What Makes Developers Unhappy

so I hate to be the one to bring this to your attention but I fear that you are unhappy and I think that most of your unhappiness is an outgrowth of dealing with other people and I have two reasons for thinking this one is that you know I wrote I wrote code from probably a longer period of time than most of your lives and now I travel and I teach so I dip in and out of shops like programming shops ten or twelve times a year and so I see unhappiness on the ground all kinds of unhappiness in different places so I see it that's one reason I believe that you're unhappy but it's but I also believe that you're unhappy because there's a study about it came out this summer for people some of whose names I cannot pronounce so I won't even try this is a they describe it as being on the distribution and causes a programmer unhappiness and so here's what they did they harvested half a million email addresses from github and then they randomly selected 33,000 people and of those they sent out surveys and they ended up getting 1,300 and some responses they correspond it back and forth with those people and they ended up identifying 219 specific kinds of ways to be unhappy all right and so they took those 219 unhappiness codes and they send them back to this group of people and had them rank which ones causes them unhappiness and they got back a total of 2,200 some references to codes now of course and that's like 10 10 average all right 10 votes per average for some kind of unhappiness but of course it turns out the distribution is not that even here are the top 10 causes a programmer unhappiness being stuck I don't know that I find that kind of weird because I sort of think that's fun but what do I know all right time bad code underperforming colleagues I thought that was super interesting I wondered if they're called they're underperforming colleague got the survey if they would say this like is it a circular firing squad kind of thing feelings of inadequacy boring things unexplained so goes on and on so I found this list super interesting and you notice they categorize some things as internal in some is external I am not all that interested in the internal things I'm gonna agree that they're important but they're not about this talk alright so I'm gonna get rid of them and this I I just don't buy that feeling board is external so I'm because I'm up here and I have this in my hand I'm just gonna get rid of that too and [Applause] so now we're left with these six right this accounts for 500 like this is a large proportion of the reason that we report for being unhappy and if you look at these six things you can really decide I believe that the root cause of all these things is other people that's what we're saying other people can be so annoying like you probably know how to fix all those things right you have an idea but it's other people that keep making mistakes it causing pain that causes pain to roll downhill to you if only they would behave the way you want them to behave everything would be better and so if despite your best efforts you've been unable to get people to behave the way you want them to behave this is obviously a problem of persuasion and now it's the time for me to confess that I have degree in psychology and this is something from which one never recovers it is really shaped how I think about the world and so when I see groups of humans who are unhappy because they can't come to agreement I see it as a problem of persuasion and this makes me sad this shouldn't happen because it turns out that humans are absolutely hardwired to be persuadable like in the early days of human evolution the world is scary and dark and when groups of humans that could bind together in collaborate live to reproduce this is how evolution works right we are products of the process that selected us for cooperation and when people can't get along some there's a fundamental systemic failure in our interactions there's lots and lots of research about this there's lots of data about the ways in which we were persuadable and I'm gonna take you through a couple of different points of view about how persuasion works here's one perspective this guy's named CEO Dini I think I'm not Italian Robert Steele Dini he wrote this book the psychology of suasion persuasion it has sold three million copies I have a book and it will never sell three million copies this is all this is a lot of books right so he goes through in this book he goes through a bunch of research about persuasion in the end subgrouping kinds of persuasion into six categories and so he has a he develops a framework to talk about persuasion and I'm gonna go through those categories tell you what they are the first one the first one about persuasion is the rule of reciprocity and here's what the rule says it says that if I give you something or help you in a way then you are if I attempt to help you if I attempt to do you a favor you are obligated to take it and you are obligated to reciprocate and you are obligated to reciprocate I can ask you for something back even before you volunteer it and I can ask you for something back that is bigger than what I gave you that's what the rule says it's it's interesting this is a rule that saddles humans with a future obligation and the evolutionary basis of this is I can give something away without losing it I can give you food or shelter or space at my fire knowing that it doesn't really actually go away for me and so you can you can really see how the rest of POC the reciprocity rule would make it so that we groups of humans could survive because it's so hardwired into us it's extremely easy to exploit see me know who these guys are yeah you're too young it's really scary there Hari Krishna's yeah and so back in the 80s notice what they have in those baskets they're giving away flowers and here's how they have a hesitation hesitate to use the word scam they have a thing they have a fundraising opportunity and this is how it works they gave you a flower and then they asked you for donation and it really exploits the reciprocity rule right nobody wants the flower like you know like in the 80s all the airports in America were full of these people and they would you would like sneak around through the main like lobby trying to avoid making eye contact with a Hare Krishna because they would give me that flower it was really hard to turn it down and when she took it it was really hard to refuse to give them a donation that it's it's an illustration of how powerful this rules people so if you could not avoid being having a flower forced on you people just throw them away around the next corner and it turns out they actually there would be someone on the Krishna team whose job was to go take the discarded flowers out of trash cans and bring him back for recycling like they totally understood that they were abusing this role and it really offended people so much so that the reason you don't see this anymore is in 1992 the Port Authority of New York City brought a case that went all the way to Supreme Court that banned soliciting like this in public spaces in America we hated that we don't want to be used in this way because this rule is important to us and we don't want to see it violated ok that's rule number one rule number two is consistency it turns out we have a strong built-in desire to continue to appear consistence of things statements we've made earlier one way you see this exploited is that you know that thing parents should know it yeah thing we're in november/december on Saturday mornings this time of year their ads on the Saturday morning cartoons for the new toy and your child begs you for that toy you promise that you will bring it to them for Christmas and then you find that it is unavailable in any store right and so you eventually break down and you buy them something else and then mysteriously after the holidays the ads reappear and now and now the toys are in the stores and your child says your child sees the ads and they say can you get me the whatever it is and you say well I got you Christmas and they say but you promised i time occurs do this on purpose because they're trying to spread their sales cycle out for the whole year and this is a way they can make you buy in December and then they can make you buy again in January it's deliberate the fact that those toys are unavailable in December I know it's kind of just kind of makes me grumpy sir I should switch slides all right so the third rule is about social proof we had a social proof example the other day when the fire alarm went off right social proof says if I don't know what to do in time especially in times of uncertainty I will do what others do like I know the social proof rule I was standing with a group of people in the hallway and I'm like let's go all right it's hard to make that action is rule all the time I'm a I'm a cyclist and it is common to be on a long ride and that is absent of facilities shall we say and then you're in the woods that's what's happening right and it doesn't matter how rule the road is as soon as you get off your bike and go off in the woods cars start going by and and if you have a your friend your set of colorfully dressed cyclists they're standing by the road like all the cars go by and they look at those cyclists and then we there's a possibility that you offend the sensibilities at this point right and so we've developed a street a scheme a strategy like I can absolutely control the gaze of passers-by and here's what you do you sell your friends when car when a car comes to fixedly stare in the opposite direction and you can watch it cars come up all the heads in the car turn to the cyclist and then they all turn and look in the direction of their gaze totally works right social proof so rule number four is about Authority there's two kinds of Authority really there's this there's a the kind of authority that's exhibited by people in uniforms right this is the obey me kind of Authority judges cops teachers we they have a role in society and we agree that we will be persuaded by the things they say because of their role there's also another kind of authority which is called expert authority we use it that a lot here right like I learned TDD because some expert told me I ought to and believe me my initial experience was not good I went from being a super well feeling as if I was a super competent program into being absolutely accomplishing zero from one day to the next because of my attempts to do TDD but I persevered because I thought that the expert was right right it's it's a way to shortcut decision-making about things that we don't know enough about and that can be super handy but it can also go badly wrong you can imagine the second-to-the-last rule is about liking we if if people like you they're more likely to do what you want now I know that you're probably having a big duh right now but but think about that like liking is so biologically hardwired into us that we never really examine what it's about it's amazingly powerful right why do we like people what purpose does liking serve we tend to like people who are similar to us and we tend to like people who have we've had positive interactions with in the past um you know that feeling so liking is linked okay so liking is linked to trust and it's about trusting that they'll reciprocate so there's this binding of community that goes with liking you know that this explains why it feels so creepy if someone is over friendly right have you ever had that feeling it's like I didn't know we were this good of friends there's a there's a feeling you're suspicious of people who are overly friendly for no reason because you you and implicitly that you're being bound in an obligation that you might not want to fulfill and so waiking is so hardwired into us that we rarely examine it but it's an it's interesting to ask right as liking exists like what is the origin of this phenomena and finally the last general category for academia is something called scarcity we tend to value things more if we feel like there's few of them right this is why Amazon taser tells you there's only seven left right the value of things go up when there are fewer of them and this this explains some really curious phenomena you know it is not your imagination that they go more slowly when you were waiting on that perfect place you're right and the people who are leaving like if you're waiting if someone's backing out of a place and you park your car and wait what happens is the the space becomes more valuable because you also want it and the drivers who are leaving that space report that they are hustling that they are moving more quickly because you're waiting but if you measure it they're actually going more slowly the only way you can make them go even slower still is to blow your horn okay that because what it does is it signifies how valuable you find that space the more value you place on it and if they can see it the more reluctant they are to let it go that's the principle scarcity and so there you go that's all of salvini these six properties I they feel in many ways they feel like triumphs of human nature to me like they feel like very positive things and yet see Leaney describes them in this book just weapons of influence now I'm gonna brief digression I am really careful about how many key no effects I use because it feels like you could get bored with it but did you notice how well Andy did yesterday morning here's everything use that wall falling over thing a million times and I never hated him for it so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna play that again so I got so this book truly is about weaponizing these things and I have to tell you I hated it it really offended me I'm gonna read you two quotes from the first chapter he's talking about these things as weapons of influence their strength is in the nearly mechanical process by which the power within these weapons can be activated and the consequent exploitability of this power by anyone who knows how to trigger them that's great here's another quote the great their great advantage is not only that they work but also that they are virtually undetectable all right yeah okay we don't you don't you love that so these things are hardwired right stimulus lead response if you know if you're aware of these rules you can absolutely use them to your advantage this book is about selling people things and it's also doing that if you don't understand these rules you should you should probably not be allowed to go buy a car by yourself but don't go in the car lot all right cuz they all know and so I really appreciate these qualities of humans and I hate the idea that we're gonna surreptitiously in a non-transparent way try to exploit them to manipulate other people and so despite the fact that the research is completely valid I hate this point of view so I'm looking for another one and I found this from the days of black and white this is it's Dale Carnegie you bet he wrote this book how to win friends and influence people and I'm just gonna run you hid the book is in four sections I had never read it like we're all aware of it right probably everybody in here has heard of it I'd never read it it comes in four sections each section is ends with a list of the principles covered in that section so I'm just going to show you the sections and let the principles run and chat underneath it all right so the first section is how to make people like you notice it liking like this his book is opinion right it's personal experience but notice how closely these map into the things that we just talked about with seal doing this the first one is about liking there are six things in this category this is what you have to do I can promise you if he did those things to me I would like you that would totally work right all right here's the next category's about handling people it's got three things in it okay all right and then now this is the longest one there's 12 things in this category this is how to win people over so this goes more directly to pursuade ability at some point about here I started feeling inadequate I mean it's like oh no imagine the world if we all behaved like that throw down a challenge is it's about that consistency like it turns out if you describe people if you say your civic minded kind of person perhaps you'll help me get out the vote people you hang that labeling people they'll live up to it that's what that's about so one last one be leader there's nine things in this category why you read these I want you to think about what would work be like if your bosses did this you have clearly seen this face new haircut at all and when I talked to Sara about this talk I told her I was reading a karna game that I'd never read it and she offered me a one-line synopsis a plot synopsis by cliff notes of Carnegie and this is what she said I think there's a lot of truth in that there's a lot of truth in that there's there's actually the Carnegie people would say one more thing about the point of view of all the things in this book think about every one of those things was not about the other person it's about you like Carnegie's about changing the way you behave his theory is that if you change your behavior you can change the behavior of others it's very definitely about you and so this make people like you handle them respectively win them over and be a leader so if you want and if you want people to be persuaded to your point of view you can do that by changing your own behavior and and I have to say that I like that a lot better than the other point of view right and so here we are we have these things who are unhappy I'm sure you forgot that but we are and it's because of other people we hate that and then we have these two sort of broad sort of frameworks that we can use to persuade people you can use the again weaponize you can weaponize influence like sealed sealed Eenie tells you and it would probably work or you can use the internally focused things of Carnegie and that would probably work too but at this point there's a question we haven't asked yet and it's now time to break it up to bring it up what if it is possible everything that we've talked about so far is assuming that you're right that the best thing to do would be if they behave the way you want them to behave alright and now I think we have to look really hard at that assumption right how do you know that you're right how do I know that you should be doing TDD how can I prove it is better if you make small objects how can I say that my style got just better than yours like we don't have any facts and I like to think that facts are facts still even in the modern world and that we are persuadable by facts but we don't have them very much of what we do what we think about writing software boils down to opinion and so and the arguments I see when I go out in the world the arguments are about not ends they're not about what we should try to achieve they're about how to achieve it alright and so we're having these big fights like either one of two things is true the people that you disagree with are evil and their intent is to destroy your application that's one thing right or they have the same lofty goals as you and they've chosen different means and so it's possible that we are more alike than we are different but you would never know it from my point of view when I got on the road you would never know it based on the viciousness of the disagreements now I think that we do share common goals I do not think the people that disagree with us are evil and I'm I think that not only because I believe in your good intentions I do but I also know what motivates you and if you understood their motivations you would be better equipped to forge agreements so why is it that we do the things we do and how can we motivate people to do work and it turns out this is a problem that's tractable to research - in 2010 a guy named Daniel pink published this book he did a bunch of research at MIT what do you what he did was he had people play puzzles and memorize word lists and shoot ball sir hoops all kinds of tasks and he was any incentivized performance with the money right so if you did it if you did a little bit of good you get a little bit of money if you get kind of a medium kind of good you get him even money if you did really good you'd get a lot of money kind of like work is supposed to work right it was that thing and he and here's what he found as long as the task was purely mechanical if you do this then that happens stuff the money actually did work higher amounts of money created higher incentives which gave led to better performance but as soon as the task became at all creative whenever there's any kind of cognitive component to the task higher rewards led to worse performance and this is not one of this you know modern sociological studies it has not been replicated this has been replicated all over all kinds of different people like this is a fact in terms of for simple straightforward if you know if you do this is that happens task money and centers work great but if you need conceptual creative thinking that those kind of motivations don't work it's it's not that money isn't a motivator money is but you just have to pay people enough to get money off the table like as soon as you pay him enough so that money is not an issue other things are more far more important about motivation so pink found three things there are three things that operate to motivate is the first one is a desire for autonomy we want to control our own lives the second one is a drive to mastery we want to get better at things and the third one is a desire for purpose we want our lives to have meaning for those of you aren't who have never done this you may not recognize that that young man is out on a very early on a cold morning on the roof of a house that's being built by Habitat for Humanity in Dallas he's building someone a house purpose we want to do something we want to work for something bigger than ourselves we crave control of our lives we yearn to get better at things and we hunger for work that has meaning these are the things that motivate us and they they perfectly explain open source software this is why we do it so if we can agree that these are the motivations we share with everybody that all motivations are as honorable as our own then conflicts between us must be due to differences about strategy about how to reach our common lofty goals if we desire the same hands but have simply chosen different means the real insufficiency maybe one of understanding and maybe instead of persuading them to do things our way we'd be better served if we got better at collaboration we need to improve our ability not only to influence but to be influenced and that leads me to teamwork teams studies show groups innovate faster they innovate more quickly people are happier they achieve better results they report higher job satisfaction but of course teams involve people and people really cause so much of our unhappiness so in but it I'm convinced that persuading all those people to do things our way is not the solution to this problem so instead of asking how can we be more persuasive we should perhaps be asking how can we make better teams and Google asked this question back in 2012 Google has a lot of teams and they have a lot of data and they're good at it and they really wanted to know they wanted to be able to predict and make good teams and so they embarked upon a thing they called Project Aristotle they looked at everything they've got all their team's they ranked their efficiency and they measured everything and they could not figure it out they could find no pattern that would allow them to predict the outcome the efficiency of a team based on the individual qualities of the team's members they looked at personality they knew things that did not matter like personality types no matter whether the people are all the same don't matter whether they socialize after work doesn't matter they looked at everything nine ways from Sunday and they could find no pattern in the data and so while they were serving this problem they started looking at they came across the idea that a group could have an identity that was different than the identity of the individuals in the group and so and that led them down a path to some research where people were people were looking other research we're looking at this idea they had someone had come up with a notion that perhaps groups have an intelligence and IQ factor like individuals have and then the IQ of the group is is separate different than the IQ of any individual in the group but something happens in groups so that they form an identity and when goodwill started looking along this dimension they eventually figured it out they eventually isolated the quality that they could use to predict which team was going to be high performing the fundamental thing that distinguishes good teams from dysfunctional ones is how teammates treat one another that's all there is to it there's two basic behaviors that fold into this one is the members of a team speak roughly in the same proportion of course they were psychologists so they called this a quality and distribution of conversational turn-taking and this doesn't mean that in every meeting everybody speaks the same amount it just means like over a course of the day I have a quote as long as everyone got a chance to talk the team did well but if only one person or a small group spoke all the time collective intelligence declined so that's one predictor of whether teams are gonna do well the next one is the thing they call average social sensitivity which and all this means this is another fancy psychological way of saying that members of the team could infer how other teammates felt with nonverbal cues they could look at the expression on your face or they could see your body language and they would know what you were feeling and so these two qualities conversational turn-taking in average social sensitivity are really part of these are two traits that are part of a lot larger bundle and psychologists call it psychological safety this is a group culture where members have a shared belief that their team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking give you a sense of confidence that the team won't embarrass or punish you for speaking up it describes a climate where trust and respect let people be comfortable being themselves now it this is not the only norm that's important right psychological safety is not the only thing teams need like a culture of accountability and clear goals they need other stuff like that but this is the quality Google's needed indicates that psychological safety is the most critical element in making a successful team this is what makes teams work and making your team safe starts with you you can set the tone of the next conversation that you have words matter words about the past are often about blame and you should probably avoid them we're about the future about solutions they're about corrective action they're about what goes next when you're faced with conflict it's okay to have strong opinions but they should be weakly held you should have an identity but keep it small don't bind yourself in the straitjacket of consistency with your past if you think back on Carnegie's suggestions they're all open hearted and forward-looking right they're the kinds of things that would make psychological safety if only we could do them and you have to wonder why we don't what is it that prevents us from sincerely trying to make them like us from winning them over from being leader why do we fail to trust their intentions believe in their motivations and make a safe place consider this if you were in the middle of a heated argument and one of your teammates accused you of being purple you would probably say well tell me more about that you wouldn't have a strong reaction to that because you are not secretly afraid that your purple you are not your code you are not your past you are not your parents and you are not responsible for everything and I think if you pop the why can't we come to an agreement stack all the way to the bottom when you look deep in the well what you come to is fear I know this because I'm afraid and I think that you are too but I also know something else right fear is just the background noise of the human condition we all have it it doesn't really matter we can't escape it but it needn't define us it doesn't matter because despite it alongside it and within it you are also good enough I feel the need to repeat that I stand here and I see you and I know that you are good enough hear me put that burden down your past does not need to dictate your future I know that I will concede that some situations are someone saying that they cannot be fixed and I'm not urging you to stay in them right the height of sanity there is to leave you get to go if it can't be fixed but in situations where the problem is miscommunication rather than pathology the most efficient way to change everyone's future is by taking a deep breath and changing yourself if you want to achieve your purpose learn these tools of persuasion and use the power of persuasion to make your team more psychologically safe we are hardwired to work together a good team is always better than any single individual and to build the best team you must reach inside and find a way to be your best self thank you [Applause]

Channel: Coding Tech

Views: 54,114

Rating: 4.8572202 out of 5

Keywords: developers, developer, software developer, web development, communication

Id: 1q7gKoNI9mY

Length: 32min 36sec (1956 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2017