Cat: 0:00

A year ago I convinced Ashley that she had to do a podcast with me. Has the last year of"Change, Technically" been what you expected?

Ashley: 0:08

I know I came in with a lot of like fear about being the person who said, oh, I have a podcast. So I came in with a lot of like self-awareness and self-doubt of that sort. But I have come around to the idea that maybe we have something interesting to say.

Cat: 0:28

When I look back at every episode, it's so far ranging. We've gotten to talk about things and learn about things, and you and I get to have these little research dives. We never would've maybe learned about these things that we've learned about and then we talk about it afterwards. It's almost kind of like been getting a Master's degree. with you, you know, as a group project in this household.

Ashley: 0:54

Almost like book club for us, but it's like research book club.

Cat: 0:58

A year of"Change, Technically", which Ashley is grateful for because it has funneled some of my energy into an output that is not just Ashley's ears at breakfast.

Danilo: 1:10

So this is producer Danilo, and we haven't done this before, but I turned on my microphone today.

Ashley: 1:16

Oh my God. Who is that? What is happening?

Cat: 1:18

It's the voice of God.

Danilo: 1:21

To celebrate a year, I proposed that we let Cat and Ashley talk their shit. I don't wanna like break my arm, pattin' myself on the back, but the premise that your very sweet, yet rigorous domesticity. Would make for a great podcast. Has borne out

Ashley: 1:45

I hope that if anybody ever writes a biography of us, it's called"Sweet and Rigorous Domesticity".

Cat: 1:52

New"Change, Technically" merch idea

Danilo: 2:02

I would love to hear about your theories of change, and what you find lacking in the common theories of change that you encounter in others.

Cat: 2:12

A theory tells you, if I change X, maybe Y will change. A theory of change is usually the kind of theory we want because we're interested in something happening differently in the world. People use this term all kinds of ways. If you actually have a theory of change, you have a So what, so we should do this. It requires a little bit of planting your flag. It requires some courage. I think you are often and wrong when you do that because you're venturing into the territory of saying, well, you know, you all said we need a solution. Here's one, let's, like, I, I think it's gonna be this one. This is the one I'm gonna argue for. To me, you know, we all need, we're all searching for theories of change a lot of the time, but then we get kind of stuck in the preliminary space and I get really frustrated when people act like. They have closed the door on a conversation simply by describing something that bothers them. And there's no, there's no path from a, the bad world we live in now to B the better world we're talking about. I don't understand when people just say all managers are evil or all managers are terrible and then they Don't have any. so what should we do about it? Where is the theory of change it's just something that I see all the time and when I try to talk about social dynamics in groups, people in tech constantly flood me with these replies that are like, you know what the explanation is, managers, managers are terrible. And to that, as a social scientist, a, I'm like, first of all. it's really annoying to me that you're ignoring. All kinds of other properties of groups that don't have anything to do with whether someone's a manager or not. So like we've all been in groups that don't have any managers and are still behaving in certain ways. And then B, what do You mean by that like is a manager, is what you're picturing actually like a white man in management who came up in a certain style? Are you picturing. This one woman who finally got one promotion and decided to take a 30 K pay raise that's gonna change her children's future and leads two people in a small healthcare nonprofit. you know, that person's also a manager.

Danilo: 4:44

Ashley, you have done a bunch of radical stuff with your students and there was a theory of change there. What was your theory of change?

Ashley: 4:55

It's so much more grassroots and from the ground up than anybody is sort of willing to admit. And I actually think the manager's example kind of ties into this because it's like, why do we blame the manager, like the person at the top when there are probably things we could be doing on the ground to change things. And like I think about what's happening now in our country, which is that they're trying. To change things top down. Every political analyst who studies policy change is like, this isn't gonna stick. Like, it's not actually gonna change the way people feel. So whether it's like my classroom or it's like an organization, I think change actually starts from the ground with people changing their perspective, whether it's like a student learning something differently or having a different kind of interaction in class or you know, on a, on a team, someone interacting with their manager differently and like changing the scope of that relationship. And that's the thing that like catapults into bigger organizational change. Or sometimes it's having like the one advocate in the room. And that's the thing that like propels up. You know, we sort of talked about this in the Andor episode, but I was also recently talking to someone at a large, you know, organization, research institute, and they were sort of talking about, oh, the people at the top don't understand, like they don't understand what we need. And I was like, who are the advocates? Like who are the people in the room? Like what are the rooms like? It's like there's these like ground level details that are actually really important and that's the thing that matters and builds up to actual, change in organizations and policies.

Cat: 6:40

Yeah, I think that, you know, when I think about your work, Ashley, I think about, you know, you're so practical and, and

Ashley: 6:45

Yeah, it's very practical.

Cat: 6:47

and empathic. You're, you're kind of like, you know, I remember when you took this job and, and I mean there's a, you could spend the whole rest of your life engaging in abstract online arguments about how Computer Science Is taught. Why students don't enroll in it, or you could do what Ashley did and get a job as a leader and create an entire program that that introduces people to programming outside of the confines, finds of computer science and actually changes something. You know? And you know, I think that there's something else here to, this whole, like doom and gloom critique. Never have a strategy part, which is do we as marginalized people in these systems ever get to succeed? And why? Why are you so eager? to punish us for succeeding? You know, if this is the world we live in and we need to feed ourselves, and also we have an ambition. Maybe I had an ambition to become a person who could create jobs that employed social scientists in tech. It's pretty clear how you have to do that. You have to become a manager who has a budget to create a job. And I'm not saying that working inside of both universities and corporations is not maddening. It is, of course. And, and, you know, but like, what do you want me to do Is living in the woods the same, you know, is that gonna create jobs for social scientists? I, I didn't think so. And I think there's something really interesting about who gets bombarded with this sort of self-righteous message about how leadership is bad and who gets just like celebrated and treated like. But you're really one of us. You're really a technical person the whole way through. You just happen to take on leadership and you just happen to, you know, occasionally take on a job. And that's what I see in tech circles a lot like this kind of sorting that happens all the time. And if you're like a woman who gets, who's successful, who daress to get promoted, then suddenly you're an administrator. And this is empirically measured across tons of research that women lose their technical credibility as soon as they become successful. As soon as there's an alternate explanation that people have that they can slide in for your competency, they'll do that. And so it's like all of those beliefs I'm interested in changing and talking about and making progress on, and it really bothers me when people just throw out all that social evidence and they just say, well, I read one post one time that was about how managers are bad. And that's like my whole philosophy now.

Danilo: 9:37

I'm curious how each of you have navigated the lack of curiosity from people in positions of power.

Ashley: 9:45

I was talking to this like, person who works at this research institute and who was kind of like upset with the way the leadership was working, I was like, what do they think about what it is that your team does? You know, like, do you know what, their sort of view of the world is and like their understanding of what you, you know, your team does. And I think that stems from curiosity and is actually like a necessary thing. Like you have to have this empathy to be like, what does this person actually think about me and my work? And have curiosity about that. Um, so that's kind of like one thing that comes to mind in terms of thinking about Yeah, the need for curiosity. I don't

Danilo: 10:20

So you, the curiosity has to start inside of you.

Ashley: 10:24

Yeah, you have to be curious about what, like why would someone operate this way in the world? You know, why is the manager acting this way? Like, why is the organization set up this way, whatever it might be. I think that has to start from your curiosity about it

Cat: 10:41

I love that. I think that there's a lot of relation between the way we think about ourselves and what we export to other people. So like, I was just writing about this in this chapter in my book about groups and group conflict and how we ostracize people. And there is this fascinating connection between self-compassion and the way that people do or don't have it. If you have a deficit in self-compassion, if you really don't see yourself as sharing humanity with other people, you're also very hostile to those other people, which sort of seems okay. No, no, duh. Like That's really obvious, but I, I think it's actually not obvious to people in certain contexts. So I work with a lot of software engineers. I've just listened to them for years at this point, and I hear how vicious they are to themselves, and then I hear them completely export that to other people and not realize it. So I hear, I'm frustrated with how I led my team and probably all other leaders are uncompassionate assholes who've never fixed anything. These are deeply nihilistic viewpoints about the world, and they can be disguised. We are really good at rationalizing them, and I don't like to tolerate it that much because I think that it's really harmful for people There's a lot of hope in that though because it means that if you can actually improve the way you think about yourself, like that actually is a really good starting place for becoming more powerful in how you interact with people. I wanna get a little more specific. Like I often challenge myself to say, well, if I'm not capable of sitting in a room with like leaders who don't understand the marginalized people who are maybe on my team, then like, what good am I? Like, what right do I have?

Danilo: 12:45

champion them.

Cat: 12:46

Exactly like I have to do that work, even if it's distasteful, scary, stressful, annoying. Like, because what matters is getting progress to happen. Not like my personal relationship with these leaders. And obviously I, I wanna have a good personal relationship. I think it's important, but to me it's like, okay, I learned this. Working in education, if you're gonna go say I get to represent a public school and their data, you cannot hold your nose up about sitting in a room with like Republican lawmakers who profoundly disagree with everything about who you are sometimes and will tell you that, you know, like. These are the fights that we actually have in the world. And so I think you're either in a place where you can do that or not. And you know, honestly, if you're not in a place to do it, which I sometimes have not been, remove yourself, like go work on something else. Right? Um, but I feel really strongly that you can't be like selfish and narcissistic and sort of say, um, oh wow, I'm astonished. I'm so astonished that people in power, like are, are blinded by that. Like, okay, of course they are. And so, are you gonna help or are you just gonna take, up space and not help, you know?

Ashley: 14:12

This kind of relates to something we were talking about last night, Cat, which is that like, if, if there's a, I think you were saying like if there's like a prejudice that is expressed in a group and I, I would say that this probably could extend to like, if a misconception is expressed in a group, then that will kind of like stick and people will remember it as the idea of the group as a whole. Like even if the whole group didn't agree with it and it was just one person. And I think this like speaks to the fact that like the dissenter in that group or the person, like actually willing to point it out, stand up for, you know, whatever marginalized community is being misrepresented, whatever it might be. Like, it's like ever more important because you don't want people to walk away from that space with an even like worse perception of how people think. Yeah,

Cat: 15:01

Yeah, totally. You're talking about like the ways that prejudices can be transmitted across our social relationships and it's, it's really, really powerful. Like there's these super interesting effects, like even watching someone that you're in a group with, be in a conversation with someone who's expressing prejudice group views, and that person is not part of your group themselves. We, we can misattribute it like we, we leave that observation. It leaks. Yeah, so there's, this is part of why psychologists say that, you know, some of these beliefs are somewhat self perpetuating and that we can be worse in groups than we actually all are as individual people. Like we have, we have our own values that sometimes get suppressed by these mechanisms. and, you know, understanding that is, is scary, but it's also very powerful. It, it lets you sort of realize, okay, we're fighting a pretty big battle here, you know, for like how our species interacts and how we see each other.

Ashley: 16:05

If you've been listening and you're thinking that you too could benefit from a really thoughtful conversation with Cat Hicks about your problems in your workspace, I have really good news for you, and that is that Cat Hicks has a consulting firm called Catharsis Consulting, which can help you and help you think about things in an evidence-based manner. You can get a 90 minute consult with Cat, where you sit down and hash out your evidence strategy, tackle your human engineering problems, and bring psychology to your software teams. Check the link in the show notes to learn more.

Danilo: 16:39

let's revisit something from, I believe, our very first episode, what is a technical person, and is this a useful question to even have?

Ashley: 16:52

Is it a useful question, like, for employers or for society or for anybody?

Danilo: 16:58

You know, let's let, sure, let's scope it to people's kind of personal experience of the workplace.

Ashley: 17:07

Hmm.

Danilo: 17:08

is this dividing line of technical versus non-technical? Is, is this useful to anybody except for pernicious goals?

Cat: 17:18

mm

Ashley: 17:19

feel like, this is something Cat has been thinking about a lot lately, but I'll take a less informed stab at it, which is that,

Cat: 17:29

I wouldn't say less informed.

Ashley: 17:31

well informed via cat, I guess.

Cat: 17:33

You're teaching at the beginning of the formation of these groups.

Ashley: 17:36

Yeah, well, I guess, no, I mean, what I was thinking is like, you know, groups are helpful in human society. Like there's a reason we have groups whether or not, like the group of technical people is helpful. Um, I don't know. I have kind of mixed feelings about, I guess, I guess I wish that instead of it being a trait of a person, you know, instead of it being like who is technical, it was like, what can this person do or what do they want to learn? Right? Because that's more like, it's like a hobby group. It's like people who wanna sew together and then it makes sense for those people to like learn how to sew together. Um, obviously we have to be in groups at work that are around particular skills or you know, like things you have to do at work. But I think the issue that I have is with it being conceptualized as a trait, as like a thing that you either have or do not have.

Danilo: 18:32

So you, you would be more comfortable with technical being a responsibility than an innate quality.

Ashley: 18:40

yeah. Sure. Yeah. That's interesting. Like a responsibility, a thing. A thing that's within your purview at work is like you are the person who, I don't know, maintains the code base or you know this particular thing or works on this workflow, and that is quote unquote technical. Sure.

Danilo: 18:58

falls over, but, but immediately now, now you're getting into like details. Right. And I think that where we fall short, where we use this technical label is that we're actually just leading a bunch of details that are the things that matter. The thing we're doing with that label is being lazy. It's like, okay, there's a specific skill that I need you to have and you either have it or you don't have it. But instead of getting into what that skill is, I'm just gonna call it this blanket technical thing, and now we're getting into traits and it's unproductive.

Ashley: 19:34

It's a heuristic for people's pay level, right? And that's why this like really matters, right? Like people who are kind of quote unquote technical are in a different pay grade than people who are not.

Danilo: 19:46

Right.

Cat: 19:48

Okay. I think that technical is like a location in multidimensional space.

Danilo: 19:57

Please

Cat: 19:58

All right. Okay. And I think that you are allowed to enter that location if you hit enough of the criteria that we create for it. And those things are shifting. So like it used to maybe be that gender was more of a passport blocker, you know, into the location of technical. But I think that there's so many interesting things here. Like one is.

Ashley: 20:26

is

Cat: 20:28

There's a really. core thing that we like to do in our minds, which is essentialize. So making something, a trait of an individual rather than an activity we perform, you know, and our beliefs about that. This is really powerful and it shows up all the time. Like across child development, across when people are entering a new field, do they learn that something's an essential skill or not? You know, do they essentialize it as a trait or not? So there's that. I, I like the shifting it towards an activity, you know, or a thing that you can bring into focus and You can think about it in your own day, right? Like, am I foregrounding? Am I starting to, am I using the part of my mind that can think in a technical way? Or am I gonna try to like, think in a different way? Right? And so I don't. And then of course there's like a, you know, the, the macroeconomic version of it, which is just all the people who get to go to the fancy offsite, you know, or all of the like, ways we could describe this technical or not technical division. Um, yeah, I agree so much with what you said to Nelo that we use it so much of the time when we're not being specific. And you can, you can elicit this from people. So like when I, I sat down in these interviews we did with software engineers a while ago and, and, I sort of experimentally asked people, um, also in this little like conference that I was part of, um. What do you think when you think, when you call something technical, or what do you think it means when we call something technical and like the, the arguments that you can spark, the absolute chaos that you can spark simply By asking that question. um, is, is so telling. And it shows that people deeply know, you know, that this division is doing things they don't want it to do, but then they also feel they need to use it. You know, they need to use it to protect certain activities in their workplace. And so you, you can just feel that tension. So to me it's so interesting to ask is it useful Like, like in some sense, everything that survives is useful, you know,

Danilo: 22:44

It, it has survived a mimetic, um, selection pressure. Right,

Ashley: 22:48

it's useful to someone

Cat: 22:50

if the, if the, if the, question is. Is this the, way we solve whatever's going on with us? I think the answer's very clearly. No, we're not solving things with this, so we need something else.

Danilo: 23:03

you you know what both you just said reminded me of a, a little allegory. Which is, you know, Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario.

Cat: 23:15

No, I don't.

Ashley: 23:17

not personally, no.

Cat: 23:18

Yeah.

Danilo: 23:19

so so me neither. We don't, we don't run in the same circles.

Ashley: 23:23

You and Suge

Danilo: 23:24

Me. And so, so the thing about Miyamoto that's wild is that at the time that he created Donkey Kong,

Cat: 23:34

Hmm,

Danilo: 23:34

he was not supposed to be the guy who did that work. The people who were creating video games at that time were like hardcore engineers.

Ashley: 23:47

Hmm.

Danilo: 23:47

had this like kind of literal mindedness to them that was more about just like, can we get something interactive out of this incredibly meager set of. Constraints and chips and costs, right? And Miyamoto is this guy in like the planning department. He's such just this like apprentice planning guy. And Nintendo is just flat out, they are so resource constrained. And so it just falls to Miyamoto like, Hey, can you, can you rescue this arcade game that we sent to America that nobody wants? And they let this guy who on paper was not technical, the game for the first time

Ashley: 24:29

Hmm.

Danilo: 24:30

he created a franchise worth, worth, billions. And so I guess when I ask like, is it useful? Is it in the long-term interests of any of us to have like a really narrow conception of who gets to do what work, including work that has very technical underpinnings.

Ashley: 24:50

hmm.

Cat: 24:50

Yeah, well That's definitely not useful. Like that just flat out is terrible, you know? And is maybe one of the worst things that we do on this planet is just constantly foreclosed on the future of the people who could be solving our biggest problems. And I mean, we do that by not caring about the health of, you know, people in other countries. I mean, we do that in any number of ways. I don't just mean that we do, we do that because some child in America didn't get into a gifted class and should have, but it's like a whole global problem.

Danilo: 25:24

Right.

Ashley: 25:24

I think there's like more acknowledgement of the necessity for people to switch fields in scientific research. Like there's actually some mechanisms for funding that very explicitly incentivize people to switch fields. Right. And, and maybe the, maybe the

Cat: 25:40

Do we, do we still have that funding?

Ashley: 25:42

I don't know. Probably not, but you know, but like, it's not as clear as like technical to non-technical, but maybe you are a cancer researcher and you think about the way cells work in a particular way, but then you are incentivized to think about, the nervous system or something different. Like take you know, your scaffolds for how you understand how biology works and apply that to something else. And I think there's like a lot of really good research around the power of that and how, you know, you can get locked into a particular way of seeing the world. And like so many, yeah. And so many paradigm shifts in science have come from people from the outside, you know, the motos of the scientific world coming in and just thinking about it differently and being like, yeah, but what if cells did this actually? And I feel like, yeah, that, that just like to me feels like a known feature of how. Progress happens is like you need different opinions and people who haven't been steeped in the same shit for like decades, you need fresh perspectives.

Cat: 26:41

For a solution to propagate, for innovation to happen, it has to be shared. And I talk about this when I talk about social learning and developers. We imagine this genius who's working alone and, even if that were true, which is often not true, but like even if that's true, when that happens, other people need to be able to receive that idea and that is actually something they do. It's not just them being robots. That is a capacity we have. Our ability to successfully imitate and transmit solutions is. Phenomenal. And if we could actually respect that, you know, it, it really allows us to propagate solutions in ways that we've never imagined. And so you'll see these moments that happens, like, I mean, open source software is a pretty famous location for this to happen. And the free revealing that people want to do because they have joy in solutions because they have made a connection between some seemingly niche problem and a solution and others might share it. And then it turns out, you know, understanding some niche possibility for mRNA could be the thing that gives us a vaccine against pancreatic cancer if we're allowed to work on it. You know,

Danilo: 27:57

Right.

Cat: 27:58

I mean, it's not just that we can't predict. What kinds of people will matter to our future? We also can't predict what kinds of work will turn into huge game changers for our future, and I, I think that is, that's something that you and I talk about a lot, Ashley, that there's this ex exploration attitude in science. There's this awareness of this when you're a scientist and we both, when we go have to work on the edges and try to work cross disciplinarily and maybe work with more people who are really steeped in that there's technical and not, and they're in that siloed, I would call it, kind of computer science kind of thinking. Then we get really frustrated because they don't have that curiosity and exploration. What they have is like a lot of rigidity that is deeply not innovative in my opinion.

Danilo: 28:52

The reason that I wanted to invite each of you to talk your shit, to celebrate a year of change technically, is that I know in the pursuit of your good work, you've had to eat plenty of it. And so for people who are listening, who are eating shit in their own way, I wonder if there is anything you would like to offer to make the journey a little bit. Less lonely.

Ashley: 29:21

Grifters always lose eventually the people who are faking are exposed Yeah. And I don't know, I think the hardest thing has been having to ride that out a little bit and to wait for it to happen, you know? And in the initial stages of someone making claims that are bullshit or whatever, like it sucks, it's really, really shitty. Or like someone telling us that like I shouldn't be teaching programming or I need to teach math as a part of my programming course, or whatever it is that is just like completely unfounded. Like, you know, those people will, will see the light maybe someday they probably won't tell you that they saw the light, but like it's coming for them. Um, I don't know. That's my initial feeling.

Cat: 30:15

Mm. I'll say something that. I think both of you have really helped me see. So like a personal thank you to both of you is never let them take your swagger. And your chutzpah and your cool, you know, like when you know what you're about and you know what you've done and you know why you're doing it, there is a quality of just untouchable power to that. And, and I think people hate it who are grifters, you know, and if, if you can become, and then realizing they can't take you away from that is just a, is such a game changer. And, And realizing

Ashley: 31:03

that

Cat: 31:04

you truly can have tremendous joy in what you're doing. You can walk, and I told, I mentioned like being in the room with say, you know, like folks who are deeply politically not aligned with me and whatever, being able to leave that room like, well, that was fun, You know? Oh my gosh. You just see the real estate that is created in other people's minds when you can have that attitude because. They, they cannot, by the structure of their beliefs and how they're entangled, their self-concept is entangled. It's like why they're, you know, opposing what are clearly things that are good for us to do. They're so trapped in like a cage of their own making. And honestly, you don't have to be, and I think there's like this quality of letting yourself be free and it's, it's healing. And it's like, when I, became a leader in tech and I started at the same time sewing my own clothes and just thinking, I'm gonna wear the colors that I like. I've had so much of people looking at me and just making unwanted comments about how, I look and who, I am, and how could you be here and have you ever thought about the fact that you're like a woman, you know, and just a thousand comments like that. I was like, well, you know, I might as well make myself. X-Wing jumpsuits and, and just have this, this joy, and I think joy is like electric and charismatic, and it, it actually helps you find people, helps other people who are genuinely well intentioned, feel good about themselves and like perhaps they too could be themselves. And so that is socially transmissible as well.

Ashley: 32:50

Hmm.

Danilo: 32:53

Well, and that is one year of"Change, Technically". If you have been listening to us since the start, we really thank you for tuning in each time we show up on your podcast app. And if you are new, there's a whole year of fun stuff just like this. We do this'cause it's fun and'cause we care about these subjects. And I think you will have a great time with them too.