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Thank you so much for coming to my talk. It's called "Reframing Shame and Embracing Mistakes." My name is Jamison Hampton, but my friends call me Jamie, and since we're all friends here, you can call me Jamie.
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You can find me on Twitter at @jamiebash. Feel free to reach out; we can be friends! You can tweet about my talk if you'd like, but please remember that I use they/them pronouns. Thank you for keeping that in mind.
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Let's do an exercise. Raise your hand if you've ever introduced a bug into production or caused an incident. Okay, yes, lots of hands! I was going to say this isn't just me teaching you how to raise your hand—this is me raising my hand too!
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This talk is about shame, a truly powerful emotion. It runs deeper than other similar emotions like embarrassment or guilt, which usually focus on something you've done or perhaps something you haven't done, as the case may be. But shame is primarily concerned with who you are as a person, and that allows it to damage our self-worth in a much more insidious way.
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Now for the second part of the exercise: raise your hand if you lied just now about whether you've caused an incident or not, or if you thought about lying because you weren't sure. I see everybody's hands in this room going straight up! The reason it occurs to people to lie about that is that shame makes it hard to admit when we've made mistakes—both to each other and also to ourselves. That's a shame because we can learn a lot from mistakes.
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We've been doing it our entire lives. From childhood, we try things, see how they go, learn from it, and try again. Everyone experiences this: a former co-worker of mine would sometimes remind me, "No one is born knowing this." Ruby was invented by a guy in Japan who wasn't born knowing it either, and neither were any of us. Of course, you have to learn it.
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Another very wise person once told me that wisdom comprises knowledge, understanding, and experience. If you don't have all three on a topic, then you don't really possess wisdom about it yet. Much of that experience comes from making mistakes, so if you haven't really experienced that yet, you don't really have wisdom about it.
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I have a case study about an incident that I want to share. Some of you might remember the GitLab outage in January 2017. I'll set the scene and explain why I was impressed with how they handled it, particularly regarding their commitment to blamelessness.
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They had an outage resulting in about 18 hours of downtime, and they lost around 300 gigabytes of production data that ended up being completely unrecoverable. This was caused by an error made by a developer they referred to as "Team Member One" in all their correspondence to avoid placing blame on anyone.
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Team Member One later came forward to admit who it was, so it's not a secret—I'm just using that title here for demonstration. What happened is that he accidentally removed the primary database directory instead of the secondary one, and that kicked off the whole incident. I really love this quote: GitLab stated, "We think that the people making the most mistakes frequently correlate with the people doing the most work." I think that statement is both true and wise.
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I remember that during that time, a lot of people in the community were speculating about Team Member One and whether he would get fired because that's typically what people think: "Who's going to get fired for this?" Surprisingly, Team Member One was promoted not long after the incident. He had qualified for a promotion to senior dev based on GitLab's career ladder just before the outage, and they decided that making one mistake didn't change all of his other accomplishments.
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In fact, I couldn't find the exact quote, but I remember distinctly folks at GitLab responding to questions about who would be fired by saying things like, "Why would we fire him? He just learned from this. He's never going to do that again." They even had shirts made for all the engineers involved in the incident that read, "I'm Team Member One." I think that's a great way to handle such situations.
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This incident highlights the idea that after you learn from mistakes, you also have to talk about them. Just like in the original exercise, it can be hard to admit when we've made a mistake. But the truth is, everyone makes mistakes, and if you claim that you've never made any mistakes, you just sound like a liar to everyone.
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A quote from my friend Carrie Miller that many of you may know says that a junior engineer is just a senior engineer who hasn’t broken production yet. This leads to the importance of discussing mistakes because when you openly talk about your own, it normalizes the experience for others, which is particularly important for senior developers.
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Naturally, more junior developers may feel more hesitant to admit their mistakes publicly, fearing it reflects poorly on them even if it doesn’t. I remember feeling as a junior that senior folks knew everything and never made mistakes, which obviously isn’t true. So, it’s essential to show newcomers that everyone makes mistakes. Moreover, it makes you a good teammate when you take responsibility for your actions. Accepting that ensures that mistakes don’t fall on others.
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Furthermore, it enables your team to band together more quickly to resolve them because you're being honest about it. Counterintuitively, owning your mistakes can inspire confidence in your work because it demonstrates that you recognize when you're wrong and can admit it. Of course, this all assumes that you're in a healthy workplace.
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In very unhealthy workplaces, there can be consequences for discussing mistakes openly, which only reinforces unhealthy communication strategies. This emphasizes the importance of a culture of transparency. Back in 2017, I speculated about the impact of the GitLab incident on the company as a whole.
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At the time, GitLab was relatively new to the scene, and such an outage accompanied by data loss is pretty severe. I thought this incident might spell the end for GitLab as a company, which bummed me out because I liked using their service.
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However, they published an extensive postmortem on Medium, which was a 21-minute read. It provided valuable insights not only into what happened and the technical aspects but also on how to discuss mistakes. I consider it one of the best examples of a public postmortem that others can learn from. In the postmortem, someone from GitLab spoke about the effects on developers.
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For a tech company, when developers are the users, it creates a unique combination of factors. Developers tend to be more sympathetic towards incidents because we've all been there; we know it sucks. I hope that this experience can make us more sympathetic to ourselves when we encounter similar situations.
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Being honest and open about incidents fosters trust. The public postmortem at GitLab demonstrated that they took the problem seriously and were transparent about what was happening. This transparency increases their trustworthiness because it shows they are taking real steps to prevent similar issues in the future.
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Now, I want to talk about why the word 'shame' can be troublesome. Before I joined the tech industry, I worked in television production, where I managed a local public access station and was a news anchor. We had a 'wall of shame' at our station, where anything that went dramatically wrong would be posted. This often included on-air anchors saying something incorrect or silly during a live broadcast.
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Despite labeling it as a wall of shame, the culture was not punishing; instead, it was humorous. The wall contained funny incidents, so people liked to read it and reminisce. If you made a mistake, you’d think, "Well, this is going to look good on the wall of shame." I’m not suggesting that we create a wall of shame in our workplaces specifically, recognizing it could lead to unintended consequences.
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However, the underlying message is to create a culture where making mistakes is seen as a shared experience that can be laughed about, thereby removing the stigma that prevents people from feeling comfortable with their mistakes. One step further, I think, is combating shame with humor. I strive to bring this notion into my life because making jokes about my mistakes alters how I perceive them.
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As mentioned before, I believe it's crucial for senior individuals to be transparent about their mistakes. But it’s genuinely tough, especially if someone still experiences imposter syndrome feelings, even in senior roles, which is common, especially among underrepresented groups.
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For me, turning my mistakes into jokes helps me feel safe when sharing experiences that otherwise might make me very vulnerable. However, I recognize that excessive self-deprecation can be harmful, so I avoid making jokes that are too mean.
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It's about normalizing conversations about mistakes rather than turning it into a self-attack. I won't recount all of my Twitter jokes here because this session is not a stand-up routine, but if you've seen them, you'll note they're more good-natured than harsh.
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While fostering a culture that encourages kindness towards oneself is vital, this isn’t always something individual people can address at every level. Thus, I’ll share fundamental aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that I find particularly relevant to imposter syndrome and work anxieties, such as automatic thoughts, feedback loops, cognitive distortions, and cognitive reframing.
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First, I want to clarify that I’m not a psychologist or an expert in CBT in any meaningful way. It’s simply a tool I’ve used effectively myself for managing anxiety, and I want to share that with others.
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Automatic thoughts form the core of CBT: the idea is that many of our thoughts occur automatically without thorough processing. Our brains are complex creatures, adept at interpreting the world around us, allowing complex thoughts to form without our awareness.
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This can be beneficial in dangerous situations where one doesn’t have time to deliberate—your brain reacts automatically to remove you from peril. However, when those automatic thoughts are negative, they can be unhelpful.
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In CBT, we utilize the ABC model of emotions: an activating situation triggers a belief or thought, which leads to a feeling. The activating situation itself carries no inherent emotional weight; for example, being stuck in traffic is neutral. However, if you start thinking, "I’m going to be late; I’m going to get in trouble," that leads to emotional consequences.
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Negative feelings can breed further negative feelings. I often encounter this as secondary anxiety—feeling upset for already feeling anxious, which only amplifies the anxiety.
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Bad feelings are also felt in our bodies, not just in our minds. For example, if you feel bad physically, it can trigger negative feelings, creating a cycle that's hard to escape. Cognitive distortions describe harmful thought patterns one may get trapped in, which I’ll discuss further.
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Cognitive distortions, the harmful thought patterns, were articulated by psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s and '70s and popularized by his student David Burns in the '80s. I'm going to elaborate on some of these distortions because they relate closely to the feelings often encountered in workplaces and contribute to imposter syndrome.
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The first distortion is all-or-nothing thinking, or the belief that there are only two possibilities in a situation with no middle ground. For instance, if you think, "I made a mistake today. My performance review is next week. Now, there’s no way I’ll get a good review," you're practicing all-or-nothing thinking.
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Instead, let's reframe that thought: "Yes, making mistakes is frustrating, and the timing is unfortunate, but I have to continue doing my best. It's unlikely that a single mistake will ruin my entire performance review." In reframing, recognizing and naming your emotions can be beneficial—the thought "I'm going to get a bad review" is a fear, while "I'm feeling frustrated" is an emotion.
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Catastrophizing is another common distortion, where one extrapolates the worst-case scenario. For example, if you think, "I caused an incident at work today. Oh my God, now I’m going to get fired and never be able to find another job anywhere," you’re exaggerating.
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Instead, you could think, "I wouldn’t expect to get fired over a single incident; even if I did, I know I’d find another opportunity." Reflecting on worst-case scenarios helps put things into perspective.
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Fortune-telling involves making predictions about future outcomes that are unsupported by evidence. For example, "Last time we deployed, it brought the whole site down, so it’s going to happen again today." Rather, try reframing: "I learned a lot from the last incident and I’m better prepared this time. I just need to tackle it one step at a time."
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Another distortion is labeling, where you overly generalize and create negative judgments about a person or concept. For example, "I overlooked a really obvious bug today. I am just a terrible programmer." Instead, recognize your emotions: "Yes, I made a mistake today, and I’m feeling embarrassed about it, but now I’ll look for that kind of oversight next time."
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Magnifying the negative refers to focusing solely on the negative aspects of a situation. For instance, "I found two typos in my code during the review, so my reviewer must think I wasn't paying attention at all." This thought can be reframed: "The rest of my code was good. Typos aren't a serious mistake; that’s what code reviews are for. It wasn’t a big deal."
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Minimizing the positive is common as well; when you're caught up in negativity, you often forget to acknowledge the positives. For example, "My manager complimented me on fixing that bug, but it was pretty easy. Anyone could have done it, so she’s probably just being nice." Instead, recognize: "I did a great job today. My contributions are valuable, and that’s why my manager wants to acknowledge them."
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Another distortion is mind reading, where we assume we know what others think. For example, "David left so many comments on my last PR; he must think I’m really stupid." The reframe recognizes feelings: "I feel self-conscious that David had so many suggestions, but I know he’s trying to help me improve." I even confirmed with David that he doesn’t think I’m stupid, which reassures me.
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Overgeneralizations form another pattern, where one draws broad conclusions with little evidence. For example, "Ugh, I got asked to do a demo. It never goes well; I always mess it up!" Instead, recognize: "Sure, I’ve struggled with demos before, but this time I have a chance to prepare well."
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Self-blaming is a significant aspect, as we tend to believe we're solely responsible for things going wrong. For instance, "Oh, a bug I introduced caused the entire app to crash; it’s completely my fault." Instead, turn it around: "Even though I wrote the code that introduced this bug, my co-workers tested and approved it, too. We succeed or fail as a team."
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In conclusion, I know I made these concepts sound simple, but changing the way we think is hard. It requires decisions to examine our thinking, which all of you made when you decided to come to my talk, so thank you for that. CBT is straightforward to understand, though difficult to implement.
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What I want to emphasize is that even if you mess up once or multiple times, the practice of trying to instill these thoughts is additive. The more you engage with them, the better you will get over time.
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And remember: I’m proud of you and of all your mistakes. Everything you’ve accomplished and everything you’ve learned from your mistakes contributes to who you are today, and I think that is truly great.
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I hope that at least one of you found this helpful. It has certainly been beneficial for me, and that’s why I wanted to share it with all of you. Please feel free to find me online or at the conference. I hope to be friends with everyone. Thank you!