[Daily] Saturday 2018.05.26 - Brain dump: a few things I learned this week, mostly about people

I learned a few things this week from two events and a new acquaintance. This is a brain dump of things that stuck.


== Work -> Coworkers -> Health ==
On Tuesday night I went to an event where Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford Business professor, talked about his new book on the cost of modern management practices. His opening line: “According to the Mayo Clinic, the person you report to at work has a bigger impact on your health than your family doctor.” It's obvious when you think about how often we see doctors, but it's an unusual way to frame the people we work with: are they helping extend your life? That's a question to turn inwards to ask myself: am I helping extend the lives of my coworkers (or killing them faster)? It's also a responsibility I had never explicitly thought about.

One objection to measuring "well-being" at a company is that it's hard to measure. However, Jeffrey said a single self-reported 1-5 of “do I feel healthy” has been found to correlate to mortality. I.e. people roughly know whether they are healthy or not.

== You get what you screen for == 

Wednesday night, I attended a panel about mentorship that featured a mentor/mentee chain: Ken Coleman, Ben Horowitz, and Michel Feaster. The second half of the panel focused on diversity and inclusion (often shortened to d&i). People management lessons are best conveyed in stories, and Ben told two stories that stuck.

The first story was about a person named Chris they'd hired for a role that required being really good at making people like you. They had interviewed and passed on a number of people who were investment bankers (Ben joked that was probably not the ideal profession to be looking in) before considering alternative profiles. Chris used to work as a waiter at the Cheesecake Factory, where they rank waiters by their tip percentages. Chris had ranked #1 chain-wide in percentage tips, so he was a champion in a field where to be good, you have to be liked. Ben's points: 1) when hiring, are you defining what skills you actually need for the job? (notably Ben didn't stress the title of the job, rather the skills needed), and 2) are you then seeking out people with those skills in all possible places, including non-obvious ones?

Ben prefaced the second story with, "People at the firm don't like it when I tell this story, but I'll tell it anyway." He once asked a team that was all women, "What is it about your interview process that you can't hire any men?" The team responded that they screen for helpfulness. Ben could have taken this response in a number of ways—are no men helpful? this team must be crazy—but his observation was, hey, it's unusual to screen for helpfulness, and that is clearly making a material difference.

I remember this one statement by Ken: if you are discussing a candidate and can't identify their weaknesses, stop. You are probably missing something because everyone has weaknesses, and if you know about them upfront, you can manage around them.


== Words and connotations; Culture from office furniture ==

Yesterday, I met up with Jules W, whom I ran into at the a16z event. He's a product manager at Slack working on growth. During our conversation, he told two stories that gave me, "oh shit, I'd never thought of that" moments.

The first story is about words. At Slack, they did a few months of user research and found the most effective phrase to describe Slack to most new users was "collaboration hub." For the longest time, Stewart, the CEO, had opposed using the word "collaboration" because it's a fluffy, overused-to-the-point-of-meaningless word in Silicon Valley. But the Valley is not the rest of the country, where "collaboration" can be viewed quite positively, and the Valley already knows and uses Slack. Their research also found that people were confused by the word "tool," because people outside of tech don't really use "tool" to describe software and tend to think of physical objects. A "hub" captured the feeling of "tool" while illustrating the purpose. For me, that's something to chew on regarding the words we use to describe Instabase. Mind you, we have many other critical things to think about, but I had at least personally been operating with the mindset that an "operating system" sounds cool!

The second story was actually a statement. "Slack will never have a ping pong table." Why? He said, a ping pong table is fun for people who have looser schedules—which tend to be younger folks who don't have families. They can afford to take longer breaks, play matches, and make up for it by working late. People with more commitments outside of work can be conflicted, possibly feeling left out because they can't afford the breaks in the middle of the day. In general, Slack wants to foster a culture of "come to work, work hard and stay focused, then go home," because that culture tends to work for a wider range of people. And building that culture requires thinking about even the office furniture. I have thought about open offices and noise and distraction, but not about this particular second-order effect of fun things.

[Daily] Thinking Spaces - Saturday 2018.05.19

I wonder if loud environments are particularly distracting to people who are wired to think a certain way. In college I talked to two friends who said they don't think in words; they think visually and in symbols. About two years ago I remember Blake Ross wrote a note on Facebook about the opposite: he can't visualize anything in his head (known as aphantasia). I primarily think in words and sentences, not pictures—I can visualize things, but in general it's not natural, and I find spatial thinking tough.

This morning, I got a coffee and quickly left Sightglass on Divisidero, where they were playing rock music at volume 10 in their airy space that enhances the sound of chatter and coffee grinding. I had pulled out my computer to write, put in earplugs (an underrated city essential), and still had trouble focusing, so I moved down the street to Vinyl. I remember reading in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains that Dr. Paul Farmer used to study in the same room as someone (a sibling?) practicing drums, and I find that dumbfounding and superhuman.

Incidentally, an article about how open offices are bad for women came out recently. Besides one internship where I worked in a cubicle, I've never known anything different, and in general I prefer open offices. I have fortunately not encountered—or not noticed—any comments from people around me about me as I've worked. If anything, discomfort I've felt sitting close to others has been in my own head due to self-consciousness, especially early on in my career: am I working too slow? Can people see me struggling? I remember feeling this doubt strongly almost everywhere I worked at Facebook, especially when I was seated right next to tech leads who are today my north stars. On the other hand, sitting next to these people allowed me to see up close what they did on a daily basis, and have frequent conversations with them. Ultimately I think this environment pushed me to and helped me become better, faster.

The one aspect of open offices I continue to dislike is the lack of sound barriers, which makes deep thinking hard for me—perhaps due to the verbal-ness of my thinking, or due to a musical instinct to pick apart ambient sound. At Pinterest, I first encountered and took a big liking to these chairs with walls, which do a surprisingly good job of blocking out the world. I would choose to have one of these at my desk over an office chair.

the Pod PET Felt Privacy Chair by Benjamin Hubert

One thing I look forward to spending more time shaping, as our small startup grows and claws its way to more stability, is the kind of spaces we work in. I think there are non-ideal parts of open offices as they are typically designed, but instead of dismissing them as being bad for a whole swath of the population, we should talk about the specific features we want to enhance or mitigate. I wonder if small tweaks, like allowing people to choose the type of chair they sit in, would help some of these larger problems. The funny thing is that I have never encountered at any company big or small a conversation about how each person tends to think, what they find distracting, and what spaces they seek out, although this seems a substantial lever for productivity.

Environment and Compatibility

There's a certain kind of thinking that can only be done in coffeeshops in the morning. Or maybe there's a kind of thinking that's just hard to do in the office, where the environment envelops me in a sense of duty. This morning, I picked up coffee to-go and came into the office early, falling back to what I've been doing my whole short career. There's still no one here, but the first hour and half became responding to emails and ticking off boxes, the type of things I can do in the minutes before bed. This small experience shows to me the impact of environment—even four walls with connotations, no people around, can do this. I've now put on Dave Brubeck and Coffitivity, which helps.

This reminds me of a related topic, that over the years I've come to believe a similar thing about jobs as relationships. W.r.t relationships, I have lost most of the inhibition to make the first move, because rejection does not hurt much anymore. (It will always hurt some.) This is ironically an outcome of being in several relationships (and other not-quite-relationships) that didn't work out, which made me realize that modern-day compatibility is incredibly hard and rare to find, and failure is not explicitly the fault of either of the two parties. Modern-day compatibility is strongly based on individual tastes. If someone rejects me, it's not my fault for not being attractive enough or their fault for not finding me attractive. As much as we like to think we are in control of ourselves, we can't force what we respond to, or on the flip side, dramatically change our personalities. It's in fact easier to change our looks.

Jobs are fit to a personality as well, which is often talked about in terms of entire professions, or big companies versus small companies. What I've seen is that even subtle differences among very similar situations make a big difference in how effective the same person is. I can say that for myself. I felt that at Facebook v. Pinterest, which are on the surface two large social networking companies, but the difference was more pronounced in tiny companies. After leaving 13-person Chorus, I felt I couldn't make a decision on another startup without working at them first, so I did brief contracting with four companies (sizes: 5, 13, 10-20, 4) before joining Instabase (4). It was surprising to me how at certain places, I felt—and I think, was—much more effective than at others. Same person, different types of work, different coworkers and company structures, different styles of communication.

I keep this in mind when recruiting. It makes me more empathetic when things don't work out, and makes me realize the resume and even pure technical interview is only a slice of what makes someone successful at a particular place. More broadly, I hope this mindset will become more common, so people do not view either being rejected in a relationship or being rejected by a company as categorical value judgements or measures of their self-worth. As with finding a fulfilling relationship, finding a fulfilling job is hard, and you should expect to fail a few times and get better at it over time.