How to Trust Again – Justin Searls

Why has trust become so rare in the software industry? Developers don't trust their own ability to program, teammates don't trust each other to write quality code, and organizations don't trust that people are working hard enough to deliver on time.

This talk by Justin Searls is a reflection on the far-reaching consequences distrust can have for individuals, teams, and organizations and an exploration of what we stand to gain by adopting a more trustful orientation towards ourselves and each other.

01:57 - Justin’s Superpower: Having Bad Luck and Exposing Software Problems

04:05 - Breaking Down Software & Teams

• Shared Values


• Picking Up on Smells to Ask Pointed Questions


• Beginner’s Mindset


• RailsBridge

12:49 - Trust Building

• Incremental Improvement


• What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How successful people become even more successful by Marshall Goldsmith
  
  
  
  
  • Credibility
  
  
  • Reliability
  
  
  • Intimacy
  
  
  • Selfless Motivation
  
  


• Authenticity
  
  
  
  
  • Detecting Authenticity
  
  
  • Laziness Does Not Exist
  
  

29:14 - Power Politics & Privilege

• Leadership Empathy


• Safety


• Exposure; “Don’t Cross The Net”


• Masking

42:06 - Personal Growth & “Bring Your Whole/True Self”

• RubyConf 2019 - Keynote: Lucky You by Sandi Metz

How to Trust Again – Justin Searls

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Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers based in the United States and Canada. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.

JACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 270 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I'm joined with my co-panelist, Mae Beale.

MAE: And I'm joined with another panelist, Chelsea Troy.

CHELSEA: Hi, I'm Chelsea and I'm here with our guest, Justin Searls.

He's a co-founder and CTO at Test Double, a consulting agency on a mission to improve how the work writes software. His life's work is figuring out why so many apps are buggy and hard to use, why teams struggle to foster collaboration and trust, and why it's so hard for organizations to get traction building great software. The Test Double Agents work with clients to improve in all of these ways and more.

Hi, Justin! How are you today?

JUSTIN: Hello. I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.

CHELSEA: Of course.

So we like to kick off our sessions by asking you, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

JUSTIN: Well, one superpower might be that I like to give counterintuitive answers to questions and [laughs] my answer to this would be that I have really, really bad luck software and hardware. My entire life has just fallen over for me left and right. Bugs come and seek me out. In college, I was in the computer science program and so, I was around a lot of computers, like Linux data centers and stuff, and I think I went through either personally, or in the labs that I used 20 hard drive failure years in 4 years. People started joking that I had an EMP around me.

So I started to just decide to lean into that not so much as an identity necessarily, but as a specialty of root cause analysis of like, why do things fail? When I see a bug, what does that mean? And to dig in to how to improve quality in software and that then extended to later in my career, when I was working on delivery teams, like building software for companies and institutions. That meant identifying more root causes about what's leading to project failure, or for teams to break down.

Now I'm kind of moving, I guess, popping the stack another layer further. I'm starting to ask what are the second and third order consequences of software failing for people having for others? I see this in my family who are non-software industry family members, when they encounter a bug and I'm watching them encounter a bug, their reaction is usually to think that they're the ones who screwed up, that they're stupid, that they just can't figure it out. I'm literally watching software that somebody else wrote far away just fail and that's just no good, right?

So I think that the fact that I just so easily expose problems with software and sometimes the teams that make it almost effortlessly, it's really given me a passion and a purpose to improve and find opportunities to just make it a little bit better.

MAE: When you talk about software and/or teams breaking down and you're mentioning bugs. So I'm assuming that that's mostly what you mean by breaking down? I'm curious if you have kind of a mental model of software always breaks down these four ways. Teams always break down these three ways. I don't know if you have any reference texts, or things that you've come across as far as like a mental model for what is the world of breaking down? How do we characterize it?

JUSTIN: That's a great question and I feel like having been basically doing this for 15 years now, I should be prepared with a better answer.

I've always resisted building I guess, the communicative version of an abstraction, or a framework for categorizing, simplifying, and compartmentalizing the sort of stuff that I experience. In some ways, my approach [laughs] is the human version of machine learning where I have been so fortunate, because I've been a consultant my entire career, to be exposed to so many companies and so many teams that that has developed in me a pattern recognition system that even I don't necessarily understand—it's kind of a black box to me—where I will pick up on little smells and seemingly incidental cues and it'll prompt me to develop a concern, or ask a pointed question about something seemingly unrelated, but that I've come to see as being associated with that kind of failure.

I think your question's great. I should probably spend some time coming up with quadrants, or a system that distills down some of this. But really, when I talk about bugs, that is a lagging indicator of so many things upstream that are not necessarily code related. One of the reasons I want to be on the show here and talk to you all the day is because I've been thinking a lot about trust and interpersonal relationships starting with us as individuals and whether we trust the work that we're doing ourselves, or trust ourselves to really dive in and truly understand the stuff that we're building versus feel like we need to go and follow some other pattern, or instructions that are handed to us.

To kind of try to answer your question more directly, when I see teams fail, it usually comes down to a lack of authentic, empathetic, and logical targeted relationships where you have strong alignment about like, why are we in this room? Why are we working together? How do we best normalize on an approach so that when any person in any role is operating that is consistent with if somebody else on the team had been taking the same action that they would operate in the same way so that we're all marching in the same direction?

That requires shared values and that requires so many foundational things that are so often lacking in teams as software is developed today, where companies grow really fast. The pay right now is really, really high, which is great, but it results in, I think a little bit of a gold rush mentality to just always be shipping, always be hustling, always be pushing. As there's less time for the kind of slack that we need to think about—baking in quality, or coming back to something that we built a couple weeks ago and that maybe we've got second considerations about. Because there's that kind of time, there's even less time sometimes for the care and feeding that goes into just healthy relationships that buil