Bridging the Tech Communication Gap: Insights and Mentorship with Chris Miller

Gene Liverman: 0:05

Hello everyone and welcome to the Volunteer Technologist podcast. Here we take a look at the different ways that people who are technically inclined volunteer outside of their primary job. Today I'm joined by Chris Miller and we're going to talk about mentoring both inside and outside the technical community. How are you doing today, Chris? I'm doing real well, Gene. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us and share your experience. It sounds like you've been doing a good bit of mentoring across your career and I'm interested to hear a little more about that. Yeah, well.

Chris Miller: 0:37

I find that it's good to give back. I've been at this about 27 years now and I'm always excited by watching new developers get started, no matter where they're getting started. I work primarily in development, which is not to discount ops or anything like that, but watching new developers come into the field and try to help them along and maybe give them a leg up where I wish I would have had one has always been a big part of it, but also helping them with making their way through a business situation because it's different. Coders talk differently to one another than they do when they talk to the business or the community stuff. It's really rich territory but at the end it also keeps me in touch with new things. You can get frozen as you move along in your career and it's always good to hear from other people, other perspectives. I learn as much as they do.

Gene Liverman: 1:36

That's awesome. I guess I should probably back up just a minute and have you introduce yourself a little bit and let people know who you are. I forget sometimes that I've been reading up on the people that I chat with, but the people listening probably don't really know who you are.

Chris Miller: 1:50

Probably not. That's okay, I am not a famous person. My name is Chris Miller. I live in Cleveland, Ohio. I got started back in 94, 95. If you want to go all the way back, it was 87 on a bulletin board when.

Gene Liverman: 2:05

I was 16.

Chris Miller: 2:06

Nice, give a little bit of old school cred. I got my start. I worked at the very first online bookstore Before Amazon. In Cleveland there was a site called Book Stacks Unlimited. We were doing business over telnet in 1992. I remember the day Amazon got started and we were all like what the hell is this? I got started there. I had worked on an English degree in college but was looking for work In those early days of the web. They would take anybody who knew a little bit of HTML, which I did. I got started there and then moved into some consulting and learned more development and more development and had some really good mentors along the way, which is you'll find a theme there.

Gene Liverman: 2:57

Makes M all the difference in the world.

Chris Miller: 2:59

Exactly. I've worked for agencies. I've worked for consulting firms. I did some time at a startup out in California. I've done big corporate work. Now I'm actually working for my local park system as their website. I've done management. I did about 15 years of development management and about 15 years of coding. That doesn't add up to 27, but you take the point. It's fuzzy math. I guess the thing that I would hang my hat on, besides the mentoring I've done, are really two things. Back in 2005, when podcasting became a thing, I worked with a couple of guys. One guy named Evo Terra, another one named Team Morris. We put together a website for serializing audiobooks via podcasts. It was called pottyobookscom. Evo was still out there. He's doing his thing. As a matter of fact, I just started working with him on another project but at the time. In those early days it was the only way you could get books in order, because when you podcast you're always going to get the most recent chapter, not the first chapter. I built an engine that would allow people to get things on their schedule. Any donations went to the authors. 75% of them went to the authors. It had a really good run. It lasted about 12 years, I think. Then podcasting, matured Audible, ate the market. All of that that was really great. These days I'm most proud of I do a little bit. I do some volunteer moderating on Fosstodon, the Mastodon instance. I'm always excited by the Fediverse. It reminds me a lot of the old days of the web. I'm sure maybe you feel that way, a lot of folks from my generation. It reminds them of the old days of the web. Again, it's that open source community that really inspires me. I enjoy being a part of that.

Gene Liverman: 5:01

To bring us back to being fully on topic, how have you applied that mentoring throughout your career? I take that you've done a good bit of work helping with some of the developers and stuff of that nature.

Chris Miller: 5:14

When I moved into management, I did it because I was getting bored with the code problems I was solving. I found that I really enjoyed helping other people work through those issues and clearing the path. Mentoring became a big part of just the daily gig, which I really enjoyed. Sometimes I was a better mentor than others. Mentors have got to learn too that eventually, working with people at my day job eventually became working with a boot camp here in Cleveland and going in and helping people with Do mock interviews. These folks, coming out of the Java or C-Sharp boot camp that they were going through for 16 weeks, would know what to expect when they're walking into an interview what people are going to expect of them. It became a soup to nuts. Here's how you get started. Here's how you continue. Then, for some people that decided to move up in management, it was management. Mentoring about. The tech is still important, but helping people learn how to communicate and how to speak to business people it's no secret that a lot of us techies are fairly socially awkward or anxious or something. Helping people through those situations so that they can succeed and other people can see how good they are at what they do that was a lot of it. I want each and every developer out there to shine. Everybody is pretty brilliant when you get down to it when you're working in this field, yeah, so it's a broad spectrum, it spans about 15 years of work, and it was always something that just kind of came along with the job, because I have known people who have had very bad managers and I have known people who have had to work their way up trying to figure it out, and in some ways I had a little bit of that at the beginning and it seems to me that it is a far better thing to help someone along, to reach and help them, and you change someone's life, though Absolutely, then to just pretend it's Thunderdome and two people enter and one person leaves.

Gene Liverman: 7:38

One of my favorite managers told me that if he had done his job right, more than one person on his team would be perfectly capable and willing to take his job.

Chris Miller: 7:49

Absolutely.

Gene Liverman: 7:51

One of his goals was to basically develop somebody so that they had the capability to be his replacement if they so chose.

Chris Miller: 7:58

Absolutely, and having them know that A lot of people have the skills and just don't know that they have it. So I don't like the word empowering because it's such a buzzword, but in some cases it's appropriate. But when someone knows their own competence and is, if not comfortable, then certainly able to navigate those waters, I think it goes a long, long way. And confident technology people are desperately needed as a counterbalance to some of the insanity we see in the business world. And that's a whole topic and I'll try not to dip my toe too far into that. But rational thought is often a premium.

Gene Liverman: 8:47

Yes, I know that, for me, having people who are willing to mentor me and that being combined with being in the right place at the right time which sometimes it waits to just luck of the draw has really facilitated me to do most of the things that I do today, and it's always nice to see and hear about how other people are filling those roles of mentoring.

Chris Miller: 9:13

Absolutely. I used to really enjoy. I used to go to there's a local thing called Py Ohio, where I live in Ohio, and PyCon. I was involved with the Python community sparingly but I had some friends that were very deep into it and I used to love going to those conventions because it wasn't networking, it was meeting people and you would meet people who would mentor you for an hour and it would be an amazing experience and I have been mentored by developers older than me, developers younger than me, all different shape sizes, and it really broadens your perspective. It makes you think in different ways and you need that because in our industry that changes so quickly and yet doesn't change at all. It's really important to keep your mind fresh.

Gene Liverman: 10:08

Yes. And pliable, very much so, and it's also really important to learn how to communicate what you've done. I've had some co-workers in the past that one of my personal mentor and goals has been to help them. Help other people know how good they are at what they do, because some of them have been incredibly brilliant but have fit into that bucket of people that you described earlier either a little bit awkward, or they feel like they have imposter syndrome or any of the other varieties of things that make them not speak up, and because people don't hear what they're doing, they assume they're not doing, which couldn't be farther from the truth.

Chris Miller: 10:54

I think in our profession it is. One of the pitfalls is we only see the flaws and we don't enjoy our victories very much and we certainly don't hang our medals on the wall, and maybe we should. Maybe a little trophy case is a good thing. Some achievements, it's not a bad way to go. But you're right, learning how to communicate those to people who don't understand the technology, learning to communicate with non-technical people is absolutely essential if you're moving into certain parts of your career and it's hard because they don't think the way we do and I'm not saying they don't think, I'm not asking aspersions, but they have a different set of priorities and a different way of thinking about things Well.

Gene Liverman: 11:45

A lot of times your customer be it an internal customer or a paying customer, or the group that you're volunteering for, whoever you're interfacing with as your customer a lot of times the reason that they want you to do your thing is because they don't understand it. But you've got to be able to communicate with them in terms that they understand so that you can make sure you're actually doing the right thing. Let them know what you need to know and learn what it is that they need you to know. That translating techie to non-techie and from non-techie into techie is incredibly important for just determining requirements for a project.

Chris Miller: 12:30

Yeah, and building a relationship with that client, customer person, because they have to trust you. And a lot of people don't trust us. People don't trust what they don't understand. And if we start talking in TLA's and XTLA's and all of our domain-specific language which works for us because we know what we're talking about, it'd be the same as if you walked into an accounting meeting and they started spinning up all of their lingo that you don't understand and you would feel awkward and untrusting. And I think a lot of us may feel a lot more curious than maybe. I think that's a defining trait of a lot of technologists is we're curious so we're willing to go learn that, but a lot of folks on the other side are not. That's not what they do and that's not what they're interested in.

Gene Liverman: 13:21

And that's OK, that's OK.

Chris Miller: 13:23

That's not their role. I know that sounds a little patronizing and I apologize, but I'm trying to make space in the world for non-techies, right.

Gene Liverman: 13:32

When I did help desk support for a while, specifically in-user support, and I would tell people all the time that If everybody knew how to do all the same things it'd be really boring. I'm really good at what I do and in this particular case I was on a university campus. I don't know 90% of what the professors and administrative staff that I'm helping fix their technology. I don't understand all the stuff they do, any more than they understand what I do, but I learned how to communicate with them and we developed that mutual trust between each other and I trusted they know what they're talking about and they would trust that I know what I'm talking about and the two of us together could get the whole job done. But either one of us by ourselves couldn't get the whole process done. Like I can put a computer in a classroom and I can set up a lab, but I can't teach the kids to use it, at least not at that time.

Chris Miller: 14:28

No, you're absolutely right and you know. Understanding that, you know it all comes together as a team is really important. And there's another side to that, which is the arrogance of the techie and the arrogance of the which is the oh, everyone else is an idiot and I could run the business better than all of them and if that were true, you would be running your own business instead of working. Yes, and so that I saw a very funny video by Jeff the guy who runs guy who runs fireshipio, and he said you know, developers only have two paths imposter syndrome or megalomania. And, and you know I laugh because, yeah, I switch back and forth between that and I think everybody does.

Gene Liverman: 15:10

I think there's a healthy balance in the middle there somewhere.

Chris Miller: 15:14

Exactly, exactly. So you know. That is also an important part of mentoring is being able to say to someone well, slow your roll a little bit. You're smart and that's great, but smart in this arena doesn't mean smart at all arenas.

Gene Liverman: 15:29

What are some ways that you have found that you can communicate some of these topics that you want to mentor people on to, like how do you broach those topics with the people who need to hear them? So like at a boot camp? Obviously they're there to learn, they're probably already really receptive to a lot of this, but in a lot of other cases I'm imagining that there's some hey, I think you could probably stand to hear this, like how do you, how do you go about starting that mentoring relationship and getting kind of getting things going?

Chris Miller: 16:01

You've got to build the trust first. You've got to have a relationship. You can't lead in with like, if I, you know, if I took you aside at work and say, hey, dude, don't do this, you're never going to, and you know why would you? Just, you know, Fair point, you don't have that relationship, you don't have that trust. So you've got to. You've got to build that first, and I don't mean like in a manipulative way, but as two people having a conversation, with different experiences and who are definitely invested in one another's well-being. It's only after that that you could say, hey, I noticed you did this thing. Why did you do that thing? What were you trying to get to? Because here's how it came off in the room and here's how people reacted. Was that the desired intent? There's a a Socratic method to it of asking the questions and, again, it's to get people reflecting on what they're doing, Because in the thick of it, you don't have time for that. But it's only through that kind of reflection that I think we learn about who we are and about what we do wrong. I had a mentor come to me once and said you know, I think you thought you were being funny, but it didn't play well. You got to read the room and here's how you can do that and and he was absolutely right, because I noticed every you know I use humor when I'm nervous and it was all falling flat on me and that's normally how I win the crowd over and it wasn't winning anybody over. So, you know, I think that's the main technique is is helping people after after you have some trust and some relationship to find their blind spots and help them reflect upon them. There's no, you can't just flip a switch for a habit that you've had for a long time, or especially a defense mechanism, but you can learn to recognize it and, hopefully, plan for it. So I think I think that's the key.

Gene Liverman: 18:06

You can learn some self-awareness too. That will help you see it in yourself when it happens. It doesn't always help with prevention, but it does make you aware enough that, hopefully, most people will become humble enough to be like wait a minute. You know, I don't think that came off the way I meant for it too, or you know what? That was a little harsher than I intended. Let me back up, I apologize and then proceed on with what needs to be done. You hit on a good word there humble humility.

Chris Miller: 18:36

That has to be a part of our practice. Just because we know a lot about a thing doesn't mean we know a lot about everything, and it doesn't give us the right to run roughshod over people. I have seen people who were absolutely correct speak up in ways that completely undermined the argument and I know that wasn't their intent. But they think they're speaking truth to power when really what they're doing is denigrating someone on their own team, and that erodes trust. You need that trust. If you're going to work together, you have to be able to rely on one another. Presentation is almost as important as the information being presented.

Gene Liverman: 19:19

I mean look at all the various ways we consume information. Now, presentation is key to getting us to pay attention.

Chris Miller: 19:26

Yeah, absolutely, when you have the attention to do so, and that's a whole other topic of conversation. Yes, it is. Cost of task switching attention to the other Cost of task, switching, attention deficit, all of that there's a lot of. I have a friend who you may talk to one of these days, tom Gideon. He had a podcast called the Command where he talked about the practice and profession of coding, and the practice of this is I mean it comes off sounding like a Zen master or a guru or something, but there is a craftsmanship, there is a meditative side to this, there is a reflectiveness to it that I think it's good and virtuous to cultivate. It doesn't mean that everyone has to do it. I mean I'm not trying to start a religion here, but the idea of cultivating some humility, reflecting on what you're doing so that you can be more effective, is just a good strategy, let alone anything else.

Gene Liverman: 20:27

I definitely agree with that. Learning those things is also one of the hardest things to do. Learning the humility, learning the introspection is very challenging.

Chris Miller: 20:39

Absolutely, and making room for other people to have a bad day. You know, I mean everybody, at any moment you meet them, is doing the best they can. In that moment it may not be much, but they are legitimately doing the best that they can. So make a little room for that, give them a little slack. I mean, if they turn into a predator and they start taking advantage of it, that's another conversation. But day to day that's not who you're dealing with most of the time.

Gene Liverman: 21:11

In the context of what we're talking about. Generally, giving people a benefit of the doubt is the appropriate response. Until somebody proves you wrong, benefit of the doubt is the appropriate way to react to most things.

Chris Miller: 21:26

Assuming we used to say assuming positive intent, especially in this era we live in, where everyone is pretty knee-jerk-y and looking for a reason to be offended, making a little space for that benefit of the doubt that assuming positive intent, well, it'll help your brain, it'll help your anxiety. If nothing, oh, absolutely, that's not a reason to do something. I don't know what is.

Gene Liverman: 21:52

Yeah, there are plenty of ways that we all find to offend each other In a constructive way letting somebody know when they have offended you, or maybe letting your co-worker know that there's a fair chance that they just came off in a very offensive manner. Those are appropriate things, but don't assume that they intended to offend everybody up until the point that they've proven you wrong.

Chris Miller: 22:17

Yep, that leads to the last piece of the mentoring that I go to. I'm a book person and I will always push people. I always have a book ready for when someone is in a particular situation and I think it's appropriate to go and read and better yourself. The mentor can only point in the direction you have to go walk through it.

Gene Liverman: 22:40

Do you have any go-to books that are your bog standard? I use these 75, 80% of the time whenever I'm looking to hand somebody a book.

Chris Miller: 22:52

You know it's funny. It depends on what the situation is and what we're mentoring about, but one that I've used a lot crazily enough, is just the first chapter of the Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Gene Liverman: 23:05

That's not one I would have expected you to say.

Chris Miller: 23:07

Well, no, of course, but what's interesting about that is it shows the way to think about strategy and what conditions you need to think about when you're assessing a situation. I think that's one of the things that we need to learn first is how do we know where we are he talks about? You have to understand heaven or the weather, because he's talking about a battlefield, or the landscape and all that. But all of that is a metaphor for your office situation, believe it or not. Just that first chapter having people read that and then discuss that is a good place to start. There are other things along the way. There are business books that have proven to be useful, depending on what you're doing. There's one called Crucial Conversations, which is good about the really hard communications If you're a new manager. There's one called the Invisible Spotlight, which he made a huge impact on me because he wrote the line you are the person your staff talks about when they go home and have dinner.

Gene Liverman: 24:18

Yeah, to see how that would be impactful when that revelation hits.

Chris Miller: 24:23

You don't think about it that way. When you step up in any kind of leadership position, yeah, it's not even management, it's really leadership. But honestly, as far as the technical stuff, there are so many good resources out there I couldn't throw a rock and hit. It's just people love clean code, people don't love clean code. I think having those conversations, I think you learn more through the conversation, not networking, but meeting people. I think there's a difference.

Gene Liverman: 24:59

Meeting and talking with people, I think, is probably the best thing there, networking is more about making business contacts or professional contacts, whereas meeting people and having conversations and the like is more about actually relationship building. At least to me, that's the differentiator.

Chris Miller: 25:18

Yeah, I think so. I think the one thing that social media has but it's built on everything that's been around since bulletin boards and use net and all that is, if you walk into that space and you can be open, you can have some really great experiences, learning experience. I mean that's how you and I met. Through that space, I have made people that I consider friendly with. I don't know I'm a little funny about friends. Are we friends? I don't know, because we've never met in person. That's the whole thing. There is an amount of caring there and because of that, conversations happen. I think that's the best learning that you can do, whether it's you know if you're doing it in your Discord server with your friends or you're supporting someone's Patreon and you're talking to people through that. I just think that openness to the conversation is super important.

Gene Liverman: 26:18

Yeah, that totally makes sense and that resonates with me as well. One of the books you mentioned crucial conversations is one that I've seen come up both professionally and on the academic side. It was actually one of the ones that I had to read for one of the classes I took in college and then several years later it came up again as part of a professional thing that I was doing, and I think it was just as applicable in both scenarios, both from the hey, I'm just learning about how to deal with people and oh, I need to really think about how to have these harder conversations of the kind of like with the developer, type conversations of hey, you wrote this to do this, but you know that doesn't actually solve the problem and being able to have that conversation in a constructive manner, that was very helpful to kind of get refreshed on some of that.

Chris Miller: 27:14

It'd be interesting if you had to read crucial conversations before doing a group code review. You know, oh, it's very clever that you were able to do that in one line. But I mean, come on, man. So I mean, as a rule I'm not a fan of business books. I think a lot of them, you know you could get three paragraphs out of it and get the most of it. But there are a few good ones out there, like that, crucial conversations, like the business spot, especially for leaders in those situations. That's good, you know, day to day developers on the ground. I think you could go back to some of the classics and look at Ben Franklin had a list of 13 virtues he tried to cultivate and each week he would work on a different one. Looking at some of those old style things, if not to adopt it whole style, but to use it as a point of reflection and say what kind of things do I want to work on? Build a discipline, build a practice. You know I stole that again from Tom because he did it and introduced me to it. So credit where credit is due. But that discipline of practice, not just in how you write your code or how you build your systems, but in how you move through the world you don't have to be perfect. Everybody has a bad day and you're not going to be a monk, but it's just being an inch of self-awareness. If we can get that, we're already better off.

Gene Liverman: 28:42

I agree. Are there any particular places that you would point people who are, I guess, on two questions, any particular place you would point people who would like to look at being mentors, and any particular places you know of that are good to go if you're looking to be mentored?

Chris Miller: 29:02

That's a really good question, and I don't know of a specific place.

Gene Liverman: 29:07

Okay, or let me rephrase part of that then, If not a specific place, a specific type of person that you might interact with, either professionally or personally, that might be a good candidate to talk to about. Hey, would you maybe be interested in helping me develop a little bit?

Chris Miller: 29:25

Yeah, I think that finding someone that you admire is a good one. Finding someone who works very differently from you works as well. I think those are the two places that I would start. Sometimes they're more senior than you are. Often they are. They don't have to be. They could work at a different business unit or do a different thing. I once had a guy who was my peer, who he and I did not get along at all. We had different philosophies on things, but I wound up learning an awful lot from him through something that now I would consider a mentoring relationship. Mentoring does not mean being subservient. You're not the Padawan to the Jedi master. You're there to have a conversation and learn some things. Your mentor will learn from you too. I think in your communities, if you see someone you admire the work they do, you like them well enough, or you see a skill they have that you would like to cultivate not absorb, cultivate because you've got to. You've got to build it. I Think just approach them and ask if they'd be willing, and then there are lots of. There are lots of opinions about what makes a good mentoring relationship. Online, there are lots of many models for this, but I think sitting down and if they say yes then say alright, well, here you know, know what you'd like to get out of it, know how often you'd like to meet, and then it turns into Not therapy but kind of feels that way sometimes, where you know you just you just work through things and you know again You'll talk about professional stuff, you'll talk about personal projects, that kind of thing. But you can set those boundaries. But do walk into it having some idea what you want out of it, because Mentorships don't last forever and they are different than a friendship. You may be friends with your mentor and that's great, but you know I've had mentors that I was not friends with, usually in a business situation. That's okay, too cool.

Gene Liverman: 31:32

If somebody would like to reach out to you, to maybe continue this conversation or to just contact you in general, how would you recommend they find you on the internet?

Chris Miller: 31:41

The easiest is my website. It's a ctmillernet. It's a hodgepodge of stuff, but you can find out when to where to find me. You can also find me on the Faustodon Mastodon instance. I'm there as grew proof like you might be eaten by a group group. Those are the two main ways I would reach out to me if you wanted to find me. I'm not hard to find you just you know, need to look in the right place.

Gene Liverman: 32:10

Yeah, and I'll be sharing include links to both of those on the show notes, so anybody who's interested should be able to see it right in their podcast app with without any trouble, or see it on the website. Cool, thanks. Well, thank you very much for taking the time today and I greatly appreciate it. Thank you for having me. This is great. Before we go, I'd like to thank those of you who have boosted in support for the show. It is very much appreciated. This is a value for value podcast, which means I rely on listeners like yourself contributing back to fund it as Such. I'll never charge you to listen, but producing and hosting it does cost money. If you got value from this episode, I ask that you contribute by sending a boost through a modern podcast app like Fountain or cast a medic, or via the support the show link in the show notes that are visible in your podcast app. You can also find the show notes and transcripts at volunteer technologist calm. If you would like to come on the show or know someone I should reach out to about being on the show, please send me a message via one of the links at the bottom of the show notes. Thanks for listening.