able to ask for help, being able to answer the request for help. So very excited to be here. Welcome.

Dave: Welcome.

Trevor: And secondly, our second guest is Dave Gerting. He’s a professor at Columbia. Dave, Would you like to introduce yourself?

Dave: Yeah, sure thing. Am I— I’m on here, huh?

Trevor: Yeah.

Dave: All right.

Trevor: Live on the air. You’re talking straight to the YouTubes.

Dave: I hear the intertubes floating around and doing their thing. Yeah, I’m Dave Gerding. I’m an associate professor at Columbia College in Chicago and at Interact Arts and Media where we teach software development for games and mobile and you name it. I also do consulting. My wife and I do management-oriented consulting in There’s a husband and wife team, former Microsoft execs named Jim and Michelle McCarthy. They have a thing called McCarthy Technologies. And their stuff is about protocols, practices teams can use to be more effective. And not coincidentally, the cornerstone skill that we teach in the week-long thing is asking for help, which is kind of a funny idea since everyone thinks that they do it and almost nobody does.

Trevor: [00:03:44] Well, to get started, I think I’d like to ask for help myself and ask, will you help me explain what asking for help means?

Dave: The McCarthy protocols, which are interesting because it’s a management doctrine that’s published as open source software. So anyone interested in some of the stuff I’m talking about can go to McCarthyShow.com and download these protocols. It’s like a 10-page document and all the good stuff’s in there and it’s free and it’s distributed under open source license, which is kind of cool. But they literally take— because they’re programmers, they took the words ask for help and they squeezed them together and they Pascal case it, and they— it’s a protocol called Ask for Help. And the way it works is when you want help, you have to say, will you help me? And there are all sorts of interesting reasons about why you want to make that unambiguous. The audience, as a coding audience, understands naming conventions and disambiguation. So one of the nice things about asking for help and calling it that is that it gets rid of what we jokingly call announcing a problem, which is not the same as asking for help. So if I walk into a room and say like, boy, my shoes are really dirty, that is announcing a problem. I haven’t done anything. Now I’m not sure how much help I would get if I asked for help with my dirty shoes. But if I did and I was using core protocols, I’d say, Hey, Trevor, will you help me with my dirty shoes? And the nice thing is that the disambiguity, you know, taking the language ambiguities out of things really helps. So right away. And then of course, Trevor can just say, nope, that’s gross. I don’t want to do that. But the main idea is when you use little language cues as part of your best practices, it lets you know that you’re practicing them. And it lets other people know that you’re doing them. And then there are a whole bunch of other deeper issues which we could talk about, which are about why asking for help is hard and why it’s important.

Sasha: [00:05:41] I was kind of thinking about something that’s not exactly in the agenda. So most of the topic is talking about asking for help, but I think asking for help is kind of a two-way street, right? So it depends not only on the person asking, but also on the person kind of responding to the request. And it’s very important. In both cases, it requires confidence, like on both parts. It requires confidence to ask for help, and it requires confidence to answer these requests sometimes, right? And this is something that is probably, I feel like, most important in the work environment, although it helps you in your life too, to be able to know that you can ask for help when you’re stuck and also be able to cultivate this friendly response. So even if you can’t help or don’t know the answer to the question, you won’t shut people down and kind of turn them away and make them not want to do it again. So yeah, so I feel like it’s a lot about the culture in the environment that you’re in and not just about the specific person being able to ask the question.

Dave: [00:06:49] Yeah, I agree, Sasha. I mean, the thing about The difference between asking for help and announcing a problem is announcing a problem is a kind of cop-out that lets me avoid humbling myself or being vulnerable and saying, hey, would you help me? There’s a certain degree of being vulnerable when you ask for help, right? And that’s part of that harder work of acknowledging. I mean, you know, in the tech world, it’s not very common for people to lead with their vulnerability, right? So lots of times it’s, I know this and I know that, and that’s why I’m sitting at this end of the table. But you’re going to have a much more effective culture, I think, if you’ve got people practicing the kind of emotional integrity and the kind of maturity it takes to say, hey, will you help me with blah? Will you look at this code at a deeper level? Will you help me understand this dynamic or that dynamic, right? In terms of getting along with Bob or getting along with the person you’re asking for help with, that can be really powerful.

Matty: I think also it’s not just like within a company, but within a community. So I think a lot about, especially within like open-source communities. A lot of times when you’re using free or open-source products, you don’t necessarily, you know, the way that you, because we think about getting help, like just support, right? So how do you get help on, you know, like SharePoint? Well, you call Microsoft, right? Well, how do you get support on something open-source? If you don’t have a support contract with a company that’s doing that, a lot of times you get that help from the community and it can, that introduces a lot of really interesting challenges. I think both around the person who’s not used to engaging in that type of work, like to say, I’m used to calling a hotline for help versus going in an IRC channel or going on a mailing list. But then also how does the community welcome that kind of stuff? And I’m attempting to share for anybody who happens to be watching, which is nobody right now, I see. But it’s a new little feature here. The Ship Show, which is one of our sister podcasts, did an episode called Asked and Answered about this. Which we’ll put in the show notes, but it’s like for further reading or listening, I guess I would recommend. But I think it’s more, like I said, it’s more than just like getting help from coworkers. It’s like from your community can be really challenging.

Sasha: [00:08:56] So in terms of getting help from the community, I think, I don’t know, Matt, if you have any advice, that would be great. Cause I haven’t figured this out yet. Cause I feel like most of the times when I’m just putting a question out there, whether it’s on my social networks, which have tons of developers on them. Or even like on Stack Overflow or something like that, I don’t get a lot of responses and I don’t really know how to engage the right people in these discussions. So I feel like for me it works best to go directly to people I know that might know something on the subject and kind of ask them the question. But I would love to be able to plug into a wider community for that.

Matty: I think that’s really hard because, and I know Sasha, you and I have had this before where I’ve said, oh well, you should just like crowdsource that on Twitter and The problem is that only really works if people who know the answer are following you. And it gets like to be this vicious cycle, whereas like today, and it’s taken me years, but I feel like now, if I have a— I mean, it’s going to sound silly because I work there, but like if I have a problem with Chef, a question with Chef, I could probably throw that on Twitter and I’ll get responses because people who are really smart with Chef follow me on Twitter. But ironically, maybe, I don’t know, I never know how to use the word right, but whatever the problem is, I don’t need that help as much anymore because I know more about it. And the reason that the people who know about it follow me is because I know about it. So now we’re back into this like echo chamber of the people who don’t have the problem are listening. And so like, I feel like how I can help like lift those questions myself.

Trevor: [00:10:23] So I think kind of something I’ve figured out too is just find out who the people you need to get in touch with are and ask them for help. So, you know, you can very quickly figure out if we’re talking about Chef that Nathan Harvey is the community manager and you could figure out how to very quickly figure out how to get in touch with Nathan Harvey and ask Nathan Harvey a question and get that answer because Nathan is a pretty nice guy.

Matty: Say Nathan Harvey like 3 more times and he will show up in the podcast like Beetlejuice. No, you are totally right. You made a really good point and that is another thing and I think back to when I was first starting in this, again, to use the example of when I was learning Chef 2 years ago. What I did is I knew a couple people. I knew like Sasha Bates, not like I knew her friend, but I knew she was a person who knew things. Watch out. So when I questioned, I would tag her and it didn’t mean— and now here’s the thing. So this is a question I kind of want to throw out there is the problem with doing that is that it might make you feel like you’re directly obligating that person to respond to you. And I’m curious what you guys think about that. Like if you were to take that activity, Yeah, I mean, I’ve got a—

Dave: [00:11:32] well, this is a completely sort of base, much less clever thing than some of the deeper conversations we’re having about the emotional aspects of asking for help. But what I found with open source, getting back, Matt, to your thing earlier about how I always started with, if I’ve got, especially if I was on a deadline and I’d been leaning on somebody’s open source stack and I’ve been more of a lurker than any kind of community member, the very first thing I do is kick $10 into their PayPal donate button. And that’s before I ask anything or say anything. And I’ve had a much better response rate because I think frankly, the folks are like, well, thank you. It’s my imagination maybe, or it’s anecdotal, but it does always seem to be that if the, you know, these are on smaller projects. I mean, the big communities, that’s probably not going to catch any attention. But if I’m using some tiny little library that did this or that, they’re just happy that anybody took a moment to recognize that this time is their money and it helps when you kick in. So that aside, I mean, the more interesting question, back to what you were saying, related to how you’re finding that you need, that you sense that you need help less, right? And that there’s that loop. But that gets at the fundamental trick about why in this boot camp thing, which started, you know, was in corporate Fortune 200 realms, why would anyone want to pay money to have someone come in and teach their staff to ask for help? What it gets back to is graph theory and like value generation, right? I mean, you’re at that high end now, maybe not needing to ask for help as often, though I would challenge that.

Matty: [00:13:05] But yeah, let me— I just want to make sure that that was not what anybody thinks I’m saying. Okay, cool. Yeah, I just mean that like, it’s— I’m asking for the basics less, right?

Dave: I get it. I get it. And but so the really interesting thing is like, it’s It’s not a coincidence that there is a fundamental connection between like value generation, how much value you’ve contributed, how much value you’re getting back, and how often and who you ask for help, right? I remember when Trevor and I were working together back at Columbia, something came up and I really, I can’t remember what it was he wanted to ask. I said, oh, well, just email them. And it was some famous person. I said, well, just ask them what they think of it. Trevor, I can’t remember the anecdote, maybe you do, but that to me was another reason.

Trevor: I don’t know if this was software-related, but I think this might have been when I was doing a paper on the Venture Brothers and I emailed the creators and they got back to me.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is the cool thing about, again, social graph theory and all this other stuff, that the cost of transacting is really low, and so why aren’t we doing it more, right? Especially in local communities like and highly self-interested, mutually self-interested communities like businesses. There, it’s insane not to seek more value from your peers who are there to help you get more money and vice versa, right?

Trevor: [00:14:26] I’m really hoping you remember what you said the other day at dinner, Dave. I actually have what I remember of it in here. You said something along the lines of not asking for help is like leaving a huge pile of free value on the table.

Matty: Yeah, yeah.

Dave: I mean, that’s what it is. It’s like, I suspect that you’ve got things that you will just give me, but I would rather avoid the pain of humbling myself or of asking, right? I mean, that’s a real kind of neurotic impulse to just say, oh, I’m there, but I won’t ask.

Sasha: If I may also, the thing is, it’s a really weird effect too, because so when you’re asking for help and like you mentioned, I’ve often met when you’re tagging someone on your Twitter post asking for some question and you don’t know that person, you just know that they know a lot and you feel really bad about asking them for help and kind of volunteering them to help you. But on the other hand, put yourself in the shoes of that person, they’d be happy to help. Most likely this is more publicity for them, this is an opportunity to kind of share their vision of the product or the service they’re they’re describing right now, and what I found in personal interaction with people who I maybe haven’t seen in 2 years, and if I write a Skype message to them and ask them for an absolutely random topic for help, they’re more than happy to jump in and help me just because it makes them feel good about themselves, right? So that’s kind of a really good way to develop connections too, and most likely you You’re not really humbling yourself or putting yourself in a bad position. You’re actually providing value to the person who you’re asking a question.

Dave: [00:16:02] I mean, I guess on some level you could look at the crowdfunding stuff, Kickstarter, whatnot, as another flavor of asking for help. Just a more overtly monetized version of asking for help, right? But I think that the real, from a culture standpoint, like an organizational culture standpoint, the reason it’s really important Competency to practice is, it tends to, it’s got all these kind of hidden requirements of, again, like, did you check your ego at the door? And not the good part of your ego, but like the dumb part of your ego. Did you check that at the door? Do you care more about results than you do some of the other dumber things? Right? How often and do you value other people’s ideas? And then the other side of it is on the receiving end, right? Right, when people ask you for help, which is you can say no. So if you’re in a culture where everybody has enough sort of emotional integrity or maturity to be like, no, I’m going to ask for what I want. And then I’m going to trust that people that don’t want to give it will say no. That’s much more efficient than me trying to do some kind of run some simulation about what I think the other person wants or what I think they’re going to say. Well, I would ask them, but I’m afraid that’ll hurt them. You don’t know, right?

Sasha: [00:17:21] And but here, here’s the challenge though. So sometimes the people you ask don’t actually say no to you. Here’s where the ego of the person you are asking kicks in, because if, if you happen to be asking the wrong person, let’s say, they might give one of the two very bad responses. One is give you misleading information So, instead of admitting that they don’t know something about the subject, they just give you, like, kind of lead you on a wrong path or just throw some information at you that proves to be incorrect after you did 2 days of research and invested your time into it. And the second option is something condescending and mean, like, let me Google this for you, which I’ve heard a number of times, and I think it’s the worst response you can give to someone who’s asking you a question because yes, I know Google is out there. I’m asking you the question because I think you’re an expert and putting my trust into you, and you can just say very nicely that you do not remember or you don’t know how to do this, but you don’t have to kind of put the person who’s asking you down, right?

Trevor: [00:18:32] Well, right, and there’s also a difference between saying I don’t have time And, or let me know, this is so trivial. It’s how you present it. Sending them to LMG, you know, whatever the abbreviation is for Let Me Google That For You that is actually the website. Sending someone there is very different from saying, did you Google the issue first?

Dave: Right.

Trevor: You know, that’s like, you know, when I worked with Dave, that was something that I would ask Dave a relatively simple question. And sometimes he would say, no, I don’t have, I can’t help you right now. Did you try Googling?

Dave: I’m sorry.

Sasha: I apologize.

Dave: To you and the entire internet community for a while.

Matty: And this is where it gets kind of tricky because there’s this notion of people call like a help vampire or a support vampire. So this is like putting the shoe on the other foot, right? And I agree with Sasha with your point about saying like, hey, you ask someone for help, chances are they’re not going to be like, oh my God, this person, right? Oh my God, someone’s bugging me for this thing of which I’m an expert. You know, we like to help people that know stuff. We all, every person on this podcast is an expert in some way. And if someone asks you for help with the thing you’re an expert in, you’d be happy to help them. But see what can happen with the— with some of the characteristics of a help vampire are— they say it’s like critical.

Trevor: [00:19:44] So I’m glad to know we read the same articles.

Matty: Yeah, it’s— it comes— I’ve heard it support vampire, whatever. There’s a Stack Overflow. I’ll put the link somewhere.

Dave: Yeah, I want to hear it because I haven’t read it.

Matty: So basically, some of the things like some of the characteristics of a help vampire would be asking the same questions everybody else has been asking. Clearly lacking the ability or inclination to ask Google. And as one says, do they think helping them must be the high point of their day, of your day? Do they get offensive as if you need to prove to them why they should use Ruby on Rails is the example in here? Are they obviously just waiting for some poor, well-intentioned person to do all their thinking for them? And can you tell they really aren’t interested in having their question answered as much as getting someone else to do their work? Now, so the thing is, so a lot of times people that you might be reaching out to have had to deal with help vampires. So unfortunately, sometimes we default to assuming everyone’s a help vampire, which is not good. And I don’t think is a really good way. I don’t think people should be guilty until proven innocent when it comes to that. But depending upon the person who, if that’s someone like who is very, very well known in their particular vertical, they’re probably getting deluged with stuff like that. So that when you think about asking for that assistance, couching it with the, you know, kind of the, hey, I’ve already looked, or I know this is not Googleable, right? Like I’ve done a little bit of due diligence, like showing you’ve done a little due diligence first. It also helps give some background. But then the other thing is looking at making sure you don’t create that particular vibe of yourself because that’s really, really dangerous and people recognize it and they talk about it. And if you are a help vampire for a particular product, everybody in that product’s community knows who you are and there is backchannel conversation about you. I can guarantee it. Now, Sasha, I don’t think that would ever be you, you know, but I know you. So sometimes when you’re dealing in an unknown initial, like introduction, unknown request, like being able to couch it in a way that kind of you’re doing everything but saying, I’m not a help vampire, will probably help bring that up. And I think that’s also where like helping lift someone else’s question is kind of vouching, right? Like Trevor tweets a question about Chef and I go and I retweet it and tag a couple of my fellow— oh my God, I said fellow experts. I’m not an expert, but you know, some people I know who are experts. It’s like a little bit of like, be like, well, I know Matt. Matt probably would voice some vampire off on me, so I’ll give this some attention. Or just, just anybody that, whether you have a reputation for it or not. So I think getting people that you know that are obliquely connected can really help. Again, I keep wanting to say lift that conversation, the question up.

Sasha: [00:22:12] So I think we are venturing into 2 different topics here. And one is, I think one is like asking people who you don’t know for help, right? And the other is asking people who you do know. And, and that like the person sitting next to you in the office. And then sometimes if I’m sitting here at work and I venture into a new topic and I’ve heard nothing about it, I will go and ask for help before I do anything. I will go and ask the person who I know has experience in it. I would be like, what are the best recommended steps? What is the protocol I should use for setting up communication to the server or something like that? Right? I will ask the question first. Then I’ll go and Google the hell out of it and read more in detail about it. But I already have a pointer, right? But then if I would ask someone I don’t know, someone on the internet, someone who I barely ever spoke with, I would first do my research. And then if I can’t find anything on the topic, I would go and ask them a question.

Dave: And I would think that, I mean, it’s fundamentally different emotional work. I think there’s a greater, just clearly there’s a greater social cost involved with doing that transaction with a real person that you know that’s part of your work life as opposed to posting it into a group. And it’s not that the latter isn’t as valuable, but my own opinion is if you’re an organization that wants to create and generate more value, getting your employees to practice that more abundantly between them is going to be really, really surprisingly effective. I mean, how many times— just that you all know, you’ll be sitting with a code in front of you. And if you’re fortunate enough to have somebody nearby that— and how many times has it been where they may not know the code stack that you’re touching at all? You just say, hey, will you look at this? And just, I mean, I’ve had it where with the act of the moment they start leaning into my frame, I’m like, oh, there it is. I mean, it’s some kind of primate competency that we’ve got that as soon as some other, some other enters the frame, It must be like an ego thing. Like, I mean, I mean, and in the benign way, but it must be something that we go, oh, and we let go of ourselves momentarily and the problem reveals itself.

Sasha: [00:24:19] So I will, I will intercept if you, if you allow me. And first of all, there is a great article on this called Ask the Duck. And that’s just a beautiful explanation of the situation where you can, you can actually go and ask the rubber duck and you will get your answer. You don’t actually need the other person to talk. Talk to, you just need to phrase the question. And now here, the psychological value of this is exactly that— phrasing it as a question. Because when you think about solving the problem, you cannot take a step back out of it and look at it in a different way. When you phrase your problem as a question to some other entity, you make the other part of your brain kind of think about it, and then it becomes clear to you. Yeah, so the answer is— this is also like something I learned about teaching, right? Sometimes when you phrase it as a question, so like when you go through a topic that you want to describe to someone else, you phrase it as a question like, how do I do this? And then it becomes clear to you what you need to kind of learn about the topic to be able to teach it effectively.

Dave: [00:25:23] Yeah, that’s a nice way of clarifying it. I hadn’t heard about the rubber duck thing. I’m gonna go get a rubber duck tomorrow.

Matty: And yeah, Sasha told me about that a few months ago, and for a while when I worked there, I had ask the Dalek. I have the Dalek on my desk and you would come ask the Dalek, but that probably didn’t usually help. You would just get exterminated.

Dave: It has one answer for all problems.

Matty: Exactly.

Trevor: So what are some ways that we can get around ego? How do we leave the ego at the door? How do we teach ourselves to stop being afraid of asking for help?

Matty: You’ve got the right answer you want to give.

Dave: Yeah, well, I would say this. I mean, I hate to be dumb. If you want to do that, that’s why asking for help is so powerful. It’s because obliging people into what Sasha was saying a moment ago, obliging people to reframe what they’re perceiving as their sort of problem-solving mode into an inquisitive and interrogative frame, that tends to soften our ego stance because if we’ve come into it like, Hey, why won’t this problem that I’m trying to solve solve? Or why— or more often what’s happening is we’re actually trying to force our solution onto a problem and rephrasing it as a question obliges us to momentarily let go of the concept that we thought was so right. I mean, we, you know, remember we called in the lab solving the solution instead of solving the problem, right?

Trevor: [00:26:50] Yeah.

Dave: And that’s the trap we all fall into. So asking a question breaks it up. Now, the thing that I like personally about asking another human, though I love Daleks, you know, and in another life I may be one or a rubber duck. The thing about asking another person is you get that extra benefit of socialization and connection. And also every once in a while you’ll get hopefully more often than every once in a while, more than your own ego, you know, more than just silencing your own ego momentarily and getting the answer out of your own head. You’re going to get better value than you might have brought to it from somebody else. And that’s going to happen. And it won’t happen if you don’t ask.

Sasha: I was thinking about this. And so I don’t know the answer to the question, how you leave the ego behind. But what I’ve noticed, it mostly— this problem mostly hits people in the very beginning of their career or the very end. Because it’s very hard in the beginning, it’s very hard to ask for help because you feel like you have to solve your problems yourself. And anytime you ask for help, you kind of look like a—

Trevor: [00:27:52] you look weak. You look weak, right?

Sasha: You don’t know. You look like you can’t do it and someone’s going to judge you for it. And why the hell are you working here anyway if you can’t solve a problem? So you kind of like, um, yeah, right, right. So you refrain from asking questions because you feel like you have to know everything and, or at least know a lot and you feel like you’re facing so many problems you have to ask questions about that you’re kind of like stopping yourself from asking questions. And, and this is very important to learn to, you know, step over this and just be able to ask those questions because so many times, like you mentioned, David, leaving the value on the table, you know, because it’s such a waste of time when you discover that you spent 2 days of solving a problem that someone on the next, the desk next to you just solved yesterday and you just didn’t know about it and he could have gave you the exact description of the solution that you were too proud to ask the question, right? And, and the second, and, and what you learn after a few years of working, you know, at a consulting firm, for instance, you learn that you don’t know anything. So it’s not really, you shouldn’t really be ashamed of asking any questions. Because, you know, anything you learned yesterday becomes kind of not very relevant tomorrow because a bunch of new technologies have spun out and I have to learn new things. And maybe someone there, out there, is already an expert on this and it pays off to kind of go and ask them. And the second part of this is when people hit a certain stage in their career, they also feel like they have to know everything. They feel like, okay, I was hired as a senior expert in a certain field, and now there’s someone— there’s something that I can’t seem to solve, or there’s someone asking me a question that I can’t answer. And they get stuck in this kind of another end of this radical state where they can’t ask a question because they feel trapped in, like, losing their authority. And I feel like best people, best senior people that I know, are absolutely not afraid of admitting that they don’t know Right.

Trevor: [00:30:03] It’s interesting too because if you practice this notion of asking for help, you also, like Dave was saying, there’s a social aspect to it too. You very quickly understand who knows the answers to potential questions. When you need help, you know, because I talked to Matt at the Azure meetup, I know that Matt knows things about Chef. I know that Matt knows things about continuous delivery and about ops.

Dave: Of that.

Trevor: If I had a question, there’s a good chance I could ask Matt and he’d either have an answer or have a social network extended enough that he could get me to somebody with the answer. The same goes with Dave and Sasha. Both of you, there are certain areas that I know that you guys are my go-tos to ask those questions.

Dave: Right on. Well, to me, I keep coming back to this idea of vulnerability, right? And the more listening to what Sasha was just saying about the place that it’s not a coincidence that the periods when people feel most vulnerable in their career is when they’re least likely to ask for help. And so the other reason I like ask for help as a kind of complex, compounded way of dealing with a lot of the crazy that people have is it also obliges us to try to be sane and have integrity and be strong. Right? Because you’re acting with integrity by seeking help. You’re acting with strength because you’re going into action. But you’re also simultaneously being vulnerable. Right? I know that I’ve personally felt that the times when I’ve been the most effective at leading and also the times that when I’ve been the most effective at following, which sometimes is the same moment, it’s when I’ve been willing to be vulnerable and maintain my integrity and say, well, I don’t understand this or I need to know this. How can we get to a better place? So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that vulnerability thing is just spot on. You know, it’s so sad when you— on both ends, it’s so sad when you meet older executives who are in that place of just not wanting to be vulnerable and they’re actually sealing their own fate, right? I mean, they’re much more likely to disconnect from the new value and the new ideation that they need more than ever. And they’re simultaneously shutting down the possibility that they can share some of that back because no one wants to listen.

Trevor: [00:32:21] So cool. Thank you. So one excuse I get a lot, and we touched upon it briefly when trying to help other people understand about asking for help, is, but I feel like I’ll be bothering whomever I’m talking to by asking for help. That’s something I want to make sure that we can try and convey a little bit to listeners is how do we get past— how do we understand that it’s it’s okay if someone says no, they can’t help us? Or how do we get to the point where we understand it’s more likely that we’re going to get help than it is that we’re not going to get help?

Dave: Well, I think you answered part of it right there.

Matty: Yeah, it’s back to leaving your ego at the door a little bit, right? But in the other direction, which is to say, I’m going to go back, right, David, to your point about saying that the cost of engaging the social graph is so low. Because it really is. And it doesn’t take— I guess my thing is it doesn’t really take any effort for someone to ignore me. You know what I mean? It’s a big difference. But also, I think it depends upon the how, right? And that’s the thing to bear in mind. So if I just tweet at you, it’s not really bothering you. Maybe it is. Some people really, but then whatever, that’s their problem. You know what I mean? Someone @replies me and my phone buzzes and I’m going to get pissed at you? Well, then I should take chef out of my Twitter bio. For crying out loud, right? So whatever. So which is my sort of roundabout way of saying, like, in a case like that, you’re probably not really bothering somebody. But then the difference is if you’re like at a conference and you go up and you engage with somebody IRL when they’re like about to go speak. So I guess it just goes back to the really the thinking about boundaries. And if you’re, if you feel like you’re respecting realistic boundaries, then your argument that you’re going to bother somebody is invalid. So I think that’s the step back and say like, okay, so if first of all, if it were me, do I feel like I’m what I know about this person? Am I respecting their boundaries? You know, I mean, an example is Seth Vargo, for example, his Twitter bio says, I do not reply to technical support questions on Twitter. So it would be violating his boundary to tweet a technical support question at him. And then you would be an asshole if you did that. Right. But if I don’t say that, I haven’t really let that be, or if I’m saying, you know, but, and also just sort of looking at nonverbals. And then same thing happens too. So that’s talking back to the whole, like, people you don’t know, right? Then when you talk about in your office culture, boundaries are something that you, when it comes to that, is something to kind of be determined. It’s actually a conversation that you can have with someone. And you can say, look, how do I ask you for help in a way that is effective? Right.

Dave: [00:34:54] Yeah. I mean, will you help me ask you for help?

Matty: Yeah, literally.

Sasha: Like, like, Matt, to your point, I think one of the things that helped me both in asking for help and being asked for help is if you do it asynchronously. So emails are probably not good, but any kind of chat or Twitter, right? It’s a very good way to ask for help because people get back to you when they can. Because personally, I feel like sometimes if you’re going to walk up to me and be like, do you have a second? Can you please look at something? I will be likely to be annoyed with you because I’m in the middle of something, so it feels disruptive. So even if I do want to help you, I’m like, okay, just, you know, let me finish my own task, right? But if you ping me and say, okay, when— right, you don’t do that, so it’s okay. But if you ping me on a chat message and say, hey, when you have a minute, can you come over? Then I’m more than happy because next time I have a break, I can come over and just kind of help you or whenever, whatever, just answer your question in that same chat window or something. So I feel like this is very helpful for both sides kind of to do that. But back to Trevor’s question, I think you’re talking about something a little bit different, which is when people actually do have a problem asking for help, not when they are not respecting boundaries or something, but when they have like inherent problem with themselves being too shy to kind of go and even ask the question and they feel like they’re being rejected and it’s enough to kind of say no to them once and they’re being shut down.

Dave: [00:36:28] They’re like help asking anemic.

Trevor: Yes.

Dave: Right.

Sasha: Right.

Matty: And it could be like you said, they can say no to you once and then it becomes, well, that person always says no to me, so I’m never going to ask them. If you already have that concern, right?

Dave: So.

Sasha: Right. So I am not absolutely sure. Maybe Dave had some ideas on how to overcome that because I feel like I’ve even tried to kind of be very, very nice to those kind of people and be like, okay, you can ask me whatever you want, whenever you want. But then sometimes I will say no still because I don’t have time or I don’t know the answer. And then they still feel, you know, kind of— they’re still unlikely to do it again. So I’m not really sure how to help that.

Matty: Can you offer, instead of a no, can you offer options? That sometimes helps. Like, I try to avoid ever saying the word no. Actually, I say it a lot. I’ve got little kids. But you know what I mean? If you come to me and say, Matt, can you help me right now? Instead of saying no, because that ends the conversation, I can say, I can help you in an hour. Or I can say, do me a favor, can you write? And this is actually what I would do a lot. There was a coworker that liked the drive-bys, right? And he would come up and I would just say, can you do me a favor and write up what you’re going to ask me and send that to me? And then I can parse it and I will figure out when I can, and I will come and get you, or I will ping you and let you know when I’m free and we’ll work it out and we’ll do a time. But I never said, no, I can’t help you. Now, you know, so I think offering options versus a no can help people who are, I mean, but that’s the person providing the help has to do that.

Dave: [00:37:58] Right, right, right. But the person, I mean, to me, like, so the epidemiology of not asking for help, it’s, they’re the folks that are doing it too little. And the folks that are— and those folks have to just start doing it. And I also, Trevor, to your point earlier about, you know, that they’re afraid about other people’s feelings and things, I think most of the time when people say that they’re afraid about other people’s feelings, it’s important for them to reflect on the possibility that that means they’re afraid about how they’ll feel about those other— I mean, that there’s, you know, they’re really afraid of being offensive or being— or having their feelings hurt by hearing no. Right? So I think that sometimes it’s a story that people say, oh, you know, I don’t want to bug them. Really, it’s, God, I don’t want to hear no, or I’m afraid. I’m afraid of hearing no, or I don’t want to hear no. And I think you have to just, in a, that’s, some of that’s just good management level people can be practicing the kind of supporting feedback that Sasha mentioned a minute ago. And that’s it. So you can say, hey, no, but. And as opposed to the improvisational yes, and it’s a no, but no, but I can talk to you in 20. No, but this, but I think the folks that aren’t asking for help need to just take responsibility in my worldview and just say, like, I believe it’s gravity. If you ask for more help, you will have more value in your life and the people around you will get better results for you. Right. And if you’re an employee near me, I want you to get better results because that’ll make my life easier too. So ask for more help. If you’re a person who’s been asking for help and you’re hearing no all the time, well, then you have to ask for help about asking for help. That’s it. You just got to pop a level and go meta for a minute.

Sasha: [00:39:37] And like, you know, I was thinking, so it just brought me to thinking. So as a girl, I’m not used to ask people for a lot of things, actually. And I feel like in my personal life, I can be very afraid of rejection. So I can be very afraid that you know, I’m gonna, I don’t know, offer someone to come to dinner and they’re gonna say no to me or something like that. It’s like on a personal level, this may be a hard thing for me to do, but in my professional life, I don’t have any problem asking for help. And I think the difference here is I care more about results, right? So I know that I have a better chance of solving a problem if I actually ask the person who knows the answer to my question, right? So maybe the answer also, like something that can help those people actually go and ask for help is if they shift the focus from their own feelings and their own kind of set expectations or fear of rejection or anything like that into what I care about here is actually results or producing value to my job, right? And this should be an easier problem to solve at that point.

Dave: [00:40:45] Yeah, I mean, we didn’t get to it, but gender clearly is a big parameter in this function, right? I mean, to me, stereotypically, It’s males are going to be much more likely to fall into that vulnerable, that failure to be vulnerable trap left or right. So all men listening, ask for help is especially useful for you.

Matty: All right.

Trevor: Well, Dave and Sasha, do you have any final thoughts for the evening regarding our discussion?

Dave: We’re talking asking for help?

Trevor: Yes.

Dave: Do it more.

Trevor: Do it more.

Dave: Do it often. Ask your neighbors for help. Ask your friends. Hear no and move on, ask again.

Trevor: Sasha?

Sasha: I think, again, both as a person who’s asking the question and the person who’s answering the question, kind of tune down your ego and think more about the results that you want to achieve than about, you know, how you come off. And also, don’t forget that even if you know a lot, there’s still so much you don’t know, and there’s so much value kind of in shared knowledge and into plugging into your social network. And like Dave said, the cost of doing this is so low and it can save you so much time and effort and grief that it’s just wonderful, a wonderful practice.

Trevor: [00:42:03] Awesome. Well, thank you guys. We’re going to head into our checkouts now. I’m actually going to have Matt start so that Dave and Sasha can get another taste of what checkouts are because Matt and I both dropped the ball this week and told Dave and Sasha about checkouts about an hour before the episode started.

Dave: Yeah. So traveling cam here and a power supply.

Matty: That’s it.

Dave: Yeah.

Matty: So, okay. So my checkouts are first, I am hosting a chef meetup in Chicago about testing cookbooks. And we’re also having a chef hack day during the day. That’s on August 19th. You can get all the details at meetup.com/chicago-chef-user-group. Or you can just go to the show notes at arresteddevops.com/17 and I’ll put in the links. Also, I am going to suggest you check out a website called Scroll Down to Riker. That’s it, scrolldowntoriker.com. It needs no explanation. Just go and check it out. Shout out to Sean O’Meara who told me about it today. Apparently Trevor probably heard about it years ago. And also registration is open for the Chef Community Summit, which will be 2nd and 3rd, I believe. There is a link at arresteddevops.com/chefcommunity. It is an absolutely cool event from everything I understand. I haven’t been before, but it seems like it’s a great time for the Chef community to get together, talk about roadmap, talk about cool things they’re hacking on. It’s in glorious Seattle that I’ve been to 5 times in the last 2 months. So check it out. Trevor?

Trevor: [00:43:37] All right. So for me, first up, something I’m about to dive into some more. Very interesting to me actually because of the work I did with Dave back in what is now known as the Innovation Studio South, I believe.

Dave: Yes, that’s right.

Trevor: It’s had about 10 names. Bang Labs, Smart Labs.

Dave: I like Bang Labs, but that didn’t work.

Trevor: It did not. Azure has added some machine learning tools which I want to play with. And I’m looking into getting my hands dirty with before Sasha can steal it from me. Also, there’s a—

Sasha: Everybody in the office is so excited about it.

Trevor: I know, it’s awesome. There’s also a new .NET language that was released on GitHub. It’s called DogeSharp. There’s much programming, so language, etc.

Matty: Wow.

Trevor: And finally, I started watching a show on Netflix called Continuum. It’s some Canadian sci-fi show. It’s actually very interesting. It kind of deals with a lot of the Occupy stuff going on. If anybody was familiar with David Sears’ variants on Rainbow Six: Patriots, it reminds me a lot of that spirit, which is interesting, except there’s time travel. For those who don’t know, David Sears is the— was the creative director for the SOCOM series, among other things.

Dave: [00:44:59] And a good egg. An all-around good egg.

Trevor: He is a good egg.

Sasha: First of all, on the non-technical checkout, I kind of this week got into wikiHow and discovered that it covers a lot more topics than I ever suspected. So you can actually read about how to succeed in relationships or things like that, and pretty decent kind of psychological explanations and advice, which is pretty nice. And you can get addicted to that. For sure. Then I will look up the article I was talking about, about Ask the Duck, and put it— ask Matt to put it in the show notes because I already did.

Matty: I just— it is in the show notes. It’s called Rubber Duck Debugging.

Sasha: I’m not absolutely sure because there’s a, like, one of the articles that describes the procedure and then there’s one of the articles that is the original tale of how it came to be, the rubber duck. So yeah, I We’ll see anyway. And the last checkout is a Chrome plugin called Postman, which I can’t believe I don’t know about because so it’s a RESTful client and it allows you to run GETs and POSTs and put headers and parameters and in the body, in the URL, wherever you want, and just kind of test your APIs like this. And I was for years, I was putting together many No, no, no. It’s like a REST client that just allows you to submit any kind of POST request.

Trevor: [00:46:26] It’s a Chrome extension.

Sasha: Yeah, it’s a Chrome add-on. Right. So yeah, so for years I was writing snippets of code anytime I needed to kind of test drive an API. And apparently I don’t have to do that. I can just test drive it through my favorite browser. So yay.

Trevor: Awesome. Thanks, Sasha. Dave, what kind of crazy shenanigans have you been up to? Oh boy.

Dave: Well, my shenanigans have been mild. I’m very also interested in the Azure ML bits. Looking forward to playing around with those. I was saying over dinner the other night that I— if not the Kool-Aid, I drank the lemonade— continue at the Telerik trough. Their NativeScript thing is interesting, which is a mini JavaScript runtime. So you It gives you native access on iOS and Android and whatever mobile platform you’re on. I think those are the two they’re supporting in the near term to the complete native API. So you code in JavaScript. Now I regret though, because I thought I was going to be talking about that. I was under the impression that they were also, that they had done a CLR compiler for TypeScript because it uses TypeScript. And I keep waiting for someone to do that. So if anyone knows, speaking of DogeSharp or other .NET languages. To me, the nirvana would be someone to use TypeScript and make it optionally compilable to CLR so that you could run in JavaScript, you know, browser land when you had to, but you’d get the performance of compiled bits when you didn’t. So I’m going to keep looking for that. But in the meantime, NativeScript from Telerik is pretty good.

Matty: [00:48:00] Awesome. Reminder to all of our listeners that we have a newsletter, arresteddevops.com/banana-stand. It is the best way to know about our upcoming podcast episodes and cool news with DevOps, when I remember to send one. So that is probably a good indicator that you will not get your inbox flooded with our newsletter, because I don’t always remember to send them.

Trevor: Also, don’t forget that it’s conference season. We want to remind you about Flowcon. Flowcon brings together technologists and industry leaders passionate about innovation through lean product development, continuous delivery, lean UX, and DevOps. We’ll be exploring the role of culture, technology, and design in growing organizations that thrive in an environment of continual change. We’ll provide inspiring and actionable information for key decision makers responsible for products and services that depend on software. The full program includes speakers from Google, Netflix, Heroku, Nordstrom, SoundCloud, Macy’s, HP, Joyent, ThoughtWorks, and IBM. The second day features an open space unconference and workshops from Don Reinertsen, Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Whitney Johnson, and Sarah B. Nelson. Use the special promo code ArrestedDevOps50 for $50 off at arresteddevops.com/flocon.

Matty: [00:49:18] Also, the O’Reilly Velocity Conference happening September 15th through 17th in New York City is a place where DevOps, WebOps, and performance professionals gather for a legendary learning and networking experience that explores why a faster, stronger web is no longer an option but a necessity. Hear from the best speakers in the industry who will delve into topics ranging from hardcore math and stats to monitoring, clustering, analytics, and organizational culture. Attend Velocity and you’ll view your work, the technologies you use, and your organization in completely new ways. Use the code ARDEV20 to save 20% at arresteddevops.com/velocitynyc.

Trevor: Thanks again to our sponsors PagerDuty and Datadog, and to our loyal listeners. If you enjoy Arrested DevOps, we’d appreciate it if you’d visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes Store. We’ll read our favorite ones on upcoming episodes. Also, we’d like to thank Dave and Sasha for joining us tonight. Thank you guys. It’s great to have you on the show. Yeah, I’m glad you guys enjoyed it. Be sure to check us out at arresteddevops.com or @ArrestedDevOps on Twitter.

Matty: [00:50:29] We are always happy to get your input, ideas, or feedback at shows@arresteddevops.com. I’m Matt at Matt Stratton, and I’m Trevor at Trevor G.

Trevor: Hess.

Matty: We are Arrested DevOps, and remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.