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For more infomation >> Lexus IS Cabriolet 250C Luxury Keyless entry, Parkeersensor - Duration: 0:47. 
Thanks for having me, everybody.
Let me see.
So I've been around for a long time.
I was looking back at my career.
I've been at 8 different companies.
Most of those were startups.
I've learned a lot along the way.
So when Matthew asked me to talk, I thought...
I know this is a younger group of people.
What would I have told myself at 25?
What things have I learned?
So I was drawn to the idea of communication.
It's sort of what I do at Slack now.
So it's definitely something I didn't think about when I was younger.
And looking back -- pretty damn important.
So first I'm gonna show a bunch of tweets.
They're short and pithy, but they're not like the famous guy tweets that are supposed to
be fortune cookies or motivational posters.
I hate those.
These are really good tweets I'll be showing you.
This one I've seen hundreds of times.
I don't think this guy invented it.
I heard it 20 years ago.
But essentially: Hard skills are easy and soft skills are hard.
But it didn't really click for me until a few years ago.
And now it just seems painfully obvious to me.
So code...
You know, I've programmed in four different languages.
It's just formatting, syntax.
You can teach someone the basics and then you can just learn the syntax you need.
We talk a lot about code, but code is a teachable skill.
Interacting with humans is this lifelong challenge.
That we don't talk about very much.
So I started to think...
What could I wedge into 10 minutes of the entire...
All humanity interactions?
So just focusing on communication and some tips that will hopefully help you out at your
job and interacting in your little teams.
So these are things I wish I knew when I was younger.
That interacting with managers is something you have to do all the time.
It's not easy.
For me, managing people was super hard, and I was terrible at it, and I don't do it anymore,
and I'm super happy about that.
Writing is, for me, like pushing a boulder uphill.
I was not born with the gift of being able to express myself easily and on the fly.
So that's something I've worked on my whole life.
And I work as a writer now.
So it's a lot easier to me.
But it's taken my whole life.
And really, communication is central to everything.
So in talking to managers, I just want to talk about one on ones.
This is pretty standard in the industry.
Does anyone here have a regular one on one with their manager?
Yeah.
Half of you do.
So you have to do...
If you've never done one, I think it's a good thing that a lot of tech companies feel they
probably should do, because a CEO saw it in an airplane magazine on management or something.
But you should talk to your manager once a week, or some regular rate.
Give your concerns.
Have your manager explain stuff to you.
But a lot of people I know just dread them.
Oh, and I ran my own company for ten years and never did them, and it was terrible.
Because we only had crisis one on ones every six months.
I would much rather had have been every few weeks.
We could have talked about anything, and nothing would have built to a crisis.
So this is a classic one.
I've had these before with people.
Especially when I'm new to a manager.
What's up?
Nothing.
How is it going?
Fine.
All righty.
This is a standard one on one.
I've seen a lot.
And it sucks.
And this is my ideal one on one, which is like...
I show up, I have a million questions, sometimes I have managers I've connected with over all
sorts of stuff.
They're just therapy sessions and they're awesome.
This is my current manager at Slack.
This is my fourth manager at Slack.
We've grown ten times since I got there.
We're around 1,000 people.
I think I was about employee 100.
Every six months -- when I joined, I was the second writer.
I think there's 40 of us now, across all sorts of different disciplines.
Every six months, we split everything into threes and people just do one more specific
thing.
We call it...
Is it letting go of your Legos?
25% of what you're doing today someone else is gonna do in six months and you're gonna
be moving on to different stuff.
That's constantly happening.
I'm constantly getting new managers every six months to a year, and I have to gel with
that person.
You know, interact with them.
Figure them out.
Figure out what they can bring to me.
How we're gonna interact.
And so I started taking notes to myself.
I would say this would be like a good...
If your one on ones are boring, and your manager doesn't really care, or isn't bringing a lot
to it, you should.
So every week, during the week, I just write down questions.
That thing on Tuesday -- I was a little confused on.
I heard that announcement last Friday.
What is that gonna mean for me?
So I always have these agendas that I bring to it.
Sometimes I send it to her before, especially if we have to...
I'm gonna ask her to look something up or something.
This is like last week's one on one.
So the questions were on the top.
We're doing ours remotely, because she's in San Francisco and I'm up here.
So it's easier to type while someone is doing a Zoom thing.
I also find one on ones are like...
I don't know.
When you're on the phone, you can talk deeper, because they're not in front of you?
I don't know.
I actually love video conference one on ones, because there's, like, that distance.
And you can...
I don't know.
Be harsher.
Or be more honest.
I don't know.
So I take tons of notes about whatever answers are flying down.
And this goes on for pages.
So...
I would say if you're having the standard one on ones that are not fruitful, not something
to look forward to, like...
Work on it.
Take notes.
Bring questions.
And I would say...
I don't know.
Good interactions I always think of as people being vulnerable with each other, but that's
really thin ice that you have to walk on and figure out what your comfort level is, what
theirs is.
Technically, that person could probably fire you someday.
So how vulnerable and honest you want to be is something you've got to figure out slowly.
I would...
You know, when you have a new manager, or you want to make them more...
Share more, I would just try something little, maybe, and see what the reaction is.
For any topic, there's an oh, no comic.
And this is a perfect one.
You don't want to overdo it with your manager, because that could happen.
I was researching this the other night.
I found there was a one to one -- one on one pack of cards.
And they're like...
Really amazing questions.
Like...
This really in-depth, if you had nothing to talk about, it was like...
Where do you see the company going in the next decade?
It's really great.
I think this is probably overkill.
But yeah.
So if you don't like your one on ones, I think it's worth doing a little work to improve
them.
So...
Writing.
Like I said before, I think some people are just naturally gifted.
They're good storytellers.
They're able to express themselves, and I think everyone else...
We have to just practice this for the rest of our lives.
And I nearly failed most high school English classes.
I worked my butt off in -- I was a science major.
I work my butt off in college to do the language classes I had to do, and literature classes,
and I got Bs and Cs.
And it was tough as hell.
And then eventually it was like ten years of writing hundreds of daily emails.
I just sort of got better at expressing myself.
And I've written some tech books and been a tech editor and a blogger.
And worked on the New York Times a little bit.
And so, like, it's just a lifelong thing you've got to do, kind of.
I think it's, like, getting way more important.
Not just for people who have a job writing, but remote work, I think, has...
You know, taken off.
I'm a remote worker.
My existence in the company is just the text I write.
There's no hallway conversations for me.
I fly down once every couple of months to San Francisco for a few days, for meetings
and stuff.
But generally whatever I write is who I am in the company.
And I'm basically text on a screen.
And I think these tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams and FlowDoc -- the more people use this,
the more people are reduced to text on a screen.
If you go to the Slack offices, it's dead silent.
There could be 100 people in a room and nobody is talking.
All you hear is keyboard tapping.
It was really creepy when I interviewed there.
It was dead silence.
So many people, and not a sound.
And it's not, again, it's not just for writing, I think.
Software documentation, being a good writer -- basically befriend your entire dev team.
Be on the same page.
The better you document your code, the better you share your work with others, and figure
out problems -- postmortems are great.
I never did that before until I was at a formal company that's formalized this stuff.
Which is when we are done with every project, we have meetings, we have write-ups, what
went wrong, what went right, what are we never gonna do again, what are things that are surprisingly
great that we could do again?
These are more opportunities for people to express themselves.
I think the better writer you are, the better you'll do at work, especially in text heavy
environments like chat and stuff.
It's like something really core to everything we do.
Once you start getting good at it, you get this weird superpower.
I could write a mean email to my daughter's school if I have to, that perfectly explains
the problem.
That's fun.
People respond to your bug reports and your feature requests when you can adequately describe
them.
I see people asking others to ask questions in department-wide meetings because they could
ask the question really well.
I'm starting to see it in engineering teams at Slack, that the best communicators, the
best writers, are kind of pulling ahead of everybody else.
They just seem natural leaders.
Like, we tap some of our developers to write public blog posts about how we build stuff,
and some of the code frameworks we used and all the tips on what we've learned, but I
also see it in the designers, the best designers who write well end up being the people who
interact with clients and agencies.
Everyone has that one killer person on the team for that.
And I'm starting to see more mentions of stuff like -- good UX skill.
I love this one.
The older I get, the more I have to say and the better I am at being able to express myself.
I feel like I'm hitting that stride right now.
So just some general communications stuff.
Before we go.
I thought this was awesome.
In Silicon Valley, I used to think being too human was a weakness.
Too empathetic, too emotional, too vulnerable, too feminine.
Now I wear human as a badge of honor.
The future lies in humanity laying on top of technology.
As software eats the world and replaces so many things, being the human voice, being
the empathetic one on your team, is, like, vital.
It's something we definitely look for at Slack.
Any time...
Sometimes people go down a rabbit hole of a new feature, and there's always someone
to say: How does this help anyone?
Or how does this work in this situation?
What does this do in a low bandwidth environment?
It kind of keeps a check on everybody and it's super vital.
Like every bad work situation I look back on, a breakdown of communication was always
at the core of it.
Usually people at the top down not sharing information until it was too late.
That was a very popular one.
It's something that I think the adoption of tools that are more transparent, as we move
away from email, like if everything your team is doing is in some sort of text channel...
And everyone knows what's going on, I think that's a good thing.
You don't have people wielding information as power over others.
This is from one of my coworkers, and it stung a little bit.
I love it, yeah.
When you're arguing with someone, like -- what the hell?
Everyone is an idiot.
This happened at work.
I found a bug in Slack.
I was really fired up about reporting it.
We have these open reporting channels.
I reported it and I got in an argument with a developer who was like...
This is a feature, not a bug.
I was like...
This is terrible.
This is terrible for people, in these three ways.
And he was like...
I don't see why I would fix it.
You know, it works as people expect.
And I was really mad at him.
I hardly ever get in arguments with people, but I don't know...
A week later, I realized I was terrible at describing what actually...
Like, why we should refactor the way it works in this one view.
And the bug is getting fixed now, but...
I definitely take greater care when I make bug reports now, to make sure.
The entire tech world is gonna be gob smacked when they finally realize the solution is
to take more time and think about people more.
There's a lot of old famous people saying things like this.
So I would think about this now as you're a young person.
That this stuff is way more important than you think it is.
Than learning the latest Node.JS stuff is maybe not the most important thing.
I just wrote this as a mantra I came up with.
Working on my own stuff.
I'm mostly doing user education stuff.
I try to be courteous and observant and have empathy, but express that to my team.
Express that to readers when I'm writing.
I think the second part that's highlighted is the hard part.
I don't think we talk about it enough.
While I was putting this together, I stumbled on this thing from just a week or two ago,
which is...
Google ran a long-term study for a couple of years on all their hiring practices.
They sort of followed people they had hired for years to see who are the successful ones,
what did we do in hiring that bred that kind of success?
What were the qualities that successful people had years after they were hired?
And this was the greatest pull quote from it.
Among the eight most important qualities of their top employees, STEM expertise came in
last.
Came in 8th.
The top 7 were all soft skills.
And they're all -- like, about half of these are communication-related.
But this is...
Like, being a human.
Having empathy towards people and your users and being able to connect with people.
And being able to communicate.
You know, 8th is like...
Being a pretty good coder.
I thought that was awesome.
So closing up again...
I think interacting with your managers isn't the easiest thing in the world.
But I think it's something you can actively help make a little better.
Don't forget: Managing people sucks.
It's hard.
It's a skill.
I would say writing...
Like, I'm sitting here, saying write, write, write, write, write.
I don't think I'm like a weird friend saying you have to work your calf muscles.
It'll change your life.
Or something.
Like, writing really helps everybody, and it just pays off in all sorts of ways, and
there's ways to apply it in whatever you do.
And, like, the older I get, more I realize that communications are central to success,
basically, for any sort of team.
And that's it!
Thanks!
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