Category: family

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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
  • First day back

    I was off all last week for Thanksgiving, and I had a very hard time getting back into work mode… which I guess is the sign of a good vacation (even though we didn’t go anywhere).

    On top of that, I’m prepping for a big allergy test, which means I’ve been off of all antihistamines for 5 days (and have 16 left to go… sign) and I am really starting to feel it. I’ve only got a couple days left of National Blog Post Month and I’m not going to stop so close to the end! The posts just might get dumber from here on out.

  • Nothing to say

    Brian and I successfully accomplished Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, and today I’m very tired.

    I think it’s because I’m in the “everything’s worn off” part of the prep for an allergy test that’s happening in a couple of weeks. No antihistamines means I’m a snotty tear-streaked mess, which is both a fashion no-no, and exhausting.

    So, this is all I’ve got today. Hope you’re having a happy Black Friday if you celebrate.

  • Bring me all the joys

    I’ve co-lead Gusto’s Employee Resource Group for families for the last year and a half, and it’s been a ton of fun. It’s brought back a ton of memories from when the kids were little, and reminded me (constantly) that parenting never stops being stressful. The stressors just change over time, get more complicated and the mistakes get more costly.

    And that gets even more precarious the more “sprinkles” that we discover in the lovely desserts that are our children. I love that phrase. I got it from one of the parents who leads one of our committees, and it’s just lovely.

    My kids are both in the “non-boring” parts of the gender and sexuality spectrums, and it took me years to realize how much fear and worry comes with that. I am afraid for them all of the time. It never stops.

    Which brings me to the joys.

    I just finished Charlie Jane Anders’ Unstoppable series and I loved it. It’s full of queer teens and space battles – and joy. Joy at coming out to yourself, to your friends, and being accepted for your strengths. Read it. You’ll dig it. It was the most recent reminder that while I’m afraid, I also need to embrace all of the joys that come along with life with sprinkles.

    More joy? One of the first communities I discovered when I joined Mastodon was the trans community. Seeing happy trans people, celebrating their transitions and the little victories along the way has been such a relief, in a way that I didn’t really understand for a while.

    Joy is a vaccine against fear. Does it make the fear go away? No, but it makes it easier to fight and get through.

    So, get out there, bask in the joy. It really does make the fear easier to handle.

  • Proof I can maintain something

    The celebration image Duolingo gave me that says "I'm on a 1500 day learning streak!"

    Today is my 1,500th straight day of doing at least one lesson on Duolingo. That’s over four years of learning Spanish (and trying out Korean, Chinese, Turkish and Portugese, but I always go back to Spanish). Am I conversational yet? Oh no. Can I understand more than I used to? Yes. I can even make myself understood in Spanish if the topic isn’t technical.

    I just want to remind myself that I can stick to something because I missed posting for yesterday. I have a great excuse: I felt like garbage and didn’t do much other than take a nap.

    I don’t feel much better today, but here I am, trying to make sure that I only miss one day.

    And that’s really the thing with habits, isn’t it? It’s not that you never miss a day – it’s that you don’t let missing one day make you miss two, then three, then stop altogether.

  • Be kind, but have boundaries

    After yesterday’s post, Amy asked another question that I’m ill-equipped to answer, but I’m going to try anyway:

    Ok, tough question: a thing I struggle with, (maybe as a woman or maybe just my family of origin), is me behaving in a kind manner often means being seen as inherently weak or (shudder) useable to others. Any insights into how a woman might reconcile or boundary that in a patriarchy?

    Amy van der Hiel

    I think a lot of people mistake kindness for weakness, and I’ve never understood it. Being kind is work. Being kind when you’re in a bad mood, unwell, or struggling is even more work. So, to anyone who equates kindness with weakness or gullibility, you’re just wrong and I’d love it if you’d stop.

    I’ve seen “do no harm, but take no shit” around the internet, and I think “do no harm” is too low a bar, but I definitely agree with the sentiment. We all need to set boundaries, protect our inner peace and make sure we’re kind to ourselves.

    I think this can be hard at work – we want to be available to our coworkers and be helpful, but that’s a trap. If we want to be present when we’re working, we need to set some boundaries and make sure we’re taking care of ourselves and our families.

    As for how to set them as a woman, as not a woman, this is what I’ve observed: people will try to take advantage of them because they see it as weakness, but if you’re firm with them then hopefully they’ll stop. Hugs are a good example. I no longer just assume people are fine with hugs. I don’t even offer to someone I’ve not hugged before, because I know it’s one of those “openings” men take advantage of. I think setting a boundary that you don’t hug coworkers you don’t already have a close relationship where there won’t be misunderstandings is one a lot of my female coworkers have had – and yeah, it can be awkward, but I think the momentary awkwardness is better than any unintentional (or intentional) misunderstandings later.

    Being kind to myself involves the following:

    • No arguing with strangers on the internet. It’s draining and not worth it to me. I just don’t engage, which means I definitely share less than I used to on social media.
    • Turn off all notifications outside of working hours except those that are related to a real emergency (PagerDuty, for example).
    • Don’t try to do more than one thing at a time. Multitasking is a myth and I can’t do my best work if I’m juggling too many things.
    • Treat no as a kindness. Saying yes to something I don’t have time for isn’t kind – because I’ll either not get it done, or I’ll half-ass it. If it’s really important, then something else will have to not happen.
    • Admitting when I’m not well, and taking time to recover. This one’s really hard, because I work from home so the bar to call in sick feels higher than it should be.

    I think enumerating your boundaries, needs and wants is helpful. Once you know what they are, you can communicate them to your family, friends, manager and peers. I love having the “exchange of needs” conversation with my manager. It helps set expectations for both of us, and makes working together a lot easier – because we both know what to expect, and have easy ways to measure if we’re asking for something that’s beyond those expectations.

    I think a lot of us grew up thinking that taking time for ourselves was selfish, and it just isn’t. We can’t be effective for others if we’re not kind to ourselves – and part of that kindness is balancing the giving with recovery and personal growth.

    I hope this helps. Healthy boundaries create healthy relationships.

  • The intersections of kindness, humor and privilege

    On Mastodon this morning, as I sat watching football (aka soccer) and drinking coffee, I asked what I should write about. Amy came through for me:

    You’ve always seemed to put a lot of thought into kindness and humor (you++). I’d be very interested to read your thoughts on that – not just as a something you decide to do as practice or ethic – but maybe a bit deeper as to why and how and how you receive kindness and humor from others too.

    Amy van der Hiel

    I think this post from 2019 explains some of the how, but definitely not all of it – and I wrote it almost 4 years ago, and I think things have evolved a little in how I think about the why of it all.

    Before I get to the why, I need to talk a little bit about privilege.

    Part of the process of accepting that I have privilege was deciding what I was going to do about it, which is constantly evolving and informed by the results of a lot of practice and trying new things. I am a middle aged, cisgender, heterosexual, white man. That’s a whole bucket of privilege – the entire modern world was made to work for people just like me.

    I’ve also had a very long career, full of ups and downs, learning new things, failing a lot and learning from a lot of those failures.

    That puts me in a place of even more privilege. I work at a very successful tech company, and am a very senior engineer, where I have a lot of influence and yep, a lot of privilege.

    I’ve also realized (multiple times, because it takes repeating things before you really learn it) that because of that privilege, I get away with things that other don’t. I’m not invulnerable, but I know where my lines are and am really good at figuring out how to cause trouble in a way that doesn’t get me in more trouble than it’s worth.

    And that brings us to why I am the way that I am, and why I believe kindness and humor are the best tools to do good work.

    Pushing limits and making space

    I have a big Pride flag hanging from the curtain rod in my office, and I wear chunky rainbow glasses when I work on the computer.

    I bring up equity issues at work in the open and to leadership fairly frequently.

    Why? It’s fun. It’s also important. But it’s really because it pushes the line of what’s acceptable and creates a space for others to do it as well. If I, the normiest normcore dad in the world, can wear rainbow glasses and fly a pride flag that’s visible in every Zoom call I’m on, then others can too. I want to derisk people being their full selves as much as possible – and if that means I get to be weird and a little silly, that’s a bonus.

    Humor as humanity permission slip

    It’s hard to be nervous or stressed out when you’re smiling. I work with a lot of people who are decades younger than I am, and I see huge confidence issues. Work is also sometimes full of stressful and unpleasant situations: software breaks, projects fail, people screw up, layoffs happen out of the blue, and it all feels terrible.

    So, I make jokes. I used to make sarcastic and sometimes mean-spirited jokes… it’s taken a long time to fix that. Now, I make terrible puns, jokes about software, or myself – anything to break the tension so we can recenter and get on with fixing whatever it is.

    Humor allows us space to admit our humanity. It is a permission slip to take a second, find a little bit of joy, and recenter before we grapple with whatever fresh hell awaits us.

    Kindness and humor are invitations

    I don’t know quite how to put this part into words, but work is a community, and communities work best when people are comfortable, willing to express themselves, and play along.

    Kindness and humor are the best ways I’ve found to help kickstart the vulnerability required to create great teams. I can afford to be vulnerable because I’ve got this super giant soft pillow of privilege, and I know that not everyone does. So, I need to be vulnerable first to show that it’s possible. I then also need to reward and celebrate vulnerability in others.

    They’re also a great way to get people to take risks and get out there. Building people up to the point that they get out there and do a presentation or volunteer to lead a project is such a rewarding feeling – and the best part is that I can then praise them publicly, which reinforces feelings of safety and possibility.

    A big part of the why for all of this is that I don’t want to be the reason that someone holds back part of themselves. I don’t want my overwhelming normieness to shut people down, make them withdraw or make them feel anything other than completely welcome and appreciated.

    I think this might actually be the core of it: I love learning about people, about their loves and lives and what makes them tick. I want to work with people who, like Emile Zola said, “live out loud.” If there’s anything I bring to a situation that would keep them from feeling safe being around me, I want to fix it – and sometimes that means turning my own volume down.

    It’s been a huge realization that sometimes, just because of what I look like (resting dad face), and my visible undeniable privilege, that might not always be possible. Just me being there might be enough for someone to withdraw, and I have to be OK with that. But, there are things I can do to make things better, to make people feel more safe, and I think the obligation of privilege is to make more room for people to be themselves, to make room for them at the table – especially the board room table.

    And this is where I am today. I’m trying to figure out how kindness, privilege and humor can build equity. If I make other people feel safe, but that safety’s not actually there, I’m not really helping. But, if I can create actual safety, and create more space where people can be seen and rewarded for being their full selves, that’s worth it.

    I’m still working on it. It’s still a “practice”.

  • Clarity

    This post is… I don’t know where it’s going to go, but I feel like I need to write my way through it. Let’s see what happens. But before that, I need to cover some history:

    • 1995 – 2008: I worked at AOL, was very involved in church and had small children. I had two major leg injuries: a ruptured ACL and a dislocated ankle that required major surgery.
    • 2008 – 2021: Moved to Savannah. I worked at a series of small startups and a lifestyle company, quit my church, had growing children, and got very involved in the community, serving on at least one governing board pretty much the whole time from The Creative Coast to Susie King Taylor Community School. Also co-founded a non-profit, TechSAV. Oh yeah, I gained close to 100 pounds between 2008 and 2019.
    • 2021 – now: Started working at Gusto, by that point, had already quit all the governing boards, and COVID stopped us from doing all TechSAV events.

    It’s now 2023 and I’m still working at Gusto, and loving it. I love having work/life balance finally, and not having to wear all the hats of being a startup CTO.

    I’ve been thinking about looking for a board to join, and what to do with all my newfound time, but… for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on, I was dragging my feet. I just don’t want to.

    Why? What changed?

    I realized that since we moved to Savannah, I’ve been under a huge amount of stress – both externally and internally applied. This is the first time since probably 2000 that I haven’t been a Single Point of Failure for something at work. Balance wasn’t something I could physically do, much less something I had in my life.

    Now that I’m finally feeling some relief from the stress, I’ve lost 50 pounds in the last two years, and I’m not done.

    I don’t want to join any boards. I don’t want to lead some great new thing.

    I want to get healthy.

    I finally have some time that’s mine. I’m not on call for the first time in twenty years. People rely on me, but I’m not a Single Point of Failure for anyone’s livelihood (except my own).

    It feels selfish to want to spend time on me, but I need to. I don’t want to commit to something else until I feel like I can do it without sacrificing my health, which I still need to improve.

    Clarity. It took me a while to get here, but now that I’m here, I’m at peace with it. I’m investing in the opportunity to be here, to be present, to make sure that I can be here and be active for a long time.