00:00:04.980
Hey, I'm Ryan. I'm going to tell you a story about myself, some bad habits that I developed, and the impact those habits had on a part of my career. I'll share a bit about how I deal with them, minimize their effects on me, and where I am today. It's a personal talk; not all of this will necessarily apply to everyone, but there are some takeaways for anyone who mentors others. You might even see some of these qualities in yourself.
00:00:30.840
My goal is to save someone from developing these bad habits and help you mentor people who may have developed them themselves. I also want to thank the managers who helped me along the way. I'm very lucky to have a solid relationship with the managers I work with, and they really helped me identify some of these things in myself and work through them.
00:00:56.340
So, who am I? My name is Ryan, and I'm a senior production engineer at Shopify. What that means is that my focus is on reliability and speed for commerce and developers. I primarily focus on Ruby type safety, tools like Sorbet, Tapioca, and Spoon. I work on how we use those tools at Shopify and strive to improve them for the community. I'm not a psychologist, but I am very hard on myself, and we'll see how that plays into things.
00:01:29.820
Today, we'll discuss my story about how I self-talked my way into convincing people that I was bad at my job, what that looked like specifically, the behaviors I was exhibiting, what goes on inside my head, and some other habits that I have. We'll also talk about how to break bad habits and, importantly, how to mentor others who might be in similar situations.
00:02:01.560
So, what's my story? I'm a pretty anxious person; I always have been. If left unchecked, I tend to spiral into catastrophizing little things. For example, at my first job after university, my manager one day cracked a joke on a Friday about some big news coming on Monday, teasingly saying, ‘Big news coming Monday, Ryan!’ I re-did my resume that weekend because I assumed it would be terrible news. It turned out the big news was just some new coffee in our kitchenette. I had told him I liked light roasts, and he managed to get some. I think he knew he’d get me worked up, but I don’t think he realized how much I would react.
00:02:36.780
The point is, I have a tendency to blow seemingly little things up in my head, making mountains out of molehills. This includes misunderstanding something, not knowing the answer to something, or experiencing miscommunications. I often employed self-deprecating humor as a coping mechanism, such as when I said, ‘I made the coffee wrong, I’m an adult.’ Academically, I would beat myself up a little if I performed poorly or even just fine, to some extent.
00:03:02.400
However, I was gentle on myself in the early stages of my career in the workforce. I felt like I was new and supposed to learn and ask lots of questions, which saved me from being too hard on myself professionally. During school, I had a successful internship at a renowned company, and after graduating, I worked at an impressive startup in my hometown called Verifin.
00:03:36.420
These days, they are definitely no longer a startup, as they are doing some cool stuff. In both cases, I was new and learning, and that was totally okay. The only company I would consider leaving my hometown for would be Shopify, and in 2016, the opportunity knocked. I love working at Shopify; I have grown tremendously and learned so much in such a short period.
00:04:11.400
However, after about a year, I think I grew beyond the ‘I’m still learning’ justification that had protected me in the earlier parts of my career. You can call this impostor syndrome if you like; I often refer to it that way. But anyway, I got it in my head that everyone around me was way smarter than I was, and I was playing catch-up.
00:04:54.060
Being surrounded by people who are significantly more intelligent than you is wonderful from a growth perspective, but I became self-conscious about what I was bringing to the table. Consequently, I started holding myself to a high standard. When I began at Shopify, I was on a team focused on developer tooling for production runtime quality. Our goal was to make it easy for developers to run their code in production on our infrastructure and to keep it running smoothly.
00:05:29.340
This included reminders to keep gems and Ruby versions up to date, among other things, long before the days of Dependabot. It also involved managing incidents, follow-up action items from outages, and things like that. During this time, I became interested in increasing my impact at work. I wanted to do more, so I was eager to become a senior production engineer.
00:05:59.880
I eventually moved to a team that worked closer to the metal, focusing on how service owners and developers experience our infrastructure. We worked on observability for our Kubernetes clusters, interacting with HandyGuard, deploying their code to Kubernetes, and more. This was a great time to mention Crane, an open-source library that Shopify maintains that helps developers deploy their code to Kubernetes.
00:06:31.800
As I joined this new team, my manager thought I was struggling. He believed he was onboarding someone who was having quite a lot of trouble with their job, while in my head, I was thinking I might be considered for a promotion in the near future. This dichotomy stemmed from how I portrayed myself and conducted myself in Slack channels, pull requests, and meetings. I had convinced people that I was not very good at my job.
00:07:06.660
What happened here? I had a lot of growing left to do. My way of beating myself up, thinly veiling it in self-deprecating humor, had negatively impacted people's perception of me. My immediate team saw me as someone who had done a lot of learning and growing, becoming more comfortable with Ruby and Rails. I had even been mentoring interns and leading projects, but I was a bit moody and did not see the impact I was making.
00:07:42.060
It was the people outside of that team and the new team who thought I was struggling. I definitely was not being considered for a promotion; I had unaddressed habits to break, some of which were projected outwardly through how I portrayed myself, and some were internal, holding me back, entirely of my own doing.
00:08:16.560
Thankfully, my manager was eager to work with me on these things, and while it was a tough conversation, I learned a lot. Let's talk a bit about how we portray ourselves to others and what I was doing that broadcasted a negative image of myself.
00:08:44.760
Self-deprecating humor may be fine among your closest friends if you have that relationship, but in general, your coworkers don’t know you the same way. They probably trust you and only have your word to go by. Slack, GitHub issues, and even hallway chats are relatively public forums. If you consistently put yourself down in places where people can see it and who don't know you well, they might start to believe you. That's exactly what I did, so it's really important to break the habit of putting yourself down.
00:09:20.640
The second piece here I call the opinion escape hatch, which I feel acts as a mental preparation for when you're wrong about something. It might look like this: ‘I’m probably wrong, but I think...’ or finishing your sentence with, ‘I have no idea what I'm doing.’ You don’t need to qualify your opinions. If someone asks what you think about something in a code review or whatever, you don’t have to do that.
00:09:55.560
There is a difference between admitting when you don’t know something, which is a great behavior for senior folks, but telling people you don’t know anything at all isn't effective communication. Uncertainty is okay, and it just requires rephrasing how you express that uncertainty, which can go a long way. You can say things like, ‘I’ll have to dig into this a bit more, but off the top of my head…’ or ‘I think XYZ, but I’m open to feedback.’
