Stay Soft

I wrote this as my farewell in Slack, and wanted to keep it, so it’s turning into a blog post!

Tomorrow is my last working day at Gusto, which has meant a lot of good-bye conversations, some tears, and a good bit of advice. It’s bittersweet leaving a company full of kind people, but the thing that’s come up in pretty much every conversation is some advice that just keeps coming up… enough that I figured it’d just share it with everyone.

One of the reasons I’m leaving is that my 30th anniversary of working in tech happened in May and hit me a lot harder than I expected. It triggered a lot of feelings, and a lot of introspection. Thirty years is a long time. I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way, learned some the easy way (from watching other people learn them the hard way), and have developed my own rules for working that I think can all be summed up with two words (don’t worry, I’ll explain them):

Stay Soft

Working in tech can make you bitter, fragile and angry. For a long time, I was really angry at all of the various disappointments, bad choices by others that affected me, and the failures that left scars. It took a lot of work to process it and turn those traumas into memories. I wish I’d done the work earlier, but I’m glad I did it at all. That’s where softness comes in.

My friend Cindy Li used to remind me: “work won’t love you back.” It’s true. Work won’t love you back; but, people will. And I think that’s the secret to making it to thirty years without being the human equivalent of a charcoal briquette: focus on the people. Focus on the how I show up and who I show up for, not the what. The what changes. The what is frequently outside of our control. Early in my career, I was all about the what. I wanted to work on the biggest, the coolest, the hardest, and get all the glory for doing things that others didn’t think could be done. It was so bad that at one point, my manager pulled me aside and said, “Kevin, people don’t like working with you. Yes, you’re great at your job, but you’re not fun to be around. You’re sarcastic, and it’s not productive.” That hurt, and made me rethink how I worked.

What we do is a team sport. It takes everyone to build something great. Sometimes, even if you’re working with the best people and do almost everything right, the thing won’t be successful. Maybe it was too early, or too late, or didn’t resonate with the audience. Maybe it was just the wrong thing to build. Tying your self-worth to the result of a project is a recipe for misery. Being a developer isn’t a golden ticket to success. We’re not the most important part of the process; we are just a part in the process.

Back to softness. Instead of investing in what, I invested in who and how. I stopped competing with other people and focused on competing only with Past Me. Just that one change fixed all kinds of problems. The second part was to do my best to play the part that wasn’t being played on the teams I was on, trying to make it easier on everyone else involved. That meant learning what mattered to them, their lexicon, and asking them what I could do to make their goals easier to achieve. Being soft means being pliable, willing to jump in and do the work that no one sees, but that needs to be done. It means being willing to absorb disappointments, changes and consequences without taking it personally (but learning from all of it). It means meeting people where they are, accepting their skills gratefully and helping them learn new ones. It means bending to try new ways of working and accommodating your team’s quirks and personalities.

Story time!

My dad was in the Air Force, and a navigator in fighters, so we moved a lot when I was a kid. I moved twelve times before I turned 21. I was also raised Mormon (but, never lived in Utah other than one very painful year at BYU), which meant that in pretty much every school I was in, I was the only Mormon kid in my class. When we lived in the South, that was a big deal. I got picked on a lot, and excluded from things for something I didn’t choose. That all left scars.

So, I know what it means to be alone, excluded and dismissed for something I couldn’t control.

I started my career in tech totally by accident. I got a job at AOL in tech support because my girlfriend at the time worked there and said I should apply. I loved it. As a sheltered 20 year-old Mormon kid (I was so naive), the motley collection of freaks and weirdos was a gold mine of things to learn. I built a group of friends that would have stuck out like a sore thumb at church. I felt at home and accepted for the first time in my life, and it lit a fire. It made me realize that I could make sure that no one I met would ever feel like I did as a kid. I didn’t have a name for it then, other than it feeling like the right thing to do – and I can guarantee I didn’t succeed all the time (I had a lot of work to do – this was thirty years ago).

There’s power in making people feel welcome and cared for. You go from being a bunch of people to a pirate gang. There’s real power in believing in their potential and telling them. Then, you all become unstoppable and can go do ridiculous things; and, have fun doing them.

I’ve definitely gotten better at it over the years, and still get it wrong. But, that’s softness too, and something I see all the time at Gusto – please don’t lose it. It’s the most welcoming place I’ve ever worked, and hopefully, I’ve helped reinforce that. If I haven’t, I’m sorry and I hope you’ll forgive me.

In closing… stay soft. Love the people you work with. Be there for each other. Help each other get better, and tell people you believe in them. Don’t let the indignities and failures make you bitter. Learn from them and use them to do better next time.

I’ll miss you all. It’s been an amazing four years, but it’s time for me to go figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

Racing Robots

This was originally published on the Creative Coast’s (now Startup Savannah) blog way back in 2016. With AI, it’s feels even more relevant now.

Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” — Annie Dillard

I’ve been organizing Savannah’s RailsBridge chapter for a few years now. By all accounts, it’s been a success: we’ve run more workshops as a small Southern city than anywhere else in the world except San Francisco, NYC & Boulder/Denver (suck it, Atlanta), introduced over 300 people to programming, helped a baker’s dozen find new careers they didn’t realize were possible, and provided a place for the local tech community to meet and help their neighbors.

But, the longer we run these workshops, the more it feels like a rain drop in a forest fire. Introducing people to programming is a great way to get me back in touch with what it feels like to be a beginner, and the students’ excitement and questions about what they should learn next are a great reminder that there is no clear path to success in programming – or in the future of work, which is really what we’re here to talk about. This thought has been tumbling around in my head for years now and has surfaced in a few different venues, but I’ve never really sat down to put it all in text.

After World War II, a whole generation entered the middle class thanks to the need for skilled labor to build our industrial future. Factories were humming. Unions were organized and fought for their members. Public highway and other construction projects kept millions of people busy. It was possible for someone who was just willing to work hard and learn a skill to enter, and stay in, the middle class without a college degree. A lot of Americans think it’s somehow possible to go back to that glorious industrial paradise, that we can somehow put all those people back to work in factories that either no longer exist, or have been completely re-staffed with robots.

That’s not going to happen. Those days are gone. China didn’t steal all those jobs – robots did. And it’s not just the factories. Wal-Mart’s wholesale destruction of Main Street? Robots. Amazon’s annihilation of small bookstores? You guessed it, robots again.

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” — Carl Sagan

Back to programming: it’s the blue collar skilled work for this century. In your spare time, using free resources on the web, you can learn enough to get yourself and your family to the middle class – without a college degree. I did it. A lot of my friends did it. There are at least two generations of great developers who don’t have computer science related degrees – because the web, especially the web at scale, moved faster than university curriculums could keep up.

While it’s harder now to go from zero to “job”, it’s still possible, and people still do it all the time. It’s why everyone is so interested in coding bootcamps and why STEM is on the tip of every politician’s tongue when they talk about education. But, turning everyone into a programmer isn’t going to keep the robots at bay, and it’s not going to keep everyone employed when 50-70% of the jobs that exist today just… disappear.

We are all racing robots for our jobs

We are all racing robots for our jobs. Most of us haven’t realized this yet and are about to get trampled and left behind. That sounds dystopian, but the more I think about it, the more apt that image is. The small bookstore owners can tell you about it, so can the store owners that used to have stores on Main Street USA, and our grandparents who used to assemble cars.

“If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, he will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.” – Seth Godin

We’ve failed generations of students in preparing them to race robots. We still rely on Industrial Age education methods, meant to churn out obedient little factory workers. Sorry, but we don’t need those anymore. That’s what the robots are for. We are failing our children right now by not teaching them the skills that will keep them ahead of the robots. Teaching everyone to be a programmer isn’t the solution – it’s just the one thing we can point to as being somewhat robot-proof (even though it’s not). We need to break it down further and realize that the economy of the future will have very few places for unskilled labor. Anything that’s done by rote will be automated.

And just because you sit in an office and work on a computer, don’t think you’re safe. Don’t think we’ll see robot lawyers, accountants and insurance agents? How much of preparing taxes is really just complex repetition? Quite a bit when you really break it down. Just think of how many jobs will just… not exist. My 50-70% number looks like an understatement now, doesn’t it? The days are already gone where you learn a skill in trade school or in college and then spend your entire career doing that one thing.

Even baby boomers held an average of 11 different jobs in their careers, and that number is probably only going to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised if our children end up with an average of 11 different careers during their working lives. So, given all this dystopian information, what do we do about it? How can we prepare the next generation for a world where their jobs will continually disappear?

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Sir Ken Robinson

We need to change how we educate our children and make it more closely match how they’ll be forced to adapt to an ever-increasing rate of change. That means that rote learning, fact regurgitation, testing as the only tool for measuring fluency… all of those things need to be burned to the ground. In their place, we need to teach:

  • Resiliency, flexibility and problem solving: They will constantly be presented with new problems and will have to come up with solutions based on very little information. We need to teach them how to do just enough research to solve a problem, and I don’t have a word for it, but I’ll call it Minimum Viable Fluency: what’s the minimum amount of knowledge you need to have about a subject in order to solve the problem at hand? I can’t tell you how often I have to go from zero to MVF in order to put out the latest and greatest fire at work.
  • Entrepreneurship: The future of work is most likely a series of freelance gigs that kind of turn into what we think of as a job. There’s not a lot of security in that, so we need to teach them how to find, quantify and exploit opportunities in the market. They need to have all those tools at the ready so they can move, adapt and survive.
  • Teamwork Across Diverse Skills and Experience: The more diverse the set of experiences and outlooks brought to a problem, the more likely it is that the team will find the best possible solution. That means we need to learn how to work with groups with different perspectives, experiences and talents than our own. We can’t build the future without including as many people as possible.

“But, it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope – because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, propose to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” — FDR

All of that brings me back to Savannah. Our lovely city is in a precarious position when it comes to the future I’ve laid out. We have a 26-28% generational poverty rate. That number has stuck like glue for thirty years and shows no sign of budging. All the social programs and services the city, county and state have put in place are barely keeping up have failed to put even a dent in the number. When all of those low-wage jobs get automated away? When the port is 99% automated? When hotels no longer need people to clean toilets or make beds? That 26% will look like a golden age. I wouldn’t be surprised if the poverty rate doubles in the next twenty years. No tax base, no new hotel, parking garage or marathon, will be able to cope. I’m not going to go into the systemic reasons that some people in our city want to have a quarter of our neighbors living in poverty. I don’t care what their reasons are because the outcome of those reasons is unacceptable.

It should be unacceptable to the vast majority of us who live here that a full quarter of us are below the poverty line. We are wasting billions of dollars in human potential because we refuse to admit our complicity in the situation and resolve to fix it. The more research I do, and the more I learn about this, the more convinced I am that addressing and fixing Savannah’s poverty is the key to building a Savannah that will thrive through the future of work. If we don’t, the robots will win and our social infrastructure won’t be able to cope with the shock to the system. You would think that I’d be in my backyard digging my bunker to sit out the end of the world, but I’m not. I’m convinced that we can solve these problems if we work together, get creative, and work like hell.

“By all means, break the rules. Break them beautifully, deliberately and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.” — Robert Bringhurst

Where do we start? It starts with what I said above about education. Those same skills need to be shared across the community. Here are just a few of the things I think we need to focus on:

  • We need to support and grow our small businesses to better take advantage of social media, modern web-based tools, and better capture the 2.6 billion dollars tourists spend in our city every year. Growing those small businesses means they can hire more employees, and we get to keep more of those 2.6 billion dollars in the community.
  • We need to embrace the successes of The STEM Academy at Bartlett and put them into practice at schools all over the system. There’s no excuse to have this internationally-recognized jewel of a school in our city and not use what works there to improve our neighborhood schools.
  • We need brave and daring local leaders to stand up and speak out. Governments act when constituencies are well-organized and loud. Too many of us have been too quiet for too long. That’s going to mean reaching out across Savannah’s well-fortified silos and working with Savannah’s amazing and dedicated non-profits and activists, having uncomfortable conversations, and working together on the things we can agree on, while accepting that there will always be things we don’t.
  • Along with those leaders, more of us need to pay closer attention to the decisions made at every level of government and keep our elected leaders accountable to us, their constituents. If we don’t speak up, they’ll listen to those who do. If we don’t pay attention, they’ll never have to answer for their actions.
  • We need to be better about sharing and celebrating our successes, coming together to learn from our failures, accepting our place in history and coming to peace with it, and then working to make the future brighter for all or our neighbors.

None of these things are impossible. We have a community of creative, committed and energetic people. We have all the human capital we need. We know the tools exist, and we have some local examples of things that work. All we need to do is put them together. I remain, as always, optimistic about the future. Not because I think things will be perfect, because that’s silly. I remain optimistic because I believe in our capacity as human beings, neighbors and friends, to improve and increase our capacities. The greatness of the American Dream is that we accept that our union isn’t perfect and that every day all of us are responsible for making it closer to the more perfect ideal.

“Optimism isn’t principally an analysis of present reality. It’s an ethic. It is not based on denial or rosy thinking. It is a moral posture toward the world we find ourselves in. If everything seems great, there’s no need for optimism. The river of good news just carries you along.” — Josh Marshall

The Nonsense Continues Unabated

My nonsensical House rep, Buddy Carter, filed a bill to rename Greenland to “Red, White and Blueland.” This isn’t the first time Buddy’s been ridiculous in public, embarrassing his constituents.

Here’s a letter I sent to him this morning.

Dear Mr. Carter,

What are you doing? Greenland doesn’t belong to us. It’s not ours to rename. Yet, you filed a ridiculous bill to rename it that is being loudly and roundly mocked around the world, bringing yet more embarrassment to the First District.

This is the latest, and the most egregious, in a long line of public embarrassments while you’ve been our Representative.

I am sorely disappointed in your priorities, where you choose to spend your time while being paid by US, and the constant nonsense that comes out of your office. I know you’re excited to see the Executive Branch burn itself down at the hands of an unelected, unvetted, drug-abusing, fascist billionaire, but please, direct that energy where it can do some good.

Sincerely,
Kevin Lawver

A Quick 2024 Retrospective of Good Things

2024 was a lot of things, a lot of them not so great. But, there was good stuff too! Here’s a quick recap of some good things and favorites from 2024:

  • Jodi Chromey’s multiple posts about how men don’t appreciate art created by women (start here) bounced around in my head all year. My intention for 2024 was to read more fiction by women, and it was extremely successful! How successful? Read on!
  • This year, I discovered the work of Annalee Newitz. My favorite novel that I read this year was The Terraformers. It’s an incredible feat of world building that had me so bought in so quickly that by the time the flying moose shows up early on in the book, it made total sense.
  • I didn’t stop there! Other great books by women I read this year:
    • Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
    • The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
    • The Waymakers by Tara Jaye Frank
  • My favorite album of the year? Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee. I don’t often get lyrics stuck in my head, but this album lives in my head.
  • My favorite song of the year is definitely Learn to Swim by Joshua Idehen. It’s gorgeous and gets me in the feels every time.
  • I played a decent amount of video games this year. My two favorite games this year were Dredge and Astro Bot.
  • I lost more weight! I lost about 35 pounds this year and for the first time in over fifteen years, I’m under 300 pounds. I feel better than I have in years, and I’m now less than a hundred pounds from my goal weight.
  • After over five years as a non-manager, I’m a manager again. This happened towards the end of the year, and caps off a year full of stretching and operating at a scope larger than I could have had at a small startup. Gusto continues to be a lot of fun to work at (we’re hiring!).
  • I successfully broke my Instagram and Facebook addiction. This is a list of good things, so I won’t share my thoughts on Meta and mainstream social media, but the apps no longer live on my phone and I don’t miss them.

I think that’s all for now. I’m still trying to figure out what my intentions (aka resolutions) are for 2025, but I think they’ll largely be what they were this year: appreciate more art made by women, continue getting healthier, and do more fun stuff.

The Thief in the Public Square

Automattic, the owner of both Tumblr and WordPress, admitted that they’re working with AI companies to sell their users’ creations to help train AI models. This site has been on WordPress for a long time, and moved WordPress installations between hosts at least twice.

This is so hard to take. So much of the web trusts WordPress with their work, and Tumblr users trusted it with their communities and art.

I’ve been thinking about how AI using content available on the web, regardless of its license, to train their generative models is different from search engines indexing our content in order to power their search products (and make money by selling ads around those results).

The difference is that search engines are directories, or maps, that take public data and use it to route people back to the source of that data. It’s a symbiotic relationship, where the publisher of that content eventually gets a potential reader/viewer/patron/customer pointed their direction based on a query that person put in the search engine. The original source of that content is still the destination.

Generative AI doesn’t do that. It gives no credit to their “inspirations” and no creator ever gets a new potential patron. Why? Because the original source is now just a signal that creates a mediocre knock-off based on it, and millions of other works, all created by people.

These companies are thieves in the public square, taking the property that others have created, giving them no credit, no way to make a new fan of their work, and producing knockoffs, polluting the world with… uninspired bullshit.

Can the entire world file a class action copyright lawsuit against these companies? How else do we tell them to make their models opt-in instead of opt-out, and make it possible to remove our content from their bottomless pits of copy pasta.

In other news, I need to migrate my blog off of WordPress, and I really don’t want to.

My Favorite Albums of 2023

I am apparently not in the musical consumption mainstream. I still love sitting down to a meal of an entire album instead of singles. I keep my playlist of favorites from the year still, but I love albums.

This year, I’m trying to avoid albums by artists I’ve called out in previous years, so even though they were great, no New Pornographers (but go listen anyway).

This post might grow as I listen to things from the year this week, but here’s my list of favorite albums of the year!

In no particular order:

  • Archimède: Fréres: They’re French, sing in French, and write super poppy songs you’ll sing along with even if you don’t understand a word they’re saying.
  • Nakhane: Bastard Jargon: Nakhane has a voice you can’t ignore, gorgeous and magnetic. It’ll pull you in, hold you close and then break your heart.
  • SUSS: SUSS: Like William Tyler, SUSS are writing soundtracks for movies that don’t exist, for sweeping desert vistas and alien cowboys. They make perfect music for deep work.
  • Killer Mike: Michael: This album is deeply personal and has the first hip hop song to ever make me cry.
  • Film School: Field: This band speaks to my early 2000’s indie soul. Fuzzy guitars, catchy tunes, and… just got get lost in it.
  • The Beths: Expert in a Dying Field: The Beths are new to me this year, and I’m sad it took me this long to discover them. They’re cute without being cloying, with amazing harmonies and very clever lyrics. Strong Dean & Britta or The Submarines vibes.
  • The Rural Alberta Advantage: The Rise & The Fall: I think this band invented Stadium Folk. It’s acoustic AND epic and you’ll probably love it.

And an honorable mention to Rubblebucket, who I discovered this year, but the album I fell in love with was last year’s Earth Worship, especially Geometry.

And another for Skinshape, who released one of the dreamiest songs I’ve heard in a long time, The Ocean. The whole album is great, but that song is just so old school dreamy soul, I think I listened to it on repeat for at least two days.

I wish you happy listening on this final week of 2023 and a thousand great musical discoveries for 2024!

We are all made of star stuff

I don’t know if you watched Carl Sagan as a kid, but a friend shared this poem, and I was instantly transported back to watching him tell me I was made of star stuff when I was 6.

We have calcium in our bones,
iron in our veins,
carbon in our souls,
and nitrogen in our brains.

93 percent stardust,
with souls made of flames,
we are all just stars
that have people names.

93 Percent Stardust by Nikita Gill

Wrapping up National Blog Post Month

Between writing a blog post almost every day and going back to the beginning of this blog and re-reading stuff I wrote over twenty years ago, it’s been a bloggy month over here!

I only missed two days. I can live with that. I’ve blogged more this month than I have in years, and that was the whole goal.

My big learning from this experience is that social media really killed my blogging. If you look at the first few years of posts, I sometimes posted multiple short posts in a day and maybe one longer thing a week.

Now, I never write short posts. They’re all longer than a paragraph, and that’s what blogging means to me now, which I think is misguided and too inspired by more “professional” blogs. This is my personal space, and I should use it to post whatever inane nonsense is on my mind. It’s not a diary, but it is kind of a public journal of what I’m thinking about – a perennial first draft of things that might become something more professional in the future.

I need to give myself permission to post the first draft (sorry in advance), and be OK with it living forever(ish). Because that’s what blogging should be – the great empathy engine of the web. It’s our thoughts, our selves, out there for anyone to stumble across and get a glimpse of our lived experience. Whether you’re me, a cishet white male with serious dad energy, a writer in Minnesota, or a famous sci-fi author in Ohio, your life is worth talking about. Your thoughts are worth sharing.

I probably won’t post once a day, but I’m hoping I make blogging a habit again. Fingers crossed!

The expert is calling from inside the house

I’ve played product manager more often this year than I have in years. It’s been a fun role to get back into.

It’s also been a long time since I played product manager at a larger company. The last two times were tiny startups, and well, it’s a very different experience.

With tiny startup product management, I didn’t have a lot of internal expertise to rely on, so most of the research was external – I had to find people to talk to, find research, do a lot of research, and figure out how to validate assumptions.

A lot of that is similar in a larger company, but, the expertise is inside the walls at a larger company. I’ve had great results in all of my recent projects by just asking for folks who have expertise in big public Slack channels and they just appeared!

I think we frequently discount our own, and our peers’, expertise when doing discovery and research, especially our peers in customer support roles. I think that’s a huge mistake. Who talks to your customer more than the folks in customer support? Nobody. Who knows your product better than the people who have to support it? Pretty much nobody.

I was able to jump start onboarding to new subject areas a whole lot faster by asking our support teams about their processes and doing user interviews, just like I would with a potential customer, and that lead to some really interesting discoveries and avenues to explore.

So, don’t take your internal experts for granted! Ask them things! Praise them! Share your results back with them!

Avoiding cynicism

I mentioned this last week, but while I’ve been fixing formatting issues on my old blog posts, I’ve made the mistake of reading some of them. Getting a glimpse of me 20 years ago has been interesting – he was so angry, usually about work, and talked about it a lot.

That guy was on the verge of burnout every other week, and I think he was actually burned out quite a lot.

I’m not angry about work anymore. I was last really burned out over five years ago.

I think if I’d kept going the way I was headed back then, I’d be a cynical burned out husk. I haven’t read beyond the beginning of 2003 yet, but I can’t wait to see when the switch flipped (having a “coming attractions” for my own past is pretty weird).

If you asked me right now how I avoid being a cynical husk, I think it comes down to my rules for working:

  • Never miss a chance to celebrate. We’re confronted with failure so often at work, that we should celebrate every little win.
  • Focus on the who and the how. We don’t control what we work on most of the time, and pinning our self-worth to the success or failure of the things we work on is a recipe for sadness. So, I no longer really care what I work on. I care about enjoying the people I work with, and focus on how I work. I can control how I work more than I can any other part of it.
  • Compete only with yourself. I try not to compare myself to other people. I’ve got my challenges and other commitments, and I know nothing of theirs. So, I only compete against Past Me™️ – which also helps make sure I’m constantly improving, even if it’s just a little bit.

That’s not a lot of rules… but they work for me. I might change them…