>> I'm sitting slow.
Hang on [inaudible]. >> I'm not that old. >> Okay. This is Scott
Hanselman. You're ready? >> Yeah, I'm good. [MUSIC] >> Hey. Okay, so for today's episode, we have Scott Hanselman. Scott, can you introduce yourself and tell us
what your role is here? >> I'm Scott Hanselman. I guess I manage community for Visual Studio
for Developer Division. So I guess I'm a
Community Manager but my title is Program Manager. So PM, right? Jack of all trades, skill of all trades, master of none. >> Okay. So in the beginning
what I really like to do is get a little bit of resolution on
what you think of as the role. So that's the title and it
gives us a sense of it. So what do you look at as the day-to-day of your role and how do you measure
success for instance? >> So right now I'm focused
on making sure that we have a healthy community in both.NET
and then Visual Studio generally. My major role this last year or 18 months in the
team that I've got; Maria, and Jamie, and John, and Jeff on my team are all
focused on making the on-ramp into.NET and the on-ramp
into Visual Studio onto the freeway into our
community is a smooth, fun, exciting, and
inclusive environment. So from the moment that you
go and Google with Bing for learning C# to right-click
"Publish" in Visual Studio. It did anything suck. >> Did you fall off
the path in some ways? >> Did you fall off the
path? Did you find it? A problem was the docs not good
or the sample is not good. Did something in Visual
Studio perplex you? Did an issue with Azure
sign up become a problem? Inclusion means everybody. So that could mean someone
on dial-up in New Zealand, it could be someone on an airplane, that could be someone
with fast Internet, someone with slow Internet,
some with a fast computer. Everything from the, I
wonder if I should learn C#. Learn C#, "Enter". Until I've just made the new Google, Facebook, Amazon clone,
right-click "Publish". Did they have a good experience? So all of that is making sure
we have a healthy community. >> Cool. So putting it in the context of what we've
been doing in the show, you're our second program
manager person, titled person. >> Cool. >> I think also you do management. So those are two elements
of it. Okay, cool. So let's start with a little bit like you're
journey through your career. So you've been at Microsoft
for 2007 I think. >> Twelve years. >> Yeah. >> Almost 13. I don't know.
Something like 12 years I think. >> Okay. So help me, how did we get here and
where we go from there? >> I was born a poor child. I was. Let me think about that. So I have been in software for
money since 1992 when I was doing Visual Basic 3 on SQL
Server 4.21 and Word 6. I think it just come out and
we're using Windows NT 3.51. I was working at a Carfax
clone called Chrome data. People would call a customer
service representative and type into a Visual
Basic application the make, model, style of a car. >> Okay. >> Then it would hit "Go"
and we would pull it out of our massive 50 megabyte database. Then we would Ole Automate. I'm using all the old TLAs. >> Yeah, everybody's hitting up Wikipedia right now trying to
figure out what all these called. >> We use com. We'd Ole automate into a Word form on the server side. We had a server farm of
machines that would run Word, build these massive
multi megabyte, massive. >> More than one [inaudible]. >> Then they would fax them
back to the person who called. So you would go and dynamically
generate for each make, model, style and you
do all this work. Then we had Digi boards, which were racks and racks
of modems within PCs. We had 12 lines and
we would had a queue, so you drop them into the
queue and you send them out, and then you have this, the fax will be there
in about 20 minutes once the fax queue has cleared. So I worked on that system
and that was in 1992. >>> Got it. >> So now it is not 1992. >> No, a few things have
happened since then. >> I'm still doing the same work. Then I worked at a company
called STEP Technology. That was a consulting company. I worked at Nike, I worked at Intel, I taught Classic ASP. >> So is it more of like a trainer? >> Like a trainer. >> Okay. >> I would go in for a week
and I'd be and I'll go. Actually in Intel, I spent
months in Santa Clara down in the bay teaching web
development, ActiveX controls. If you recall, there was a
time when you could host a Visual Basic application
inside of Internet Explorer. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> No [inaudible]. >> No security at all. Totally. >> Yeah. >> That was [inaudible]. Then I worked with Nike,
worked with Intel. I worked a bunch of startups. I was a professor, adjunct professor teaching C#. Maybe, I don't know, 2001, 2003. When did it started? >> So it real new. >> Yeah, it was a new thing, right? During all of this I was going to
school, which was a challenge. I actually only graduated
from college in 2003, but I was working since 1992 because I was going
to school at night. > I see. >> Then I started losing credit. Because did you know
that you have to finish your four-year degree in
a certain area of time? >> It's like airline miles. >> Right, so just like
your airline miles expire, your Writing 121 credit expires. So then they call you seven
years later and they go, "You haven't graduated yet. Can you go and take
Writing 121 again?" So that became this crazy treadmill. >> Did you get off? >> But you're trying to.
So I finally graduated in 2003 after having been in the
industry for 11 years at that point. >> Got it. >> So that was awkward. >> Was it that you can bring
yourself through school? >> Basically, I was finding that
the work was interesting enough, so I was working 9-5 and I
was going to school 6-10. >> Got it. >> But that is not entirely
sustainable, right? >> Yeah. >> You're taking 12 credits, and then you get tired, then you
take nine, then you take six. Going to school, three credits a term is like paying the minimum
balance on your credit card. So then eventually you get to
the point where you are actually paying the minimum balance and
your balance is still going up. So the same thing
happened to my degree, but I needed to finish
it, and I end up with a software engineering degree. During that process,
I was teaching as an adjunct because I was
the only one that knew.NET. >> I see. >> So the agreement
that I made was that, how could you throw the credit away if I am also an
adjunct professor? But I was the only one
without a master's degree. So there was this awkward
bit of paradox that occurred where I blackmailed them into not throwing
my credit away, because I was also one
of their professors. >> You prevailed against
the bureaucracy. >> Indeed. >> But that's good. >> So the result was a degree
and a number of years teaching. I also taught XML and wizdl, TCP/IP and all the good
packet sniffer type stuff. >> Those were the days, folks. >> Yeah, basically now we have
self-driving cars that you can Uber and I was teaching how to
rebuild a carburetor. That's fine. I always like to joke about
my three-page resume. Because I'm old, I have
a three-page resume, but the second page of the resume is all stuffed in the
90s that no one uses anymore. So now I just have a resume that
has page one and page three. Page two is a checkbox. In the Azure Cloud,
scale this website. Page two gone, shredded, because none of that
means anything anymore. >> Although I've never, I love when you get to go out and meet the people who
still do those things. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> COBOL programmers. I assure you, if this whole thing falls apart, there's probably some good OLE automation job for you
waiting somewhere. >> One of these days this whole
self-driving electric cars, Uber thing is going to fall
apart and someone's going to need someone to drive
stick shift. I'm your guy. >> You [inaudible] do that. >> If you need me to
double-clutch on a hill, going uphill. I can do that. Absolutely. I'll drop into WinDbg,
do our thing, it'll be good. >> Get it done. Cool. Okay,
now we got to the point where you've got the degree and so that's the end of Professor
[inaudible] I'm guessing. >> At that point, I'm looking for a real job. Actually, I've been in a
real job at that point. Let me think about this. 2003 I had gone to Principal
Consultant at STEP Technology, and I was doing a lot
of white boarding for money which is flying all over
the place being a virtual CTO. >> Okay. >> So you're basically, we're in
over our depth with architecture. We're building a large
distributed system. It was the beginning
of the D-COM days. Don Box was King. We were all reading
essential com and trying to understand how to
build large systems. It was the day. It
was the first bubble. >> Yeah. >> So this was all the
three-letter domains. So I worked at 800.com and Gear.com
which got bought by Overstock. So all of these short three and four letter acronym places building, what was at the time the most complicated problem in computer science was
the shopping cart. >> Yeah. >> All right. >> That could scale. Do you think about this so was true like
line-of-business training, and now you've entered consulting, is that the
way you think of it? >> At that point I
got into consulting. So I was the CTO for hire who had
not yet been any kind of a CTO. >> Trust me. >> I was building large scale systems or building big order
management systems in Java at Nike that were
going from at the time, tens of thousands, two hundreds
of thousands of users at once. So I was learning about
large system scale, which was quite large for the time. That got me into banking,
retail online banking. So checking your balances, doing what at the time
was very revolutionary, but now we don't even think about. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Check images and depositing, taking a photograph of a
check and depositing it, that was the height of tech. >> Then I worked my way
up at that company called Kirilian to chief architect. So I wasn't a CTO, but I reported
to the CTO and I got to learn about how the CTO bridges
the business and the tech. I had a really great CTO. He ended up going off
and being the CTO WebMD. Then Kirilian got bought
by, up by Fiserv? No, got bought by CheckFree, they got bought by Fiserv. So 400 person company where
I was the chief architect, got bought by 4,000 person company, got bought by 40,000 person company. >> A situation of a small fish get eaten by a slightly bigger fish. >> That is exactly what happened.
So I was like big fish, small pond inside small fish. Then then Fiserv says, "Hey, come and be an enterprise
architect at Fiserv." I don't want to work
in Excel or whatever Vizio and draw out UML diagrams, and I don't want to be a
UML diagrammer for money. Then I was at an O'Reilly
conference called Foo Camp, the Friends of O'Reilly conference. Two people were there; Steve Sinofsky and Scott Guthrie, and I hit it off with
Guthrie and we were talking about the threat, the threat of Ruby on Rails because it was
early days of Microsoft. He was like, "We should do a .NET Model-View-Controller be open-source. That'll be kind of like
Rails." I said we should do it.NET on nails. That was rejected. But then I got to come and work with folks like Phil Haack and all like the Brad Abrams and
all the early .NET people and reach our
open source stuff. You remember, we open sourced
it when no one was looking. Then they turned around
and they're like, "Oh crap, you've open
sourced everything.". >> Now we need policies. >> Sorry. Yeah. Exactly, right? >> Yeah. >> Now, we'll teach the
lawyers how to say yes. >> Exactly. >> We snuck a lot of code out
in those days, didn't we? >> So one thing I like as we
were discussing before as some ambitions that people can watch these episodes and see
themselves in different things. I'm wondering if there
are lessons to be learned for people who are in that. Like you were in this
beginning part where you're just looking for different
things and trying to find what would become
a more straightforward, dotted line community, in some ways where you're bouncing
from line of business to that. How were you doing that?
What was driving it? Was it luck, was it making the right connections that
then turned into opportunities? >> Well, that's a very good question. So first, I never discount luck. >> Yeah. >> I think that this
is really important. There is a spectrum of
privileges that we all have and you can go through this spectrum of the
privileges that I have. But as well, luck and
people making luck for me. I think that yours and my, almost require and our obligation
is to be someone else's luck. >> Yeah. >> So a number of times, I was given the warm intro. We call it the warm intro. This is what I call the transitive
property of friendship. >> Okay. >> So we're cool, and then I'm cool with her,
probably behind the camera. Then now you're cool, be the
transitive property of friendships. So if she vouches for me and you
vouch for me the we're cool. The warm intro is simple
as you saying, "Hey, my buddy Scott is
looking for a job," or, "my friend, Goulnash, she's looking, she's great, she's fantastic. You should talk to her." That's all you got to do.
You vouch for somebody. >> Yeah. >> That moment you are passing the trust A to B to C and it
doesn't get them a free interview, it doesn't get them a job. It's simply cracks the door open. >> Agreed. >> I do that as much as I can because I could point to
like a half dozen moments. Like these sliding doors moments.
You've ever seen sliding doors? >> Yes, on LaserDisc in the '90s. >> Gwyneth Paltrow is
running to reach at the end of the train and then the
movie splits in half. One, Gwyneth Paltrow
gets on the train, one does not and her
whole life is different. Those moments exist. So what we can do as senior people is make those
moments for somebody. It can be introducing someone, re-tweeting them,
forwarding and e-mail. It has to be in a
non-transactional way. Like I'm not keeping score. >> Right. >> I'm not going to, "Steve keeps calling me and
asking me for stuff." No. >> Be on my show. >> No. Just, past the love. So I learned that very early on because of the
behaviors that we're. >> With people doing it for you. >> Exactly. I'm not
saying like I'm all like, "Hey," pat, pat, pat. This is about I'm trying to model the behavior of all the
successful people I saw. They would unselfishly spread
the love and lift people up. There was never any
of this. I've climbed up the ladder and I
kicked the ladder of. >> Agreed. >> They reached down the ladder. >> But I'm curious like
in that model, see, now you've got these people and are either being boss for a vouching and one of the most
important things I think with that is like creating this
reputation as a spotter of talent or somebody who
like that network, when you give those
things are valuable. Do you think there was
anything that made it such that you would be someone that people would want to vouch for? Did you do that actively or is it just something you
noticed in retrospect? >> I appreciate you
helping break this down because there's
silos of information. So there's the being cool and being kind and trying
to vouch for people. Then being non-denominational
in my technology religion. I did VB, I did Java, I did C, I did C Plus Plus,
I did embedded systems, I did large systems, I did scale, the fundamentals of computer
science are fundamental. >> Yeah. >> Right. It doesn't matter
what language you're doing. You put stuff in a
for-loop and you sort it. Well, let's talk about
algorithms, right? >> Right. >> It does not matter whether it's Ruby or Java or.NET or whatever. >> Polyglots. >> Polyglot is one way to look at it. Polyglot is the learn
all of the languages. >> I see. >> But at the root core, the religion is be fast, scale well, do as little as possible so that you can do
it much of it as possible. I always joke about
how if you do nothing, you can do it infinitely. So you just want to bring
your overhead down. So I was thinking about those things and languages were coming and going. >> Got it. >> But I understood the
fundamentals of scale, of systems, of network latency versus
disk latency versus memory latency versus CPU and I
think that for a lot of people, that basic understanding
of the metal. >> Yep. >> Whether you're driving
an automatic shift or not, there's a clutch until
of course there isn't. >> I see. >> Do you know what I'm saying? >> Always knowing
one additional layer in the call stack more
than your neighbor. I don't say I claim to know down to the register level,
at least not anymore. But if you can drive a stick and your neighbor or
your cube mate can't, then that makes you well one layer
in the call stack more useful. Then being very generous with
your giving of knowledge. I would learn about these things, and I use this analogy of driving a stick shift, but you get the idea. >> Yeah. >> Then do a brown bag. What's the point of
learning something and then not telling
everyone about it? So I started doing brown
bags and making like regular weekly lunches
and in that brown bag, it spills into a user group and that user group spills into a code camp, and that code camp spills
into a conference. >> In some ways by being
the person who creates that community or at least
become the seed kernel for it, that you're creating a leadership. >> That's what leadership is. >> Yeah. I don't know. >> Basically creating
something out of nothing. >> Leadership implies one person, but it's more of if you're the
first person in front of the mob. >> Yeah. >> "Hey, let's go that way. Come on everyone." We all march that way. >> Right. Yeah. >> So try to be as
generous of my time, generous of my routing of people and generous of
whatever knowledge I have, and then also being unapologetically
ignorant about things. Then giving other people
the opportunity to go and give those talks as well. >> Got it. There's two threads I
want to pull on that for them, especially now that we're starting to get a few of these
episodes in here and I'm looking for
things that are in common across them or interesting. Normally I thought was interesting
that I think we should probably clarify for people who are in that early part of
their career and maybe don't know all of the technologies
we just listed. >> A lot of acronyms. >> I think one of the
thing that was in common is they want all the cool ones, this is the new app and coming one. You're talking about things
that today if you're cool, you might roll your eyes as "Oh, I know the price of,"
or something like that, and I think what you're
saying is in some ways you were willing to do
those things because you knew that underneath them
there was this foundational layer of computer science
behind them that was all the same and the coolness
wasn't that interesting. >> Well, one way to look at it
is that I've been doing this for almost 30 years and
it's the same problem, it's text-boxes over data
presented to a user. It's user interactions trying
to minimize keystrokes, trying to minimize mouses, trying to make sure that when
I hit submit on a form I don't serialize then
deserialize and then serialize and deserialize as it bounces its way across the network. What's the least that I
can do to get those texts, cache in the right places, do the least so that
you can do the most, whether it's Java and RMI on a
hot Java box in 1996 at Nike, or whether it's Angular and
the latest hot new.JS today. I'm not trying to be old man
who shakes his fist at Cloud, but I am trying to recognize that Containers and Kubernetes and Scale, these are all fundamental
ideas that had been thought about going back well into the
'40s and '50s, and Mainframes. >> Sure. >> I'm not saying we should look
at new stuff with a negative eye. >> Sure. >> But we should look at it
with historical context. >> Nothing biased against them
is what you're getting at. Never being above this all. >> But I think that as one moves into the future looking back
into history is important. I have long believed that when I stopped being a programmer
I will go and be a professor and I will
teach what I think is not taught which is the computer
science history classes. We learn lots of computer science but when did anyone learn history? >> In particular the ideas and
how they evolved over time. >> Maybe I'm missing out. Are there computer science history courses? I got to go to Bletchley Park in
the UK and see Bombe machine, and Damian Edwards and I actually sat there and we got there on
a random Tuesday and there was an older gentleman
who's probably in his 80s sitting there and he
was just chilling and no one else was around and he spent two hours explaining the Enigma. We actually encrypted and
decrypted on the Bombe machine, a real message as he sat there because he had nothing else
to do and he knew that stuff. Nobody learns that, but if
you look at that and then compare how RSA works
and encryption today, the concepts are all there. So knowing again how to
drive a stick shift- >> Got it. >> - make you a better programmer. >> Indeed if you are a
Seattle person watching this. >> The Living Computer Museum. >> The Living Computer Museum, just go there find whoever the person with
the longest greatest beard is or the longest braid or whatever. Find someone there who is older and ask them to teach you
something, they are amazing. >> Yes. Everyone's got an auntie or a grandma or grandpa who was
a programmer in the past, stop watching this show right now, go and get your video
recorder or your iPhone and go talk to Grandma about when she was doing
paper punch cards. >> Yeah, for sure. >> Capture that stuff. You can actually go to the
Living Computer Museum, put your name on a punch card
and punch it and take it home. >> Yeah. >> I love that stuff. I think
that not to wallow in the past, but to sit on the past and respect it as we stand on
the shoulders of giants. >> Yeah. The second thread I
wanted to pull on that, again, is a theme that keeps coming back
in these conversations is you're talking a little bit
about the going one layer further down in the coal stack. So, for instance, David
Feller talked about how really having a mentor
to teach him how to do debugging was absolutely
critical to his success. Mauney likewise said that having a mentor sit down
with her and go through how to really understand code through case studies
of what code you don't own, really does was a big powerful accelerator
to them and then, of course, when you started the first thing
you're saying is this idea of how do you get that next layer down and really
understand the fundamentals. So I'm curious how you
learned those initial things. In some ways you're
saying that that's I think that helps you stand out in these early times and then the fact that you will go and
share that knowledge. >> Yeah. >> So how did you get that? How did you get there
in the first place? >> I like that word "mentor" and I have a lot
of mentorship programs. I have mentor at myself, I had mentees, but David, actually, I was talking about David Feller
and he juxtaposed the difference between the word mentor and sponsor. >> Yeah. >> He almost sounded like a sponsor, like a super-powered mentor. >> Right. >> They will not only teach
you these things but they will also kick down doors,
they will back you up, they'll defend you, they're a shield, and they are a helper. So I had those early on in school. I would say that since when I was
12 and my sixth-grade teacher let me sneak in there
after school and use the only computer
that the school had, the Apple II, there wasn't one
per kid or one per classroom, there was one in the school
letting me see that. The privilege of my
dad selling the van. I literally can tell you that the most transformative moment in my life was coming home
from school one day, the van was gone. I walk into the house,
hey, where is the van? Well, we went to Sears and
we bought this Commodore 64 for $300 which is a huge
amount of money plus 299, plus a 199 for other things, like 500 or 600 bucks, disk
drive and the monitor. They bought that because
the principal of the school had told
them that your son is getting into a
wrong crowd and he's hanging out on the road
behind the school, doing stuff didn't need to be doing. He should be inside
and he's good at this, think about investing in a computer. If my fifth-grade teacher
hadn't talked to the principal, hadn't talked to my dad,
who had a van to sell, I would be probably
voted most likely to be convicted of a white-collar
crime. Do you know what I mean? >> Yeah sponsors. >> Those are sponsors,
not just mentors. They put themselves on the line
for you and that's so important. So hunt those people
down and collect them. >> So how did you do it? So I agree with you on a principle. >> The first one, it was luck. Why did my fifth-grade teacher
spot me and not someone else or which of the 100 kids that they
had to deal with? I don't know. >> Being inquisitive,
asking the right questions, putting in the work. The kind of stuff that
I tried to tell my 11-year-old and my
13-year-old now is that, don't live your life by default. If you just accept the defaults
then default stuff will happen. If you at least try, then the thing will
either happen or it won't but at least you tried as opposed to just you woke up and then the thing happened so intentionality. I would say I was told to be
intentional by my parents. I applied intentionally to my life. Stuff happened. Yes some luck. Yes some good effort. That intentionality though was
applied more when I became the chief architect
of Kirilian because the CTO was someone I
really looked up to, and he was a gentleman who had an MBA and a Masters in Engineering, also was an Air force Major. So this was an incredibly
well-rounded individual who had a foot in the
discipline and the military, had a foot in the
discipline of business, and a foot the discipline
of solid engineering. He showed me, as a sponsor, as a mentor of mine,
to go into a meeting. How do you show up at a
bank and shake the hand of a senior VP of some bank
and act like you belong. If you're an older, just put it in really frank terms. If you're an older
white guy mentoring the younger white guy
about how to go into rooms of older white
guys and navigate, that is in itself, difficult. Even more so if you're a woman or a young woman or a person of color, how wonderful would it be if you had that sponsor that comes in with you, knocks the door down, gives you that transitive
property of friendship and says, "Hey, this is the best person
we've got on the team. Let's see their presentation." By then lending your privilege
to that person temporarily, it knocks down some
barriers that they would otherwise have to
deal with themselves. That's the difference in
mentorship and sponsorship. So luck to start with and then intentionally hunting it down and then now intentionally giving it out. Those are the one, two,
three punch right there. >> So there are a couple of different types of things that
you're learning in these stories, and one of them is
these sort of like, how to have conscientious, the drive. >> Intentionality. >> Intentionally is the word. Yeah. Then there's also the elements of actually knowing
how to dig through those things. I'm curious how you
acquired that skill specifically of how to
get that layer down. I agree with you that there were a number of things that had to
happen in order to set that up. >> I know what you're saying. I'm the first one to go
to college in my family. But my parents always
went one layer down. My dad was a fireman. My mom was a zookeeper. But my mom could have just
and did shovel elephant crap, but she also understood the
behavior of the elephants. She chose that like I guess
my job is to shovel poo, but also knowing how the animal behaves is going
to make my job easier. If I'm going to work with hawks, I'm going to work with a different
animals that she works with, knowing how that works is important. My dad was a fireman.
Being a fireman, at least in America, is a
large part of medical thing. You're almost a kind of
a nurse or a doctor. So understanding humans
is going to make your job better and easier. But then my dad was
also a woodworker. He's not an engineer, but he's always using tools. So there was never a
sense that I couldn't go one layer deeper and we
were also very poor. I mean, this family of working
with your hands people, we've got animals around us. My dad is dealing with
people all the time. Something in house breaks. Are we going to just throw
it away and buy a new one? No, I guess this weekend we're opening up to television
and fixing it. >> Got it. >> We don't have enough money for, I remember this very clearly, we don't have enough
money for the furnace. Let's build a wood stove
on the side of the house. We actually built an
actual wood stove and added the chimney on the side of
the house like there's a problem, let's understand the problem. Let's fix the problem space. It was a kind of
programming except we were building a wood stove
on the side of the house. >> You learned that
algorithmic thinking, style of things, systematic. >> Systems thinking. My friend, Kesha Rogers,
talks about this. We are spending all this
time teaching kids how to code but we never
teach them how to think. But my dad was like, "Hey,
the toaster's broken." Well, I mean take it apart, is there power to the wall, is there power in the building, is the neighborhood's power out, like that systematic thinking. >> Got it. >> Simplistic thinking would be
throwing it out and trying to buy a new toaster and then discovering that the power's been out
[inaudible] the whole time. >> Right. Cool. >> So yeah. I would
say my parents were never afraid to break
those problems down. >> Got it. That's really cool. So the next thing I wanted to
chat about it a little bit was like your Jump Microsoft, a lot of it I guess is about
building these communities. I'm curious again
how you kind of like developed skills in order
to do those things and also bringing customer and I
think is another big topic that I'm interested in for PM type people who are
watching this or actually, let me me rewind that a little bit. Let me put it this way.
What skills do you feel like you really had
to learn as you're making that transition into
sort of like more of a program manager space
out of what you're doing before as like either a consultant
entered, working with the CTO. >> I tried to practice and I think the skills that either I have or have developed is that of extreme empathy. We all like to say that we can put ourselves in that person's shoes. We never really can. You can never be anyone
that you're not, but you can try to see it
from their perspective. So you can be a really good advocate
for the customer if you can truly understand what they're coming
from, that means their context. So whether I'm meeting with, I always use the example of the IT Department of
Little Debbie Snack Cakes. Like what's their job is shipping snack cakes but they
have IT department. So you have a business. What
are their business problems? If we do this thing .NET, butterfly flaps its wings in.NET and Little Debbie Snack
Cakes has failed deployment. How can you go from point A to point Z and do that and the
only way to do that is through extreme empathy for the
folks at Little Debbie or at Do it Best hardware or at Home
Depot or at Chase, Manhattan. Whoever our customers are. I don't know if any of those
people are our customers. >> Right in until. >> No, but the point is it's a
very diverse group of people. You never really know
and we sometimes in the Redmond Reality Distortion Field forget that this
little bit of code or this little flag or this little web.config thing is going to
roll its way all the way to China into some programmer who
you've never met before as machine and they're either going
to not read the docs or whatever. So to use a term from Rico Mariani, how can we have them fall
into the pit of success? Empathy, empathy, empathy like
it's hard. It takes energy. It gives you a headache right here. But the number one thing
that we need to do here and I think that Julia and John
and the folks in leadership. >> That's our VP. >> Our VP and the other VP. >> Yes, the VPs. >> The VPs. Yes. So Julia and John
are always trying to say like, "Hey, like don't forget about
these people and those people." I don't know how far
that empathy goes. But as you enter a community, you have to be able to think about
things from their perspective. >> So how did you learn to do that? >> I don't know. I never thought about it
because I've never been interviewed by you before. >> I'm not annoying, I'm sorry. >> No. I think you're doing a great job because you're
asking me questions that I've never been
asked before which is a good sign of a good interviewer. I don't know how does empathy start. I mean, I think it comes by there's a certain amount
of not having stuff. I always try to raise my kids like, they have a privileged in
the sense that they have some money, but they
don't know it yet. So you want to raise your kids
with enough money that they can do anything but not so
much that they can do nothing, that Warren Buffett kind of thing. But when we had nothing
when we were poor, there was a certain amount of empathy for other people
who are even poorer. So you're still doing volunteer work. Just because your poor
doesn't mean you volunteer like there's this hierarchy. So we were always thinking
about other people, about other family members, about other people in the community, other people on our street. >> Some way seems like practice. >> Empathy is baked in when
you're at that background level. Suffering isn't the right
word because everyone, it's not the Oppression Olympics, but everyone has a level at
which they come in right. So I think there's a certain
amount of not being born with a silver spoon that
gives you some empathy. I think travel causes some empathy, but I didn't travel anywhere
until I was like 25, 26. I didn't get passport until
I was like in my early 20s. Travel for me was a road trip
to the beach. I don't know. What is it that causes someone
to watch something on the news and see a famine and be empathetic versus changing the
channel. What were you going say? >> Oh, I was going to say
like the one thing that I noticed as you're
narrating the story was that even though that you hadn't moved across a
bunch of different worlds, like effectively you ended up in a room with the bank president
that you would never met. >> That was super weird too because I don't like golf or
smoke cigars, whatever. >> Yeah. Mine, when
I was with my dad, he was like accountant guy and so he always was like as
I was coming up and he wanted to help me be successful and he was good at computers
for an accountant, but not a computer guy and
so he kept being like, "Son, you got to learn
how to play golf." I'm like, "Dad, I promise you." >> That's a business skill,
like as a business skill. >> Yeah, exactly. But
he didn't understand. That wasn't a distinction that was occurring to him because he
didn't have like the model. >> There was a time when I was
meeting with literally like the Senior Vice President
at a major bank and it was literally like a movie. It was country club, cigars, big giant fat steaks, and I don't like to eat that. Alcohol, I don't drink. So I don't drink, I don't smoke. I don't eat big giant fat steaks. Like it was just
extremely a caricature of like that movie where Eddie Murphy
swaps with the other old guy. >> Trading Places. >> Trading Places. That was
just total fish out of water. But being able to move
through that somewhat elegantly and recognize
that that is a space, that's not my space but I could at least not embarrass myself in
that space. It was a challenge. >> But in some ways,
it gives you this sort of opportunity to practice the idea of being in different
places and you get the idea. >> It also taught me that
I don't want to make that, I don't want anyone to
ever feel like that. I try to avoid making those
spaces for other people. Like even when we're
at like a convention, if we're like at Microsoft Build
or something, you work the booth. You and I are hanging at the
booth, you could open the circle because if you have
a bunch of people, especially a bunch of people
that are all the same flavor and then they're all in a huddle, like anyone to break into
that it's impossible. Because if you simply open
and become a row and go, "Hi. You having fun? You having
a good time with the show?" >> You're the first person
I've talked to since I landed. Like that moment is how you open those spaces up and that must
have been victims since day one. >> Yeah. Another topic. I'm really interested, like
one thing that at least I think is that you really Excel
it technical communication. >> That's so sweet. >> This presentations,
stuff like that. >> Thank you, that's very kind. >> I'll go with my standard question. How did you learn that?
How did that happen? >> So it's empathy.
Empathy, analogies, stand up comedy, comedy
sports, improv classes. >> Interesting. >> Toastmasters,
extemporaneous speech. >> I'm getting a sense of
the intentionality again. >> Yeah. Right now, trying not to say um. >> Yeah. >> That's intentional, right? Like a space, a pause, a moment is better than an um. I'm not getting it perfect. But one can try to speak
with some intentionality, or one can simply attach their brain to their mouth
and just see what comes out. >> So there's this idea is sometimes even if you're not the best
in the world, it's something. If you're like top 10, 20 percentile of two things. >> I know. >> You can combine them. So like you mentioned comedy. >> I'd mediocre at a lot of things. >> But in a unique combination. >> I think of myself
as a Swiss Army knife which is just a lousy knife, and it's a mediocre pair of scissors. You know what I mean? It's
the power of the Swiss. It's why the Swiss Army is the
power that they are today. But it's just like here's
this mediocre tool that they could do a whole
bunch of stuff though, and they're so convenient
though because it's all in one tool, so I am that tool. >> Okay. Tell me how you brought, like you used comedy as a way to build a career stuff.
That's embedded important. >> What is comedy though?
Comedy is looking at things. Both a way that no one's ever thought about what makes
you tickle and why you laugh. Because I go, and I was
like, and it's true. That is funny. Computer
people aren't nerds. That's crazy. Never
thought about that way. There's a say it in a way that
no one ever said it before. That's an analogy. So the stick shift analogy. Using stick shift to describe the call stack of a
computer to explain Uber, Tesla, continuous
variable transmission, automatic transmission,
stick shift, etc. That's a perfect darn
near perfect analogy. If you get a good thing like that, you've all had those teachers
that are trying to explain the Spanish Revolution or whatever and then they
come up with analogy. They go, "Yeah it's like
this", and you go "Oh". This thing I am unfamiliar
with is exactly like this thing I am familiar
with, it tickles something. It gets the neurons firing. It's both funny, it's
interesting, it's edutaining. >> So imagine, let's use our your empathy skills.
I'll build on your idea. So let's imagine you're like
five years in your career, and you're trying to follow into this thing where you wanted it to
get more up in front of people. You want to be able to do the edutainment thing that
you're talking about. Do you recommend that people go and take improv classes? How
do you feel about that? >> I think that there's value in
taking improv classes generally because it's simply outside of
most people's comfort zone, and it teaches you something
that is called yes and. >> Yeah. >> Which is super important.
I was talking to Gulnaz, our director about that earlier, like If you're vibing with
someone, like you and I, if you asked me a question, and you're the
interviewer as you are, and I'm like, "Well, no." >> Just out of it. >> Like that was awkward. Now
the whole thing is messed up. But yes, and it's like,
"Yeah, absolutely." Or, "Well, yes, and not really." This is a dance that we're doing
here. This isn't scripted. We're trying to figure that out. Technical conversations
are like that as well. I think I know who you are. So given the context I have, I will explain a concept. I didn't understand where
you are coming from. I'm going to then shift
gears and come up with another way to explain
this concept until I have clicked that people in this context from this background
understand this thing this way. So if I'm explaining.NET
to COBOL programmers, or mainframe programmers, or Java programmers, or Node programmers, I have a gear for each
one so that they might understand.NET that then builds
up this toolbox of stuff. Just like a comedian was
going to go and roll in. Doing comedy in LA is
different in Portland, is different from downtown
Lincoln, Nebraska. I will bring different jokes. I will bring them in a different way. They will land differently. That is applying both empathy
as well as a toolbox of stuff. So where you should start
as a junior programmer is, "Can you explain it to yourself?" Like you shouldn't be
worried about talking to the conference or the local thing. You need to talk to your rubber duck. You know about rubber duck
programming? You know about this? >> No, I do not. >> My friend. Okay.
Go out there and do the googling with Bing for
rubber duck programming. This is when you have a problem. How many times you've had a problem, real technical problems,
been bugging for hours. You call someone and in the process of explaining it
to them, you've solved it. Well, you can bypass the
embarrassment by not explaining it to them by just getting a rubber duck and putting it
on your thing and saying, "Okay, listen, here's
what's going on. I'm doing this, and I de-reference,"
and then now you know it. The free threaded Marshall are, and you go, "I did it.
Thank you, rubber duck." >> Yeah. It's interesting
because I sometimes I feel like I need another person
to sit next to me and do it. >> I know it's bad. I called
doing it a waste of time, all the time, and he's
like, "You're an idiot." Damien says to me. I'm like, "I just needed to tell
somebody," and he's like, "Talk to yourself.
It's not the same". >> It's not the same. >> But my point is,
talk to your teammates. This is important especially for under-privileged, or
underrepresented people. You need to find a
place where you can safely do that and and be dumb. >> Yeah. >> So a sponsor, a mentor, or a series of mentors, or a positive and inclusive
team is somewhere where if you and I were
working together on a project, I would be concerned that how
many times can I call you, ask dumb questions or walk-through "dumb and air" scenarios until you've flipped the
bozo bit on manually. He was a bozo, he
didn't know anything. How do we build a working
relationship where you know it is okay that I am going to ask these
seemingly uneducated questions, but you know that I
fundamentally understand it, but there's maybe some blind spots. So rather than you
judging me and flipping the bit on me and going
up, "I'm sick of him." You go, "Hey, I've noticed that TCPIP has been
a challenge for you, or DNS is a thing that you may
have a misunderstanding about. I would encourage you to get
some coaching in that area." >> Right. Like basically help
them see what they're seeing. >> Right. But you
could just say, "Well, he doesn't even understand
how HTTP works, and then now we're not cool anymore". >> Yeah. I don't remember
where it was I first saw it, but one thing I just gravitated to in terms
of behaviors of leaders, that really resonates with me is being the person who will
say, "You know what? I don't understand this in a meeting, expressing you're running the meeting and so I'm like the
quarterback for.NET thing. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So I'm in charge of this really expensive meeting with all these people who are
way smarter than me. >> That's empathy right
by the way. You just pointed out that it's
an expensive meeting. You know the hourly rate of these more than 10-15 people that's
like a $1,000 meeting, right? >> Yeah. I'm just like, "I don't understand it. Explain it to me," and then they know that process of educating
me educates the room. >> Also, you didn't put it on
someone who's junior to say that. I've gone so far as to make sure that the juniors can text me or chat me as a back channel
during the meeting so that they don't have to put
their reputation on the line, and I will ask the dumb
question for them. That makes a safe
place for new people. >> That is really cool. >> You should try that. >> Yeah. >> Seriously, because you can throw yourself on the ceremonial grenade, and you've got as many
lives as possible. They may only have in their
minds two or three lives. >> True or not. >> Whether it's true or not, doesn't change the fact they feel that way. >> Yeah, exactly. >> There's no amount of
you saying that they shouldn't that will change that fact. So my friend Anne Wan Simons
calls it lending your privilege. I got unlimited lives, maybe not unlimited, but
I got at least a dozen. >> Yeah. >> Where I could ask some dumb. >> I got some capital to burn. >> Absolutely. I could ask some dumb questions
and Guthrie, I forget. I can probably ask a
dumb question a month. So why not just give that dumb
question to someone else, and again, I don't mean to say dumb. I'm using that as a
colloquialism to just indicate a slightly
uneducated question. >> Yeah, and in some ways, it's like at the beginning
when I started being, I always said to myself, "I will be the person in the
room who will ask the question." >> Good. That's good. >> But the thing is,
at the beginning, I thought I was taking this risk. >> It's no risk for you. You're a senior house.
It's not a risk for you. >> You're not doing it a
couple of times. No, even when I was junior, I'm saying. >> It all depends on the junior. >> Like we're in a
medium or whatever. >> It all depends on the person. If this is your first
job at a college. >> Yeah. >> Right? You're an
under-represented group, I think it would be really
hard for you to convince yourself that you
have unlimited lives. >> It was, and then when I'm- >> It depends on the group. >> Yeah, exactly. But I would
occasionally take that risk. >> It's good. The more
that you build up, you realize that there are
some questions that are dumb. I was like, "What was that acronym?" "Sorry, we have a glossary, or whatever." Problem solved. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Yeah. Setting people
up for success and making that safe place is all
part of the inclusion. >> Cool. All right. We're way off my format,
but that's fine. >> Do we have a format? I don't know. >> We have a good conversation,
that doesn't matter. But do you have any particular pieces of career advice that you've received that you
did think was valuable, and you have any that you felt
was like, "Somebody told me this. Boy, was that just useful". >> Number 1 career advice.
Number 1 life changing big deal. John Yoo Dell. >> Okay. >> He was a very famous blogger
who worked at Microsoft. He's also a librarian. Told me, "Don't waste
your keystrokes", and I've turned that
into a personal mantra. >> Okay. >> So you know how old you are, you know how fast you type. There are finite number of keystrokes left in your
hands before you die. >> Okay. >> Okay. So we don't hang
out as much as we should. But let's say that after this, you send me a great question, and I'm like, "I don't
really know you that well. Do you really deserve the gift
of 4,000 of my keystrokes? I've only got like a
couple of billion left." What should I do? It was a great question you asked, and I could e-mail it back to you, and you'd be like, "Thanks." Like "Really? Five thousand
keystrokes, and I get Thanks?" I don't even know if
that even worked or not. So where should I put
those keystrokes? I should not put them
in e-mail, ever. E-mails is where
keystrokes go to die. He says, you put them
anywhere with a permalink, anywhere with a URL. SharePoint, OneNote, a Wiki, a knowledge base, a blog, anywhere. So I don't write long e-mails. If I get more than five
sentences into an e-mail, I mean they're going
to call you, or I'm going to write a blog posts. So when you call me later
and asked me a question, I know a lot of amazing question. Free blog post. I
typed the blog post. I blogged it. I'll send you the URL. You say, thanks, and
then every additional person who visits that blog
post multiplies my power. Do that for 20 or 30 years, and you will be a
semi-famous blogger. >> That is a fantastic
place for us to end. Thanks very much Scott
for coming on board. >> Thank you. [MUSIC]
