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But one thing about how painful it is to learn or to run into problems - I think a lot of newer engineers won't know if the pain that they're feeling is worthwhile, or going to be valuable for them or not. We had a phrase when I was teaching at Turing School, and bullet points, around effective struggle strategies. Lik... |
**Jerod Santo:** That was one of the things that I did often. So I did teach web development for a couple of years in classrooms, and as an instructor, I would be able to pick and choose if I was going to remove a roadblock for somebody and get them along their way, or if I was just going to let them sit in that one. A... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Mm-hm. |
**Jerod Santo:** At that point, it was like, “This is actually making you stronger, if you get through this.” Other times, it's like, "You just can't figure out this database connection string, like this is not knowledge that you need to have. This is just ridiculous. Let me just fix it for you real quick, and you can ... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** For senior engineers that are in these mentorship roles, there are definitely signs of effective struggle and ineffective struggle. Sometimes for the engineer, this might come out in emotions; they might be getting really frustrated or really short with some of their questions, or how they're feel... |
One thing that we would see a lot with people who are struggling and spinning their wheels was like - especially for new engineers - tons of commented-out code. It was like they wanted to hold on to all of these things that they tried. And it's like, "I can tell you tried ten things and you're afraid to get rid of them... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The weeds. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah, you're in the weeds. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[55:54\] So before my professional days, I was a server at a restaurant, and we would call that “in the weeds” essentially - when you have too many tables and you can't keep up and you just cannot focus, we call that “in the weeds.” And that's where I learned that terminology. It applies to many of... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Step away to get unstuck. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. And it's also okay to be in a position where you don't even know what question to ask, because you're so stuck and you've tried nothing, or you don't understand the problem space. That's another area of coaching that a lot of senior engineers have to run into, is helping them rephrase what t... |
So this is another aspect of like, you really need to build a close relationship and understanding of the background of the person that you're working with and the person that you're mentoring, to see what kind of pre-existing knowledge they do have, what is their foundation, where is their area of expertise, so that y... |
We had a newer engineer join our team who had worked a lot with Git, and this was their first infrastructure position. So connecting Git for version control to Terraform was a really good link for them to be like, “Okay, version control for your infrastructure versus version control for your code.” There's a lot of sim... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Those kinds of exchanges though - it does require some vulnerability. Because that person that’s the mentee is going to have to potentially share, like, “You know what? I -- ” They’ve got to show the side of them that doesn't know, and that's challenging. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Absolutely. And I think that comes with the safety aspect of that, comes with, as a senior, demonstrating, “Here are the things that I don't know anything about. These are the things that I struggle with. And these are the things that I get really confused by, and I always have to lean on this per... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Essentially, that provides some safety, right? Because in vulnerability, you're like, “Can I be safe to share what I don't know?” And that's a version of saying, “Hey, it's safe. Because I'm vulnerable in these ways. I don't know everything here in these ways. So you can reciprocate and be vulnerabl... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[59:44\] At Articulate, do you have an explicit budget for education? Do you have that at your disposal? Because I'm looking at some of these things like lunch-and-learns, and bringing in outside teachers, and a lot of these things actually require capital expenditure, right? |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. So we don't have like a dedicated internal team on education right now focused on those efforts. But we have the personal professional development budgets for all of our engineers, and anyone in the org really, for a benefit to go expand their learning and their education. We've done hackath... |
So we do a lot of the standard things right now that I think a lot of orgs do in terms of benefits that way, and then these education efforts are all just getting rolling, because we've been a pretty small company so far - I think about 250 employees - and we're starting to grow, and absolutely feeling a lot of those p... |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm just thinking about somebody who wants to instill these values and then execute on these values inside of their orgs, what are the kinds of things that they would need. That's why I asked about a playbook. It seems like you need some sort of budget or the ability to spend some money, especially som... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah, absolutely. So I definitely think budget is a concern, and knowing to prioritize that upfront time cost for future gains and efficiency later is super-important. And I think as managers and directors at Articulate, we have the autonomy to do that, and it is absolutely up to our discretion. I... |
So I think it's really important to have that buy-in from up above and that trust from up above to make those calls and make those decisions, because you don't have to have a dedicated team or person that is solely focused on implementing these educational efforts all across the org on every team in one-on-ones. You ca... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you don't have the actual education team; it's sort of baked in. What is that called, and if you don't have that - so speaking to listeners that don't have this and want to instill it, what would you call it if it doesn't have a name yet? And how do you pitch that as an idea? How do you forecast ... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Great question. I think you really want to define that as a core value and core priority, either for a relationship, when you define the relationship between a senior engineer and someone who they're going to be mentoring... They can define that as a core value in their relationship. They can say,... |
As a manager or a director of a small team, you might be saying, “Okay, within our team, this is how we operate. We put these types of processes in place, because we're going to prioritize these types of learning efforts”, and you work that into the policies for your particular team. |
\[01:04:11.16\] This works really well at Articulate, because we do have that autonomy to run our teams, and that trust to run our teams the way that we see fit; maybe at other organizations they're a bit more strict with that type of stuff, but at the team level you can define that as a core value. And then at the org... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I like that. It's incremental. You start at the smaller area where you can see the surface area and control it better, and then you see this success, and you use that success to layer it up. It's iteration. It's iterative, essentially. Iterative education, I don't know what to call it, but you... |
**Jerod Santo:** I think - ongoing, right? Ongoing education. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Is that what they call it? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Why I say iterative is because you started in the smaller two-person sense or small team sense, you were able to put some sort of framework and it made sense for your coding style, team, or operational, organizational, whatever it might be, and then you said, “Hey, everybody else, this is how ... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. And once you have that proof, it's so contagious, especially at these smaller organizations... Stealing ideas from each other is our favorite thing to do at Articulate. We're always creeping on each other's meetings and popping into different team meetings, and we're like, "Ooh, I like this ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We do it here, too. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Into your team. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** In different ways. I steal Jerod's words. He steals my words. |
**Jerod Santo:** For sure. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** What does the proof look like? Is it happy engineers? Is it you end up moving faster eventually? What does that quantify? It seems like it's hard to quantify. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah, I think it's both of those things. I focus a lot on efficiency, and really seamless resolutions to issues. So on our team, in particular, our platform team, we're supporting lots of engineering teams internally, and we have a lot of really good data points that we can work off of. So we'll g... |
\[01:08:16.05\] But I think also just being able to move really efficiently and fast on a lot of our projects is another indicator, and being able to have anyone jump into anything pretty seamlessly is huge. So our team is responsible for - I think it was like a hundred repos out at one point. It's less than that now, ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Anything on closing, Brittany? I know we've got some resources mentioned that we'll put in the show notes. But I'm curious if there's anything you want to call out, that's like, "Okay, you made it this far... You must want to dig further or dig deeper." Any particular resources you care to call out ... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** I would definitely read up and watch the two talks that I mentioned, Camille Fournier’s blog post and Katrina Owen's -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Cultivating Instinct, yeah |
**Brittany Dionigi:** ...video on Cultivating Instinct. And then there's a lot of education research that I would encourage people to look into, just literally about how our brains work and what the different learning styles are that exist. And I have tons of links to these that I can send over that we can include. Thi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I’d be curious for sure. We'll get those links from you and put them into our show notes. So listeners, you know they're there; head back to the notes, you'll find them, a link away. Dig deep, be curious. |
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