Swinging on the Engineer/Manager Pendulum with Jewel Darger-Sacher of Reddit

About the guest:

Jewel has been shitposting and sadtweeting her way to a comfortable tech career for over a decade in community and consumer product engineering as a software engineer, manager, and all-the-hats start-upper.  She hasn't accidentally taken down production in a whole month, mostly thanks to PTO.

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Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host... 

ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.

ADRIANA: And today, we have with us Jewel Darger-Sacher, who is a Senior Full-Stack IT Engineer at Reddit. Welcome, Jewel.

JEWEL: Thank you. I'm delighted to join you all today.

ADRIANA: We are super stoked to have you with us. Now, our first question that we always ask our guests is what are you drinking today?

JEWEL: So today I brought some fancy tea. I picked up some raspberry chai from Ren Faire a couple of years ago, and it's treating me great today.

ADRIANA: Awesome. How about you, Ana? What are you drinking?

ANA: That sounds very yummy, and I kind of wish I had some tea. I went with my LaCroix peach-pear sparkling water. Sometimes you just need a little bit of flavor. But I need sparkling water to do podcasts sometimes. It's just like that nice, crisp of staying awake. What about you, Adriana?

ADRIANA: I am finishing off some green tea, and I've also got a glass of water.

ANA: Extra hydration.

ADRIANA: Extra hydration.

JEWEL: Always staying hydrated.

ADRIANA: That's right. So I guess first things first, Jewel, we always love to hear how our guests got started into tech. It's always really cool to hear different people's paths to their current career. So, what's your story?

JEWEL: I grew up with a keyboard in my hands. My parents actually worked in IT and computer science from their graduate degrees. I was the third child. And they bought a Commodore 64 for the house to play games and do word processing. And I was the baby. I'm the third daughter. So I got to play a lot of Jumpman and little machine games as a kid before I really knew anything. 

And I remember they had just a big button or a big sticker on the go button on the keyboard for me because that was all I could push when I was a baby. [laughter] So my parents kept that up over the years. They gave us a good widespread diet of arts, and music, and math, and tech, and literature. So we always just had computers lying around in the house.'90s kids will remember the TI-82, the TI-83. I think they're still getting used. 

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.

JEWEL: Yeah. So I spent a lot of time in high school just manually hand-typing little games into the calculators, so I could goof off during class.

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: Oh my God, that's awesome. 

JEWEL: Yeah. And then there's the one time where my chemistry professor walks over, and he's like, "Excuse me, miss, you seem to be goofing off. What are you doing?" And I went, "Oh, I'm programming a visualizer for the orbit of electrons around this molecule," [laughter] using matrix math that my dad had taught me because he's, as I mentioned, a math nerd. So yeah, the instructor was just like, "[sighs] carry on."

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: I mean, how would you respond to that? Like, you've out-nerded the instructor. [laughs]

JEWEL: Yeah. So I definitely come from a nerd background, and then I did actually --

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: That's awesome. 

JEWEL: Yeah. And then I actually did get a real Bachelor's degree in computer science. But I kind of mixed it up a little bit where I got a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science.

ANA: Nice.

JEWEL: With a double major in technical theater and a minor in Spanish studies. And people thought I was a music major.

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: That is awesome. That's so cool, so cool. 

ANA: So many different buildings [laughs] to be in all the time. 

ADRIANA: Wow. That's a lot of hats. [laughs]

JEWEL: It's a lot of hats and a lot of keys. I also worked in the AV department, so I would have keys to a lot of campus. 

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: It was really funny when the campus security guy called me once or twice, and I'm just like, "I'm sorry, I work here. Like, I have more keys than you do." [laughter] And they were not impressed. But yeah, so that was my...my informal training as a kid was just mess around with computers, do math and science stuff, do a lot of other interesting extracurriculars, and then went to college. And then, after college, I got into the industry. I worked at Epic Medical Records, not Epic Games, doing internal tooling there where I worked on basically the internal employee directory and how to request PTO because this was 2009, and we didn't have Workday at that point. 

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: We built too much stuff in-house. And then, I worked at Sonic Foundry after I got tired of Epic and mostly the commute. It was an hour commute in the snow sometimes, which was less fun. But Sonic Foundry was a quick skateboard ride away from my apartment. And then I left Wisconsin for California when one of my friends who I had been working on a startup with, said, "You can either move to Rhode Island, and we can get acqui-hired, or we can move to Silicon Valley, decline the acqui-hire. I have some other jobs lined up." And we said, "California sounds nice."

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: So we moved to Mountain View, and we worked there for a couple of months before we got laid off, which was fine. I didn't like the job anyway. And then, I got a job at Imgur for a year. And then I've been working at Reddit for the past six and a half years. So yeah, that's been my...I've just kind of floated around tech a bit, just kind of poking my nose in a lot of things and trying to make it multidisciplinary.

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: That is so cool.

ANA: It's always fun when you end up getting a chance to bring your hobbies into work and in and out and try to figure out what makes the most sense. I know when I first got a chance to meet you, I was just like, wait, how did you even study Spanish and something theater-related and technology in your year? And at that moment, you were a manager at Reddit. 

It was just one of those things that I was like, okay, acknowledging the different career paths that folks can come in with, which was actually really cool. But now that we have you here as an IC software engineer, I also kind of wanted to poke at it. What was your transition from management to IC like?

JEWEL: It was an interesting transition to go back from being a manager to IC. And I'd always kind of planned this where I remember reading mipsytipsy's pendulum career path blog posts. So Charity had written several years ago about the benefits of working as an IC for a while and then switching over to engineering management and then switching back to an IC path as, you know, more experience and more understanding of how does management work? Why does management work? Like, what do the managers need? Like, why are they asking me these things that I previously thought were a name? And now I come back from it, and I'm like, oh yeah, I get this.

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: You're asking for this because your directors are asking for it, or because we have this regulation to deal with, or this policy, or this process. And I also understand why you build processes because, as a manager, you usually don't have time to deal with stuff. So you write it down, and you ask somebody else to follow the instructions. Or, more realistically, you ask somebody else to write down the instructions for a third person to follow. 

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: So yeah, it's been fun going back from manager to IC and just having a lot of empathy for my manager and taking a lot of work off of his plate, especially logistics and project management that before I wouldn't care to deal with it. My manager would be like, "Could you please fill out your paperwork?" Now I understand why he's asking me to fill out the paperwork because he wants us to keep getting paid.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's funny because, as a manager, it's so frustrating to get people to fill out timesheets or fill out employee surveys and stuff like that. And then, as an IC, if you haven't been on that side of things, it can be a little bit difficult to relate to just how frustrating it is to try to like herd cats [laughs] because that's what it feels like a lot of the time as a manager. I definitely agree with you on the empathy. 

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: I definitely find that nowadays when my manager asks to do some admin thing, I'm like, oh yeah, I remember what it was like to try to get people to fill stuff out and how frustrating it is to chase people down. And it's totally out of your control because, I mean, they have to do it, not you, but you're still accountable for making sure that that stuff gets done. 

JEWEL: Right. It's like, I see the benefits of, like, oh, if I do a little bit of the admin work, they can help me out with a lot of other things that they're much better suited for. Like, my manager is really good at schmoozing, and he has a good sensibility for, like, here's who to talk to, here's who you don't talk to, or like, here's the person you talk to first. They will help you prepare for who to talk to second because that person's time is hard to schedule, or they have certain interests they want to zero in on. 

And it's like a lot of stuff that I just don't have experience in. I'm like, oh, you've been around this block. Let me just watch and learn and take coaching. And then he also does the nice thing of career growth for me and puts me in those situations and then back channels it to me about, like, you can lay off this topic. You can move on to that. Or, like, hey, you're doing a really good job. Keep it up.

ANA: That's super supportive. [laughs] 

JEWEL: Yes, very supportive.

ADRIANA: I was going to say you have a unicorn manager. [laughs]

JEWEL: Yeah, he's pretty great. He even asked me in one on, one he's like, "Hey, I know that you've got this big three-month recovery time for surgery coming up. Are you planning that in Q3 or Q4 or what?" And I was like, "Let me get back to you in two weeks after I talk to the surgeon." So that's what I'm dealing with today is going back and forth, back and forth with the surgeon, to nail down times so that I can take off three months from work. My manager is here for it, and I'm like, oh, great, cool. This is awesome.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. 

JEWEL: And his request was like, "Please give me two or three months' warning so that I can schedule our projects around this."

ADRIANA: Yeah, for sure, for sure. You mentioned going from manager to IC. Have you done the jump back and forth a couple of times, or is this your...or have you just done the jump once from manager to IC? Have you gone manager to IC, IC to manager?

JEWEL: In terms of titles, I have been an IC software engineer for years and years and years. And then, I took on a management role for three years, two and a half years, and then switched back to IC. But I've also been doing lead roles in other spheres, like for ERGs. I've helped found and lead and then train up other leads and step back and get them to do the work for a bunch of ERGs and for various little projects. 

One of the nice things that we do at my job is like a one-week hack week every quarter. So even though I've come back from being a full-time manager to an IC, I have this time where I can put together a small squad for a week or two and do engineering manager work again for them or act as a product manager or act as a project manager and delegate out other stuff. Mostly it's to ask people to step up and pick up who wants to be the project manager for this or who wants to do this and that. So I get to jump around to a bunch of different leadership roles, even without the manager title now. 

ADRIANA: Oh, awesome. Lots of fluidity, then.

JEWEL: Yeah. It's fun, especially during this one week off where it's like, go try out partnering with people in other teams, go try out other roles, go just do some project you've been wanting to take care of. So I end up kind of matching up around my ERG goals as well. Like, one of the projects that I worked on last quarter and I'm working on this quarter is when you change your name...because I changed my name legally and socially last year. 

So, in addition to changing your government ID, there are all these places where you're identified by name or by username. In all these systems, what's the process for getting those fixed, like, for updating those? Where does it kind of break? Where does somebody need to manually take on work versus where can you just do it in one central point? 

So one of my projects was, as I went through that, I went and logged all my actions that I was doing, like, I updated this system, or I noticed that this system was broken, just log it. And then, after three months of that, I got together a group for this hack week and said, "Hey, I need people to help me get this knowledge together, get it usable, identify more gaps, and turn it into a guidebook, like a runbook for other on-calls who are tasked with processing a name change of one of their fellow employees," because this happens all the time.

People are changing their names for weddings, and divorces, and transitions, and just notable life events. And it's like, okay, we should streamline our systems where they're not streamlined because there are protocols for this. But there are a lot of systems that are on older protocols or aren't doing it. So we have to do manual work on top of that. So it's like, all right, well, let's write a runbook. That's what we know how to do, write a bunch of runbooks.

ANA: [laughs] It's nice that you get a chance to bring some of that mentality of, like, you do it once, and now let's actually document it the first time so that we actually don't have to deal with this on a constant manner as it continues to come up. That mindset of the SRE that we kind of get to walk life with, I think, is a very niche space of glasses to wear and pattern-recognize, or just kind of want to standardize, automate, delegate?

JEWEL: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's very much where can we make the computer take on the work? And where do we need to have our own checklists to take care of it ourselves? Or can we even find middle ground of you file a helpdesk ticket, and the automation is not go apply the change to all the system? The automation is go create more helpdesk tickets, like, have one central helpdesk ticket, that is, I'm changing my name. And that can fan out to the accounting department and the infra department, and SREs, who are people who are responsible for different systems.

We have a team that is specifically responsible for the feature flagging and experiment framework. They have their own little data store that has data mapped by your email address to you. So if you change your email address, you need to go change data in those data stores. It's like, cool, let's just fan out a dozen tickets, and we just know where they need to go. And we just automate creating helpdesk tickets more easily than making somebody walk through a checklist on a Wiki page.

ANA: Make it easier for the user and follow the processes as needed. It's beautiful. [laughs]

JEWEL: Yeah, exactly. Like, it's hard enough to deal with a name change in general. It's like, yeah, let's just make it an easy process for everybody.

ADRIANA: Otherwise, when these things become so complicated, it becomes incredibly off-putting. So in some cases, it makes you want to just give up, or you invest a lot of time in this process and it kind of drives you crazy. [chuckles]

JEWEL: Yeah, a lot of time, a lot of money. I talk to people who are just like, "You know what? I don't want to bother changing my name when I get married because it's so much logistical overhead."

ANA: And, I mean, I think it even adds on more to the overload that kind of comes with it, like, something that should be simple. Like, why should the employee be suffering when using all these tools in order to do something so basic as, like, legally, this is my preferred name? Legally, it says that it is. Why can't my job kind of catch up? And that non-inclusion space and what that means for the person that they kind of have to take on of like suffering and feeling like they can't be themselves, or just extreme frustration that leads to a lot of other mental health aspects.

JEWEL: Yeah. And it really puts a light on where has there been investment in this? Banks have it moderately streamlined, not that great. The government, like, driver's license that's streamlined. Social Security that's pretty streamlined. But updating your gym membership, no, they don't care.

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: They're not dealing with financial regulations as much. And one of the things in particular that I saw is our benefits system; our benefits reimbursement system broke, where I couldn't log in. I had to go get a separate username and address. I couldn't login with our one-click login because I had set one name in our internal systems, but I hadn't changed my legal name yet. So the benefits system was still working off my legal name, and they struggled with that. 

ADRIANA: Oh no.

JEWEL: So that was just like, cool, I have to jump through even more hoops to get money to pay off for all this other stuff going on in my life. Fortunately, I did notice after I changed my name at social security that did percolate through a surprising amount of systems automatically. It's like, okay, if I did start with the blessed path, in some ways, my life would be a lot easier as opposed to I was impatient for various reasons and did things a little bit backwards. 

And I'm like, I feel like this is a lesson I keep learning a lot at work too of like, when you're starting up a new service, and you're like, you want to build a new application, and you want to get it out the door. We have at work this great system for...you go talk to the SREs and the infra folks. And they talk you through what kind of load do you expect? And what are your failure points? And how are you going to recover when they fail? 

And what are the dependencies that your app is sitting on? What's going to be dependent on your app? And when they go down, how is your system going to recover? And how are the other systems going to recover from your app going down? So they just walk you through this whole system of making sure you're going to have this nice, stable system to work with, and you can have a nice, smooth launch. 

Because when you're working with a daily user base of...I try to avoid looking at the numbers but lots, there's a lot of traffic going through. And if you want to spin up a new service, you have to target for stability from the start. There have been some times where I just went ahead and built stuff from memory, and I did not do the checklists, or like, I didn't go and talk to my SRE partners. And I went, "I want to go launch this thing." And they went, "Okay, are you sure?

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: Are you ready? Are you planning to stay up all night to keep fixing this because we're going to have to stay up all night fixing it with you. We would rather get sleep because sleep is good. You like sleep too. You've done on-call." I'm like, "Oh, yes. Yes, that's a good point. I should follow through with my checklist." And this is why I appreciate my SRE partners who then go, "Okay, we'll fast-track, walking you through the checklist because you have an urgent deadline. Buuut...

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: You need to go through the checklist, or you're going to be hurting more than if you just push your deadline another week or two." So sometimes it's easier to take the blessed path, take, you know, somebody built the system up, and it's like, okay, fine, I'll follow the system. It'll make my life easier in the end, I guessss, fine.

ANA: The checklist.

ADRIANA: But also having people to hold you...being, I guess, a voice of reason helps a lot. 

JEWEL: Yeah, that externalized voice of reason, especially because I get too close to my project, or I get too invested in just shipping it. And they're like, "Yeah, you can ship this. It'll be easier if you do this very reasonable thing we've asked."

ANA: [laughs] It's like the checklist got created for a reason. Like, let's continue preaching to standardize it.

JEWEL: Right. All of these things on this checklist are because somebody got hurt at some point or somebody got hurt repeatedly, and we would like to not repeat those same mistakes. We would like to make interesting and new mistakes.

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: But it's interesting, too, because it can be a double-edged sword. Because, I mean, it sounds like your checklists are actually up to date and are useful. And then you've got the other scenario where you've got these legacy checklists that nobody bothers to update. And then you don't even know why these items are in the checklist, and then you end up screwing yourself over for that. So it sounds like you have the happy path of checklists where the checklists are up to date, are doing what they ought to be doing.

JEWEL: Yeah, it's very nice to be in a company where we are trying to keep everything fresh, especially with...there's been a lot of just change under the surface and the inner workings of the platform in the last couple of years, so it's a lot of, well, we used to use this process, but it doesn't even apply anymore. Let's look at it and see what we can pull out and reuse. But sometimes it's like, yeah, you've forgotten what this is useful for? Well, keep an eye out, and if it's important, it'll pop up again, hopefully, probably. 

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: But it is that constant like, yeah, just be tweaking your processes. Go back and look at what you're doing every couple of weeks or every couple of months and just tweak stuff. And I actually have a reminder. In my team's core project, in the README, I have a checklist of, like, did you add screenshots? Did you add verification instructions? Did you add post-deploy monitoring instructions? And then there's one more item on the checklist that says, "Have you noticed you have been going off the checklist a lot recently? Like, are there things in the checklist that you're just constantly ignoring or things you keep adding? Go change the checklist. You have the power of changing your own checklist."

ANA: That's a nice little reminder to add for your future self and that mindset.

JEWEL: Yeah, because it's like, I remember...I'm looking at a photo on my wall where I astonished one of my friends because she...I was just showing off like some art. And I have this black and white portrait of just a line drawing of a woman. And she said, "Oh, it'd be really cute if you had a copy of that with blue hair like you do." And I said, "Oh, that would be cute." So I took it off my wall, and I took a marker, and I drew on it. And she was astonished.

ADRIANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: She's like, "Wait, you can just draw on that?" I'm like, "This is a $20 painting from Target. I don't give a shit. 

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: Also, it's got glass, and this is a dry-erase marker. So when I dye my hair again, I can fix the color. It takes 30 seconds." [laughter] It's like, yeah, just reminding people of, like, we're not stuck with the tools we're given. We have so much power over the tools that we use and the ways that we use our tool. And it's just fun to just remind people of, like, you can tweak your stuff. Like, it's a little frustrating to have to constantly be tweaking your tools. But it's nice to have the option of, like, it's been two or three times this wasn't working. Let's do something different.

ADRIANA: Yes, and being given the space to do that as well. I think one of the things that I've benefited from most in my career is being in places where when something's not working, being given the space to take a step back and rethink how I'm doing stuff versus places where they're like, oh, this isn't working, you suck. But you must continue doing it the crappy, shitty way.

JEWEL: Yeah, I definitely appreciate having managers and peers who will remind each other of, like, it looks like you struggled a couple of times. Do you want to host a post-mortem? Do you want to maybe make some tweaks to the system? And getting that messaging from our VP of infrastructure is a big proponent of monitor yourself, monitor how you're working. 

And when we start doing a post-mortem discussion, there's the preamble, which we will repeat even if it is a bunch of people who are experienced. But the preamble is we work in complex systems with a lot of people and a lot of inputs, and things constantly changing. Things break constantly. Let's talk about it. Like, this is the blameless post-mortem style of you might have done something, but we understand that you are trying to do your best. 

And if we see a trend of somebody not trying to do their best, then it's like, that's a different discussion. But we're just assuming that good intent off the start of we're trying to do our best in a complex and challenging environment. How can we support ourselves and each other? And just having that throughout the company it's so nice, and just having lots of places where we can go ask questions like different channels for different topics. 

Or every week or two, there'll be a meeting of front-end people, or back-end, or machine learning where it's like, yeah, let's just keep in touch with each other and figure out how to help each other constantly. And that's when people are interviewing, or people just joined the company, I'm like, how do you do success? You help each other out.

ANA: Humans first. I mean, I think that acknowledgment you share is like, if more organizations were actually starting to conduct their meetings around incidents in that manner, they actually might be able to understand their systems more in a faster way than when they're sitting there pointing fingers of like, so and so did this but this didn't do that. 

Versus focusing on why is it that such person did this action? Like, because the UI was easy to use? Is it because of prior knowledge, or is it just because that was the first place that you thought of checking in your tooling in order to see if there was an issue going on? Like, asking those questions actually to protect one another a lot more.

JEWEL: Yeah, asking the questions. And it's like, yeah, you find out so much more. And you can find so many opportunities that are non-linear. It's like, how do you think outside the box? We just ask a lot of questions that lead you outside of the box. And then we're like, oh, is this the first thing you saw on your tooling? Okay, we can fix the tooling. Or like, oh, you never got trained in this new tool? Was there any marketing around the new tool? Okay, let's do a little round of marketing around this new tool that's more useful for you.

ANA: They sent you to the wrong dashboard? What link did you go through? And then you start realizing that you have a whole bunch of random dead links somewhere else.

JEWEL: Yeah. Or, like, we had this recently where we moved one of our Wikis and didn't realize that we wouldn't get redirects. So now I do have a bunch of Wiki links that are sitting around that I need to go fix up. So occasionally, people will be like, "Hey, your link's broken." I'm like, "Oops, thanks. 

ADRIANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: I'll go fix that. Where did you find it? Are there more nearby that I can go fix in the process?" Yeah, asking questions is..., and I'm finding this more and more, especially as I'm growing older and getting better at personal relationships outside of work, that asking questions gets you really far and assuming that people are trying to do their best. 

ADRIANA: So true.

JEWEL: And if it's like, oh, I feel like somebody is not doing well by me. Then it's like, well, let me ask them, like, do you know what I think is good? What do you think is good? Do we need to negotiate a little bit, or do we have some fundamental mismatches? Or where can we find common ground here and take care of each other outside of work?  And it's very much the same style of questioning that we use in a post-mortem question or a pre-mortem of, how is this going to go wrong? What happened? And let's just talk through it and not be blaming each other. Let's just take note of things and figure out interesting follow-ups. 

You just have to change the framing and the phrasing a little bit where it's like, if I'm talking to my partner, like a romantic partner, I'm not going to be phrasing stuff in like, what's our OKRs for this weekend? [laughter] I'm going to be saying, "Hey, what do you want to get done this weekend? What do you want to get up to?" And it's like, "Oh, you want to go out and have dinner and get a nice dinner? Okay, we can work towards that." That's our OKR of, like, objective: have a nice dinner. Key result: we get home, and we feel fat and happy

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: Bringing SRE into real life.

ANA: And, I mean, I think even as you were mentioning earlier, that part of asking questions and trying to understand there is that part of, like, where are they coming from? Why is it that they're thinking this? Why is it that this behavior happened? That we get to have that context in humans around us and relationships around us, that we get to ask more questions to try to understand someone's behavior in the same way that we try to understand the system's behavior.

JEWEL: Yeah, because humans are big systems, and systems are representations of humans at scale. 

ADRIANA: Absolutely.

ANA: [laughs] The only big difference is that humans just have this other part of systems call called feelings and emotions. [laughter]

ADRIANA: Throws a wrench into life.

ANA: So...

JEWEL: That's one of the really fun things I've been chatting with in therapy in the last couple of years. It's like, okay, what are the systems that I can use around processing emotions where, like...I heard this phrase, like, feel your emotions. And I'm just like, how am I supposed to feel my emotions? And then, thank you, pop psychology on Instagram. I saw a little diagram that's like, here's how emotions manifest physiologically. 

Like, when you're feeling anger, you'll feel this literal tightness in your throat or this heat in your chest. And it's like, oh, I recognize all these references from theater. When you feel that gorge in your throat, like the tightness, it's like, no, you're literally feeling tightness, and that's part of your brain, your body signaling that. And it's like, oh, this is my dashboard of, like, let me pay attention to that.

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: Your body sends you alerts when things are not going well.

JEWEL: Right. And that's when it's like, oh, the yoga instructors are like practice mindfulness. I'm like, mindfulness around what? [laughter] Oh, that my body is sending me these alerts that I need to sit up and eat something. Why am I feeling angry right now? Oh, because I need to go eat something. I need to go take a nap.

ANA: We got shipped with tooling, no runbooks, no Wiki. We're out to figure it out for ourselves because it's that, where it's like, feel your feelings. And you're just like, I feel sad, and I'm going to go on about it. But you don't really necessarily understand where in your body that actually shows up. 

I've also been following some Instagram holistic psychologist accounts that were talking about that where it's like, where is it that anxiety pit in your stomach actually falls and where that stems from. You actually not being able to talk about those feelings, and then your body internalizes that processing. So it's kind of interesting on that human complex system mindset.

JEWEL: Yeah. And, like, we do have some of these runbooks. This is where it's like you get graduate degrees in therapy and in psychology, and it's like, oh, they're the ones sitting on the runbooks. Okay. Yes, I'll go pay for a therapist; rather, I'm glad that my insurance helps cover for a therapist. 

ANA: I agree. [laughs]

ADRIANA: I want to zoom in on the therapy stuff because I've been in therapy before. I think it was one of the greatest things that I could have done for myself was just seek someone out when I was in distress. And I love that we're able to talk about that freely here because even though I think there's a lot more openness towards talking about mental health in tech, I think we still have ways to go. It would be nice to have...and I think employers are definitely starting to provide support around mental health. But I think there's always more that can be done. 

Back in the day, taking stress leave was viewed as a bad thing, and now people...I don't think we even call it that anymore. We call them mental health days. And employers are starting to embrace that with the realization that, hey, sometimes we go through shitty times, and we just need some time to reboot the system so that we can be at our best at work and to have that kind of support so that we can continue to perform and not end up at the hospital because we're stressed out. I think that's really, really important. 

But I do wish that there was a little bit more that can be provided because I think a lot of employers will cover up to a certain amount of money in terms of therapy bills, but it's not 100% coverage. And we all know that long-term therapy can last years and years and years. That's just the reality of it. And it's good to have long-term therapy, but it's expensive.

JEWEL: Yeah. When I was planning out FSA for how much money do I want to have to put into healthcare, a lot of that is just going into paying out-of-pocket expenses for therapy. But like you said, with the employers putting into it, it's like, yeah, it's like paying for the therapy too, like, putting into your healthcare benefits. But also, that time off, those holidays where if you look at other industries, as a sailor, you would get shore leave where your shore leave is going to be a long weekend or whole week off. It's like, oh, you need five days off to make a substantial holiday of it to feel a reset. 

ADRIANA: Yes.

JEWEL: So it's like, yeah, take off. Within the tech industry, we do have this very Christmas to New Year's-centric holiday, but it's like, oh, the slowdown that happens in December, we can all jointly agree let's take a day off, or like, let's take a whole week and not just a day. Where it's like a day off is good for a day trip or get some more groceries, whatever. It's like, no, you want to take a little substantial time. 

But then you also need to have that psychological safety of, like, my manager will help me with redistributing my labor, or I'm not going to come back to a fire. I will be able to trust in my co-workers to take care of stuff that comes up. Or just be like, you know what? We're just going to reschedule stuff to later. We're just going to cancel some stuff that does not feel more important because you need to take that rest period to be able to continue doing work. 

It's like, yeah, this is the capitalist pitch of if you want to get the most out of your staff, you don't run them into the ground. You give people some rest time. You let people sit down and chit-chat and take a couple of days off and not think about work a decent amount of the time.

ANA: And it takes, I think, having a lot more of those conversations like making sure that it just becomes normal in many organizations, in many teams of how folks are doing. What I always say is that it kind of comes from the top the same way that we see reliability that unless leadership is the one pushing it down, like, we need to build stable, reliable systems, it's not going to happen. If we're not saying we need to build a team that actually cares about humans, it's not going to happen. And you need to take into account workload, on-call rotations, how many pages they're getting. Like, how much are they getting pulled into incident post-mortems? And I think not a lot of that happens. 

And I think one of the things that I'm starting to see again, or maybe it's just more common now, that when you do end up in crisis, is that you're broken, that you've broken yourself. And I myself also had that belief that when I burned out of tech, I was broken. And it's just like; it's just your system telling you to slow down and that you need to do things differently. But it's that shift in mindset that's going to get us to make a change in the industry.

JEWEL: Yeah, that's very much previous pain informing improvements of behavior where I'll have these long-running incidents, or I'll have incidents that'll go until, like, 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. And we still have to get up in the morning and deal with it. And sometimes I'll go, I'm prepping a large rollout, and let me think back to, oh yeah, do I have the energy to stay up all night? Nope, nope, I do not have that energy. I have suffered already before. 

With that memory of that pain, that informs me to go and say, "Hey, SREs, how can I avoid getting paged for this system in the middle of the night?" Or, like, if there is something that breaks, is it p-zero severity? Or is it the highest severity? Is it mid-severity? Can we set up our paging with respect to that of, like, oh, here's the lowest severity escalation schedule that doesn't fire outside of business hours? Great. Let's use that instead of routing everything through the respond immediately to your pager.

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: Totally. 

JEWEL: And that's one thing I've been glad to see with this or getting more and more mature is defining those SLOs and SLAs that reflect severity levels of, like, is this impacting 100 people, or 1,000, or 20,000 people? React appropriately.

ANA: I think people forget how much of an impact fine-tuning alerts can actually be on the mental health of a team and that this should actually be due quite often the same way that folks are revisiting service-level objectives. It's just like; it's a constant need to be evaluated. 

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's a maintenance thing. I mean, in some ways, it's like going to therapy. Sometimes you go because there's something that triggers you needing to go to therapy. But then there's other stuff where you continue to go to therapy for continuing to maintain your mental state, and I think SLOs can be looked at in the same way. And when we spoke with Alex Hidalgo about SLOs, one of the big takeaways was your SLOs aren't set in stone. And as your application evolves, they're going to continue to evolve, and that's all right. That's what you should be doing.

JEWEL: And that's also where I appreciate my management for enforcing the social side of that of, like, oh, you need to host these therapy sessions. And where do we do it at work? We have our every-other-week sprint retro. We have our post-mortem sessions for big events, and then potentially scheduling more where it's like, oh, we see a recurring trend; let's do a roundup. Or we have our operational excellence meetings every couple of weeks or every month where we go through and talk about, like, what's been happening recently? And how do we feel about it? Can we do better? Where it's like, this is group therapy in a technical setting for our systems and ourselves.

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. That's awesome. One final point that I want to make along the lines of making sure that you have support from...just going back to the previous point of making sure you have support from your organization around mental health, I feel like, going back to what you were saying, going from IC to manager I feel that when you get into a position where you can have that kind of influence on the well-being of your team, as a manager, drawing on that IC experience of like, hey, I've been in situations where I haven't been supported in my mental health, and as a manager, I can do that. 

Or I've been in situations where I have been supported in my mental health, and I've seen great results from that, and as a manager, I can also do that for my team. The more people coming into positions of management having that, the better. I just want to go back to Jewel's comment about supportive managers with respect to mental health and supportive organizations with respect to mental health. 

And one of the things that I think is super important is that as people in their careers come up as managers, I feel like this is a really great opportunity for them to effect really positive change on an organization where you can draw from personal experiences whereby, like, hey, I was on a team where my mental health wasn't taken into consideration, and therefore I don't want that to happen. I want to do better for my team. Or the converse, where you've been on a team where your mental health was taken into consideration. You had a kick-ass manager, and now you have some behavior that you can emulate. 

But basically, I want this to serve as a call to action for anyone who's coming up as a manager, whether it's for the first time or you're going back and forth between IC and manager. I feel like this is a really good opportunity to really make some positive changes in how an organization treats mental health. The more folks in management continue with this pattern of positive behavior; I think the more that we can start seeing more positive changes in the industry around mental health.

JEWEL: Yeah, that's really nicely said. And yeah, definitely, as more people get into the industry and get into supporting your mental health and supporting your team's mental health, it's like, yeah, when you're the manager, you're the one who gets to make those decisions of when are we going to be hosting these daily and weekly meetings? You seem to be working too hard. You need to take a break. Or figuring how to finesse that...saying it softly where some people will be like, "I'm fine," and be like, "But are you though?

ADRIANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: Would you like to review your velocity? And you can come to the conclusion that you actually need to take a break."

ADRIANA: Yes.

ANA: Definitely on tracking those PTO days of, like, "You haven't taken days off or go get an Airbnb somewhere and work somewhere else remotely." 

ADRIANA: Yes.

ANA: Like if your job permits it, those things like it. Or I would even add, like, maybe even just posting as a resource within the engineering organization, like burnout index. Like letting folks understand if they're possibly near burnout and, what they can do about it, what burnout actually looks like. Having that conversation that if you're burnt out for too long, you might fall into a depressive episode and such. We have to be a lot more proactive about these conversations, the same way that we've been preaching about reliability. Like, what work can we be doing now to not be stuck in an ouchie or worse later?

JEWEL: Yeah, and it's really fun to talk more and more about that because, like...we haven't talked much about it today, but I got diagnosed with ADHD several years ago. And that's mostly because I saw people like Rich Burroughs talking in public on Twitter about ADHD coaching and getting diagnosed and seeing other people in my tech sphere talk about ADHD and going, oh, what they're talking about, that's me. I'm reflecting those same behaviors. 

And this is a particular approach to working well with, like, this is how my brain works. Here's how I can work with my brain. So it's like, it's no one size for any service. It's no one size for any person of how to make things work well. So just talking about it and putting it out there where it's like, oh, just, you know, mention this is how this impacts me, and other people just realize, oh, that is me.

ANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: And then figure out, like, okay, how do I work better? Like, for me, it's I put a lot of effort into...I now take meds. I now do better practices. Like, at the start of my day, I pick my top three things to work on. I tell my co-workers like, hey, if you want this thing to get done, maybe schedule a meeting where we just sit together and work through it together because otherwise, it might not get done. So you and I would both appreciate if we just sat down together and did this because that's what works for me. And I see this, especially within SRE, where I feel like a lot of SRE culture is actually codifying ADHD coping tactics.

ADRIANA: [laughs]

ANA: Whoa, I love that. [laughs]

JEWEL: Yeah, because it's like, oh, we don't want to do the same work three times. Let's make the computer do it. 

ADRIANA: Yes.

JEWEL: Or like, oh, there's something broken, and we're good at fixing it. Yeah, let's go fix it. But also having that cognizance that you might not recognize that you've been working for too long because you've really focused on this thing and you need to cycle out, like, somebody else will just come from a rotation, and you have to go hand off. And it's like, oh, yeah, okay. Okay, thanks. Thank you for having some external guardrails on my own brain.

ANA: There's definitely a lot that SRE guidelines, and rules, and goals actually teach you, like, if you are to embody those into your life in a way to live a fulfilling life. I've said in multiple [laughs] podcasts those are the type of things that keep me up at night. How is it that you find that parallel of, like, am I doing my hobbies, my habits? Am I running towards my goals and making sure that I stay focused through the day while doing so? Which is kind of like what our complex systems that we're on-call for have to do. [laughs]

ADRIANA: Totally.

JEWEL: It is fun to be a complex system. My partner will sometimes go like, "Remember, you are a complex plant. Go get some sunshine and some water."

ADRIANA: [laughs]

JEWEL: It's like [crosstalk 44:34]

ADRIANA: Yes.

JEWEL: Yeah, okay.

ADRIANA: It's good to be reminded of that. 

ANA: I love that. You are a complex plant. 

ADRIANA: That's going on our Twitter, and Mastodon, and all the things. [laughter]

JEWEL: Pinned post: you are a complex plant. Get some electrolytes. That's what plants crave.

ANA: Yes.

ADRIANA: You need sunshine and water. [laughs] Love it.

ANA: So with that, we would like to thank you, Jewel, so much for joining us in today's podcast. We loved talking all things from SRE to on-call, ADHD, taking care of our mental health. 

Don't forget to subscribe and give us a shout-out via all the social media such as Mastodon, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram via oncallmemaybe. And be sure to check out the show notes on oncallmemaybe.com for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. For On-Call Me Maybe, we're your hosts Ana Margarita Medina... 

ADRIANA: And Adriana Villela. Signing off with...

JEWEL: This is Jewel wishing you all peace and love for the humans we collaborate with and code to support that peace. Thank you so much for inviting me today.

ANA: Whoo.

ADRIANA: Thanks so much for coming on. This was great.