Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 32: Hiring Inclusively & Company Culture (Part 4)

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

In this episode, Conor and Bryce finish their conversation with Chandler and Patricia.About the Guests:Chandler Carruth leads the C++, Clang, and LLVM teams at Google, building a better language with better diagnostics, tools, compilers, optimizers, etc. Previously, he worked on several pieces of Google’s distributed build system. He makes guest appearances helping to maintain a few core C++ libraries across Google’s codebase, and is active in the LLVM and Clang open source communities. He received his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Wake Forest University, but disavows all knowledge of the contents of his Master’s thesis. He is regularly found drinking Cherry Coke Zero in the daytime and pontificating over a single malt scotch in the evening.Patricia Aas is a C++ programmer with a “thing for building browsers”. She works for a company she co-founded called TurtleSec where she teaches courses in Secure Coding in C++ and does consulting and contracting. She has been a professional programmer for 16 years, and started off her career working on the original Opera browser. Since then she has made embedded products at Cisco and another browser at Vivaldi. When she has time she works on her own open source (pre-alpha) Chromium/Blink+Qt based browser called TurtleBrowser.Date Recorded: 2021-06-05Date Released: 2021-07-02ADSP Episode 29: From Papa John’s to Google (Part 1)ADSP Episode 30: Google, Interviews, Leadership & More (Part 2)ADSP Episode 31: Strategic Decision Making & More (Part 3)The Petrified Wood PrincipleNo Rules RulesHit RefreshNVIDIA GPU GemsOrganizational Charts of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, GoogleIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Bryce is, like, when we're having technical meetings, Bryce often dials in from his kitchen while making bread and other, like, things. It's amazing. Welcome to ADSP The Podcast, episode 32, recorded on June 5th, 2021. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host, Bryce, we finish up our four-part conversation with Chandler Carruth and Patricia Oz. In this episode, we talk about how to hire inclusively, company culture, and much more. If you haven't listened to the first three parts of this episode, they'll be linked in

the show notes. We highly recommend you do that first, as this is the final chapter of this four part miniseries. Okay, okay. Since I'm doing this next week, all of my interviews are next week. So I wanted to touch on one of your points. You have one that says build an actually inclusive culture, but I'll put that aside because I'm right now in hiring. So you hire inclusively. What does that mean? For me, hiring inclusively means causing the outcome of your hiring process to be an inclusive culture, right? And so it's the first thing to understand is that like, I'm a little bit outcome oriented. And so I would like the actual experience of the hiring process to also be inclusive. That's not my top goal. That's a fairly brief period of time. I want the team that I'm building, right? The organization that I'm

building, the company, whatever it is, I want that to be inclusive for the next, you know, years, right? And so what I'm aiming at here is, like, how can I structure the hiring process and every aspect of it to ensure that the resulting team is going to kind of sustain inclusivity and actually be kind of an inclusive and welcoming culture and environment for the long term. So some specific things that I like to do here. The number one thing that I actually like to do is kind of fun. It's a bit recursive. It's like to actually talk about inclusivity and hiring for inclusivity in the hiring process.

This has a bunch of really great effects. So if you study psychology, there's this great psychology study done on what changes people's behavior. And so they ran an experiment where people at a national park in the u.s were going in and stealing uh um petrified wood out of this natural park and it's natural resource right like this takes i don't know so however many thousands of years maybe it's millions i've i'm not a science person clearly uh but like like this basically this petrified wood is this very rare resource there's a natural park that has a bunch of it and people walk on trails the way they're supposed to but then they would see something and they just go off the trail

and grab themselves a little souvenir take it back so they wanted to stop this because it's like it's finite um and it's it's depleting this like particular natural resource people should come to the park and see it not take it with them so they tried different techniques of how do you get people to change their behavior? So the first thing they did was they put up a sign. It said, like, don't steal the petrified wood. This is a natural resource, important to preserve. There's, like, all the really good reasons why you shouldn't do this thing.

They tracked the occurrence of theft. It skyrocketed. Because, like, if other people are are stealing it that must be a good thing to stamp precisely it turns out what they did was advertise that taking this stuff was a common occurrence and people responded by matching that perceived norm and so in psychology, this is the perceived norm within a group, almost exclusively dictates how people behave in that group. And so they then put a different sign up on the park, which thanked all of the visitors for preserving these petrified wood and not taking it, and how appreciative they were, and how much they have because people don't take this

plummeted. All of the theft plummeted, right? And so this tells us how to influence a group of people. You don't tell them, well, you better not be a jerk if you come to work on my team. That isn't going to work. That's going to advertise to them, wow, you must have a bunch of jerks on your team if you have to warn off every person you hire about being a jerk. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You want to set the expectation that it is normal, right? That it is just the way things happen on the team, that people act inclusively, that they intentionally think about inclusivity, plan for it, and kind of incorporate into everything they do step one talk to them about how you hire people who are inclusive right because now you've you've just you've just advertised wow the person

doing the hiring cares about inclusivity well i guess this whole team must right and so they come in and their behavior is like i you know, I want to fit in. I want to behave in the way that is normal in this group of people. So I'm going to behave that way. Talk about psychological safety in your interview process. And you'll cause the person you hire to preserve psychological safety on the team. And so this is the first thing is actually just open up the discussion. And this is also great because it means your strategy to inclusive hire is also transparent hiring, right?

You just tell the people you're trying to hire all about the culture that you already have on your team. And by doing so, you cause that culture to exist. Okay. And this is super super fun. I will use this next week. I mean, the other really fun part about this is you also get a beautiful self-selection bias. Yeah. Right?

If you talk in your hiring process about inclusivity and you make it super clear how important this is and how fundamental it is to having the whole the whole team's culture and how everyone really prioritizes it people who are not interested in participating in that kind of a group or adhering to that norm of behavior will not take the job yeah and that was your goal right i've been wondering but i've been wondering how to say that, though. Like, how do I, how, what, how do I present that? And that's been an issue. Like, I, I, I, I, I've been thinking, like, I've been, I joked with, with, with someone I talked to the other day. It's like, I can't go in and say, it was like, you might work, you know, you might work next to a gay person or a trans person or, you know, you know, a woman or, you know, a young person or a trans person or you know uh you know a woman or you know a young person or an old person or you know how are you like i can't i i can't say that it did it be it so i don't i don't quite agree i actually think you can say that so i like as a concrete question that i love to ask

people like in order to hire inclusively right like? Like let's talk about, let's talk about team dynamics. It's like, so imagine you come onto the team and you're in a team meeting and, you know, one of your colleagues gets misgendered and, oh, let me explain what misgendering means, right? So for the trans community, if someone uses the wrong pronouns, right, it can be really, really frustrating because the person is already struggling with their gender identity. This is a very sensitive topic and it's a mistake. Right. And so it's kind of this compounding factor for that.

OK, so now imagine you're in a team meeting and someone misgenders one of your colleagues and you realize this. What things would you do? And here's the best part. It doesn't matter if they have a good answer the secret here is that it's not about like and it's fine if someone is if you're interviewed and someone asks you one of these inclusivity questions and you're like oh my gosh i haven't thought about that i'm not sure what to do that's fine right the actual question is how are you going to respond to the hypothetical even if you don't have a good response that you have a trans colleague right you have a trans colleague now you've you surfaced this is this is the thing you better be prepared for and so the self-selection starts right and then you also get to see right

like are you do you want to know what you should do or do you not or are you frustrated that this has even been brought up right these are the kinds of distinctions you're actually looking for and so so it's also an easy interview question for people to pass they don't need there isn't a right answer in the sense of like the right thing to do the right answer is to you know not be upset to not like fear this right to have any caring and and i think this is a great way to interview folks i i i will it's it's going in the book it should be clear too although there may not be a right answer there is definitely wrong answers to that question there are lots of but i think that but i

think that's a good thing both ways like you know oh no if someone responds by saying i really don't think that should be an issue that we care about in our work like you okay well you've now got a very clear signal on on where to go and i then that you know that person will not be happy in in in this company so so it's better for both of us that we part ways. Because, you know, that's not... And these are the questions I like the most, are the ones that have just tremendous signal-to-noise ratios, right? And also kind of telegraph exactly what the person is coming into. Because it means that they're not just good signal-to-noise ratio for you, the interviewer.

They're also good signal-to-noise for the interviewee. I really like that. Because this is something I've been struggling with. Like, how do I signal this? And also, I want to make sure that somebody coming in that might be in the closet in some way or might be trans, but I can't tell, you know, for them to realize that

that's okay. And, you know, and that, that they'll be safe and they can be who they want to be. But I have to signal that in some way. And, and, and doing that signaling, I, I, yeah, it's going to be a challenge this week for me. I mean, another thing that I really like for hiring inclusively is, so I used to think this was a really silly thing, and I'm now a total convert to it, is to have a team culture document, to actually just have your team write down what their culture is. So my team at Google has a team culture document.

It's massive. I mean, we're talking like pages and pages and pages. And the point isn't that everyone's going to read all of it. They're going to read the pieces of it that they care about, that kind of thing. But the other really nice thing here is just once you have this written down, just share it with candidates directly. And a lot of people are like, oh, but is that appropriate? I'm like, why not? Just be like, we just took the time to write down what we think the culture of our team is.

Happy to share it with you. If you have questions about it, let me know. It's super long. Don't feel like you need to read all of it. There's no quiz. Do you send it in the interview yeah okay sure or just give a link to it and be like you know if you're interested feel free to take a look if you have questions feel free to ask them in the interview do you right do you have an example one that i'd like i i'm just thinking like i'd love to make one of those for my team do you know of any example ones that are out there i was gonna say netflix

uh they wrote they had a whole book written uh called no rules rules which is literally a whole book i don't want to read a book also i'm not sure that's that's that's it's it's it's not a great well i don't want to say it's not a it's a different culture let's say that and they they try to make that point across in the book that like it's not not a company for everyone. If it's the company for you, you'll love it here. But it's a, it's a very, very different culture. And to their credit, like they're very upfront about that. Like, they're, they say like straight up in the book, like, you know, sometimes we get bad press, but our company is not designed to be like the company for everyone. It's designed to be the company for a certain set of people. And we're searching for those people. Anyways, but yeah, that's probably not a good example. No, but I think it is a good example because it's a good example because it's a totally

different culture. And so they are advertising their culture. They're explaining what the culture is. They're allowing people to self-select into that or self-select out of that and even if that is a different culture than maybe the culture that i'm i i want to make then then looking at how they do that i think it could be useful and like how can i communicate like one of the things that we did and the reason why we waited so long to to do the hiring we were planning to hire this year. And that was the plan from January.

But what we spent the whole time is making a webpage on a website, which is called Working. And it basically explains who we are as a company, how we're structured, all of the work stuff. It even has the pay so you can figure out like what will i be paying and and it has like your pension and everything like what like sick pay like you know parental leave all sorts of like like lots of stuff and we wrote it down and then we put it in the ad so that And the idea was that then people could read through that and they could figure out, is this for me or not? And then choose to apply or not.

But it's just the link from the ad. The ad is super short because it's basically like, do you code and could be interested in security, basically. And here's what it's like to work for us uh but but i think i could i think we could make like more a culture thing but but then i think maybe i want to make that with these new people when they show up because currently we're so small i think we need more people to i'm sure you have an idea like building a culture with a team is a great idea but I'm sure you have an idea of some of the the principles and like the foundation of things that you want to see in

that team that you're building right but I it becomes very dominated by me I think that can be okay though and here's here's also the a different. So what we do is we have the stock, right? And so I wrote one of them. I wrote kind of the first version. It was based on one that a colleague that some of you may know, Titus, wrote one for his team. And I kind of looked at that and took some ideas from this and synthesized one. And actually our larger org has adopted it. I'm hoping that I'll actually be able to share this document at some point,

but I need to figure out how I get the okay to just publish this because I just want to publish our team. Even if you don't publish it publicly, could I get it? Well, maybe by the fourth episode of this mini-series with Chandler and Patricia, we can link it in the show notes, maybe. Check the show notes. If it's there, Chandler got the okay. Or just the index. I don't know just the index you know just the the the other though the interesting thing about how how we do this to kind of keep it from

becoming kind of unexclu because you also don't want this to be exclusive right like oh well but are you allowed to like participate in and so every time someone joins the team you don't just share the team culture document with them you also share you'd say and please contribute anything that's missing or or suggest changes that this is it's got to be a living document and you just have to anchor people in like this is a living document it is never meant to stay static and so as new people as you hire people right you can write the first version and that's fine but as you hire people you say like when you join the team you're going to get to you know put your fingers your fingerprints on this you're going to get to put your impression on

it if there's stuff that you think should be in the culture document that isn't or things that are in it that you don't think makes sense okay and then it just keeps evolving right yeah okay so then i could write like a first draft and then it could be something that grows over time but go back to the sign right you want to set expectations and you want to establish the norms um because otherwise it can be really really hard something that i've watched a lot of organizations struggle with um is this actually gets into you know some of the other things right like how do you resolve misaligned incentives between organizations one of the things that i watch organization after organization struggle

with is when the organization came into existence without this clear and established set of norms especially around things like inclusivity. Changing the culture afterward is, in my opinion, the hardest thing to do for organizations. It's so hard that I have almost no examples of it being done successfully. The psychology study that I'm mentioning is also cited by Harvard Business Review and some other groups. And the thing they talk about is like, well, okay, so if you run an organization and you want to change its culture, how do you do that? There are already norms, right? They already exist.

And about the only way that anyone succeeded at doing this is you basically have to have an incredibly persuasive group of leaders that everyone in the organization will really look up to and admire and within that small group all of you have to unanimously decide to go and project a new norm into the group and if you basically get a single leader that's not engaged and not trying it this whole thing fails because you can't overcome the existing norms so this is this is sort of related to your previous thing of of like this this group mentality and and the leader and and losing or winning and projecting uh enthusiasm versus and how it it kind of goes through the entire group and they kind of all get pulled into it.

Okay. So, yeah. The easy way is to just – and, like, there's the great comic about inclusivity. It's, like, you know, all of the – what is it? Red-colored fingers say, oh, you look different. We don't want you here. And they're, like, fine. And the green-colored one's, like, fine.

We'll go make our own space over here. Right. But there is a trick here. Right. So one thing that you can actually do is you can use this psychological factor against people because the easiest way is if you create a new space and you put a sign at the door that says, by the way, everyone in this space likes to do X, then everyone who walks through the door sees that sign is like, oh, I guess here we're going to do X, right? We're going to be inclusive, right? And so this moving into a new space is one of the easiest ways to do this. And so now you can see how you can align the psychological incentive with what the organization wants to do. So one of the best tactics for changing culture is to cause people to feel like they have changed where they are right feel like there is some movement that they're coming to a new thing there is actually

one i think really good example of a company that did reinvent itself and uh change its culture and that company is microsoft under yeah under satya nandela. And there's a whole book written on it called Hit Refresh. And it basically has like a couple chapters where it talks about how when Satya was like tapped on the shoulder for the role of CEO, he knew that like this kind of reset and exactly what Chandler was saying, like where they put this sign. And you know, we used to be a company that innovated. And that was like the pioneer of the technology industry. And if you, you know, if you've been paying attention to the tech world, like the reputation that Microsoft had a decade ago versus now where they're building out VS Code, which

has become one of the most popular editors in the world. And it supported Linux first before it supported Windows. Like that would have been like unheard of. And like everyone was scared when they bought GitHub and it's, it's just been nothing but like good things. And so yeah, it is very rare that it happens, but there are some good examples of like, you know, maybe less than I can count on one hand that I know of. The way he framed it though was essential. It was about a new Microsoft, not just a new culture. It was a new Microsoft. They were going to change where they were so that people would actually change their behavior when they moved into

the new space. This is so much easier than trying to get people to change their behavior without a new space. It's sort of like a branding process, a rebranding process. hopefully hopefully i won't have to do that i mean but it's for me this is this is kind of a a fun thing because you can you get this this whole tactic works even if you tell people what you're doing like you don't have to be sneaky there's no need to like mislead anyone you can go up to a group of people and say we need to change our culture in order to do that i'm going to we're going to create this artificial construct of a new version of our team and we're all going to move over to this new version of our team

like you've just given it all away, right? It still works. It still is effective because it's just about, like, it's just about having kind of a reason for people to internalize the change, right? It's about framing. It's not about it being like the secret thing. If people can think about this as, oh, I'm moving into the new Microsoft. I already work at Microsoft, but I'm going to be in the new Microsoft. Then they're going to internalize the need to change their norms and change their behaviors. Whereas if instead they think of this as, oh, I'm bad and need to change. As opposed to something I can do versus something that i'm just being chastised for and you get this defensive thing it's like no my culture isn't bad i don't need

to change my culture why would i change my culture how dare you tell me that i have a bad culture like no i i'm gonna stick with this right i i like this and it's just an amazing difference i i i can't apply it next week but this i can apply like in my, you know, in my life. And it ties back to what Bryce was saying, too, about like it's inspiring people that like this is something like when you read if you read Hit Refresh, which is the book that like documents it, like people were like they were so excited like when satya got up on stage and was talking about this like new microsoft like people there have been people that have been working at microsoft back when it used to have that reputation of like it was it was this pioneer of the industry and and now here was someone that was full circle saying let's get back to that like we're gonna it's gonna take time it's gonna be hard but we can and like it i'm sure the book is biased to a certain extent they want to tell tell a good story, but it, uh, from reading it, I was like, oh man, this is like,

you could feel the excitement coming off the pages. No, I have to read it now. I am also, I also wrote down the no rules rules also. Yeah. Hit refresh is definitely a better, uh, it's a more, it's a more exciting read. No rules rules is it's a very like chapter like chapter three, onto this part of the culture, chapter four. It's an interesting read. Do you have like any book from NVIDIA, like an NVIDIA culture? I don't, not that I know of.

We've got GPU gems, like one, two, and three. There are some like internal documents in a few places that talk about it. But NVIDIA is also a smaller, like an order of magnitude smaller than Microsoft and it doesn't have as specialized, I'm going to say, culture as Netflix. And so I think because of that, there has not been a desire or a need to write something quite as extensive. NVIDIA's culture is very interesting because NVIDIA

has, it doesn't have a lot of established hierarchy, which is really, it's something I absolutely love about the company. It's one of the reasons why I is really, it's something I absolutely love about the company. It's one of the reasons why I'm there. I was going to say, it's great for Bryce. You know, when I started at NVIDIA, I was hired to work on one thing. And when they started, they told me there's no product manager for this thing. So you'll sort of have to do that. And at some point I just sort of decided one day, like, all right, you know, like I'm not, I'm going to just decide that I want to expand the scope of what I'm doing. So I'm just going to start calling myself. I'm just going to

start saying that I am the C++ core compute libraries team. And like nobody, nobody stopped me from doing that. I just, I synthesized the team. This is what Chandler is saying here. You are, you are making the room and you are naming the room and you are saying, right, if you want to be in this team, then you should move into this room with me. Yeah. And the great thing about NVIDIA is that NVIDIA is a place where nobody's going to go and tell you you can't do that because you didn't go and do it the proper way. You might, you know, of course, it's not a place where there's no rules. You know, if there's something that you can't do for a good reason, you'll get told that. But you're not going to get blocked solely on process and progress. And so you can, in many ways, you can shape your own destiny at NVIDIA, which is really appealing to me. But on the other hand, you know, for some people, they really like having

a clearly established hierarchy and like, you know, sort of knowing how things work, you know, what they should be doing, et cetera. And so for that sort of person, it might be, you know, the NVIDIA lack of structure might be scary. It might be intimidating. Yeah. I only have like a baby example for that. But I remember at Opera in the beginning, it went of Agile and all of that. We introduced Agile and we basically did all the things. We read the books and then we did all the things and we read the books and then we did all the things um and one of the things that I found interesting was that some of us who were very self-driven

and didn't really need much structure and and we we planned our days and we knew what we were going to do and we found it to be overhead mostly it's just okay yeah we can do all of these things but we still know what we need to do so we just need to do those things but some people they absolutely loved it they felt like they finally had some structure and something you know and a list and and for them this was like an amazing experience and i found it very interesting how we could come at the same culture because this was also a culture change and and get totally different experiences so i i agree with you that some people they don't like working like that oh wow oh look at that is this sharing properly so we we probably have to start wrapping up soon but this this might be a great way to wrap up is that there's this meme that I,

someone shared with me when I was at Amazon of the different corporate structures across. What are the six companies? Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple,

Oracle. The Microsoft. Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah. The different, the different the different warring organizations i think nvidia's would look the most like facebook's where it's just like a disorganized

uh a disorganized collection of of nodes that are connected with no no real clear hierarchy i i think that would work for me actually i. I think that kind of that i do for me to know what i'm expecting the folks on my team to be and it's not even that it's really for me to know what they are doing right now but i sort of like you know if it if it works for them they want to use that as the way to track great if they want to do if they want to use something else that's great it's it's but like it's there for me to keep an eye on things, not for me to impose anything upon them. But I think that's a good idea. Because that gives the possibility of having different kinds of people.

Yeah. I think we have a tendency to want everyone to be the same so they fit into the same system. And if you can have people being able to control their day more themselves and the people need more structure, have more structure and the people who. Yeah, I guess I'm lucky in that the sort of role that I'm in and the sort of team that I'm building, it's primarily senior engineers are doing the sort of work that we're doing. Um, uh, there aren't, it's not, it's not the sort of work where you would staff it up with a large number of junior engineers. Um, uh, and because of that, um, I don't really have to deal with overseeing more junior engineers in that, um, you know, that means that the folks that I'm working with are people who are mostly self-sufficient. They're mostly people that I just sort of got to point them in the right direction. And I'm very blessed in that regard that they're all fairly senior and self-sufficient.

Yeah, no, right now we're hiring seniors, but definitely in the future, that's something that's going to be a whole other thing. Like how to take in juniors and and and help them evolve and and develop and that's but we're not doing that this time so i'm just gonna push that problem to some other time we we can come back on and have another three hour podcast in uh whenever whenever that happens like two years. Two years. All right. We probably should start to wrap up. But yeah, thank you so much for taking all this time. You've literally given us so much gold content.

Maybe we'll do two Papa John's episodes. We don't know. Thanks for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this four-part miniseries. And once again, thank you to Chandler and Patricia for spending so much time with us. Have a great day.