Interview with Hadi Hariri

Hi, it’s Mike Hall again here with Utesic. Today I’m coming from the GOTO Conf in Chicago, GOTO Chicago. I’m sitting down with Hadi Hariri, who is a developer evangelist with JetBrain, and one of the talks he was going to be giving today is on being an antisocial geek is harmful. Which, I think, is actually very thematic for what Utesic is, and it’s trying to support people who participate in the community and get out from behind the desks. So, thank you again for sitting down with me. What is an antisocial geek, if we don’t already know what it is, and why is it harmful? So, there’s, you know, there’s easy, there’s an easy way to get a talk. It’s not that anti, that we’re antisocial. I mean, if you define antisocial as someone that wants to disrupt and be aggressive towards others and their rights, we’re not. We’re not antisocial. We’re antisocial in the sense of we’re not really, you know, into socializing as much as other people. It’s not misanthropic, it’s just going for it. A little bit, yeah. So, the talk is more about communication and interaction. Right? And it’s more about the experience that I’ve had over the 20 plus years of interacting with different developers, with different teams, having run my own company and seeing the problems that communication or lack of it causes between developers and teams. And it’s, you know, often you find, like, in our industry, it’s become common to say that developers are introverts. Developers, you know, don’t, don’t mind him , you know, Steve is great at developing but you can’t really talk to him. Right. And I think that we are ignoring this and we’re kind of accepting that you can’t talk to Steve. Right. As opposed to trying to find out why you can’t talk to Steve. Find out why you can’t talk to certain people or why there’s so much friction when you’re talking to certain people. And what happens is that we end up with teams where certain people, certain individuals are isolated. Mm-hmm. And that, I, I feel that impacts the team, it impacts the, the code, it impacts the company, it impacts the goals, everything. Mm-hmm. And just happiness. Happiness. That you’re kind of pigeonholed into this, you’re a developer therefore you don’t want to talk to anybody. You’re a developer therefore you just want to sit in a dark room. And it, some, I’ve seen this culture of we all sit in a dark room and nobody talks. And then we all go out to lunch and then everybody just chat, chat, chat, chat. Mm-hmm. Which kind of leads me to believe is that people actually do want to talk and they do want to share. But we have this stigma or this preconce ived notion the way we’re supposed to act. Yeah, I mean we’re, we’re great. I mean it’s not that, you know, it’s a myth that developers are introverts. They’re not introverts. What, what we don’t like, and I’ve discussed this in my other talk, the Prima Donovan that I talk about, is that we don’t like small talk. Mm-hmm. And when I, the first time I said that to me, gave that talk, someone said to me, “What do you have against the language small talk?” No. It just proved my point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like, yeah, come on, right? Yeah, exactly. Uh, we don’t like small talk. So we, we love to debate. We love to just sit there and, you know, debate things on end and bring out points and make sure that we have the last point and we’re right. Sometimes we don’t realize that it, it’s time to back off. Sometimes we don’t realize that it doesn’t matter of, you know, making a concise point about something. Mm-hmm. It’s, we, we miss the big picture. Right. And it, it’s, I, I kind of feel it’s these skills that often we’re lacking. Yeah. Right? Because we, you know, like I, I think that it’s very good for developers to work in technical support. Mm-hmm. Because you learn to deal with customers. You learn to know when to back off. You know when to concede, to say, “Okay, well, you’re wrong, but I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong because of this.” Right. Because it’s, in the end, it’s just not worth the battle. It’s not worth the battle. And what happens is that with teams, when you’re in, when you’re with someone that is constantly trying to prove his point, it ends up that you’re just like, “Okay, well, just do whatever you want.” You know? And that do whatever you want can impact your product. It can impact your, whatever you’re developing. But you’re like, “Well, it’s not worth the friction to, to dispute or debate with this guy.” Mm-hmm. Okay. And there’s a lot of people that don’t realize that at some point it’s, it’s better to back off. It’s better to, you know, again, not miss the, the, the point that we’re making. That’s what we’re trying to do. Right? What, what is it that we’re, we’re here for? Yeah. Recently, myself, I’ve, I had to work in a non- developer role and getting to see, most dealing with HR people, and getting to see how different, because what you described about the way developers tend to talk when we’re amongst other developers, and then going into human resources where it’s very much not as, as rigid as development. They have their rules and they have their protocols, but the, the mode of conversation is much different, much more, I don’t want to say casual, but it, it, it is different. And I’m, I’m struggling to figure out how to. It is because, you know, we are, we, we, we try and apply our coding principles to our conversations. Yeah. Like, “Dry.” Yes. “Oh, I, why do I have to review myself?” Or, “Say the minimum possible for it to be efficient,” you know, like, “Ultimate efficiency when we see what we speak.” And sometimes it’s not about efficiency, right? Sometimes it truly is about talking about the weather or some nonsense or whatever to break the ice, to, to try and understand the other person, right? And, and that’s one other thing that I feel that is lacking a little bit in the developer world, which is conve ying emotions. Like, you know, we don’t have a lot of empathy often, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, you’ve seen, no doubt, you’ve been involved in open source, right? And recently there was some, some lady that had put up some code on open source, and there was such a backslash, backlash on it on Twitter. Like, who would put up rubbish like this? And when you get high-profile people putting things like that, it hurts people. And we don’t think about these things. You know, we don’t think about how our actions in the goal of saying that something is right or wrong can end up hurting other people. Yeah. And it’s kind of interesting how you, how you are describing the, the, you know, I, I don’t want to say lack of empathy, but it sounds like more of a underused empathy muscle. Yeah. That, you know, we, we can relate to each other, but we haven’t, many of us haven’t developed that, that, that skill dealing with other people. In, in, in a, in a more benign way, I’m thinking of, in the HR role I’ve, I’ve had is working with developers as they’re onboarding. They’re trying to get… Right. …people who’ve only been at a company under seven months or so, to talk to somebody who’s starting today. And when I’m talking to the person who’s, you know, only six, seven months there, they think, well, I don’t know enough to be able to give useful information to this person. And I don’t want to say it’s a lack of empathy, but they, they don’t remember how to empathize with what it was like to be that new person, and realize that they do have a lot of experience that they could share that could be useful for that, that person. And it’s, it’s, they can’t put themselves back in that role of not knowing. Yeah. It’s like, like as adults, we forget what it’s like to be a child. It’s, if you’re a parent, it’s, it’s hard sometimes to remember. But it’s, it ‘s an, it’s a, it’s an empathy deficit. Yeah. It seems like. Now, as a developer evangelist, you have to deal with a lot of people, I’m sure. Yeah. So, you know, dealing with communities, has your, has that, has this view that you’re having now, and where this talk came from, and, and even the Prima Donna’s talk, you, you, you mentioned earlier, is that coming from your experiences largely dealing with so many varied communities, .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Python? Well, yeah, but I mean, I’m, you know, I’m not going to bad mouth the developer community far from it, because I’m still a developer myself. Right. But I, I feel that there is a little bit of a lacking. I mean, I, you know, I, I, I’m, I work at, I, I work at a lot of conferences, and I stand at a lot of booths, and I see that it’s very, often it’s hard to engage conversation with , with people, because people are shy to come up and say, you know, like, what do you do, or whatever. And so, I have found it, but, but more than in, as a, and as an evangelist coming across this, I, it’s been more my experience with, with teams that I’ve worked with, or teams that I’ve worked on. Right? And it’s more about the, the actual root problems that, often, they’re, they’re having in, in teams. And I’ve, I’ve learned to deal with people more openly, and be kind of like, you know, more open in that, a lot when I was dealing with customers. Okay. I mean, when I had to talk to customers, and, and that’s why I say, I mean, customer support is, is one of the best things that developers should do. I mean, I have had to deal with customers, you know, doing technical support in ISP, where, you know, the guy would call and say, I can’t send email, and he would say, are you connected to the internet? And I’m like, I don’t want to go to the internet, I want to send email, right? You have to learn to deal with that. Yeah. And it gives you patience, and it teaches you how to talk to people, because you can’t hang up the phone and say, you’re, you’re too stupid to send the email. Right. You can’t. Well, and, and the thing is, is, again, it goes to the empathy, remembering that once upon a time, you were in the same boat, you know, you may have been a child when it happened, but once upon a time, you did not know what the internet was. And, and, and trying to remember. One, you know, this, this reminds me of, you know , I, I, you know, I’ve been, of a, a scenario I’d experienced in the military, where I was dealing with a bunch of new recruits and asking them where they, which, which jobs they were going to be taking. And, of course, you know, one was a medic, and one was going to go to language school, and one was going to be in, an MP, and the other one was, kind of, said, I’m just going to be a truck driver. And it kind of took me back. She was, she was really like, eh, you know, I’m not as good as these other people. And, you just, not, she also, like, kind of, from the other end, forgot that she was going to be providing a very valuable service, and that what she was doing was important, and that she was a human being, and, and had value. And, and when we’re looking at our, you know, ivory towers, we have these very fancy jobs, we’re senior engineers, and we’re, we have these very illustrious titles, and we forget that we couldn ‘t have that without the truck driver, who carries the computers. That we’re all part of this. If that customer didn’t call in and say, I want to send email, I don’t want to get on the internet. If it wasn’t for that person, then we wouldn’t even, we wouldn’t even be able to exist. You know, much like the truck driver, you couldn’t even have an infantry without having the trucker who could bring the stuff, the supplies. All the factory work, all that puts the chips together on the computer that you’re using every day. It’s every, every. And it’s, though we, it’s just, it’s part of an ecosystem, you know, that, that, you remember that, maybe you might, I don’t want to say humble, but just be more aware that Well, I definitely think there’s, you know, there is that, that missing in, in the developer community. I think we need, we all need to be a little bit more humble. We all need to come down, back down to earth and think about what we are doing as part of the global picture as opposed to our personal goals. And there was an article recently, in fact, on, I think it was on Forbes. Or somewhere about whether we are the, they were putting a comparison of, are we the Lindsay Lohan or are we the Meryl Streep of the, of Hollywood, you know, as opposed to are we in this startup business of getting venture capitalists and cashing out quick, or are we there to try and really change the world and grow up a business and grow it steadily? And I often find that we’re kind of more moving towards that big, you know, hotshot Hollywood kind of thing, right? Well, yeah, it’s, it’s the… The, the, the, the rock star, the ninja. Yeah, the ninja, the rock star. Yeah, yeah. It’s very fancy. It’s all, it’s all that. It’s all that. And it’s again, that’s, that desire to put ourselves up on, on, on a higher pedestal instead of realizing, okay, we’re, we’re part of an ecosystem that, you know, we, we can’t do these things without each other. And that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to support and, and make user group organizers and conference organizers, the people that bring people together, that’s one of the reasons is to help expose them, to support, to support the people that build the community and, and realize that we’re in this kind of together and it’s more fun to do it together than to do it alone. Everyone plays a role. Everyone is important. Yes. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to stay with me. Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Pleasure having you. Thank you. Sorry. Oh. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.