Rust Programming Language RustFest Barcelona 2019, 29 Nov 2019

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From YouTube: RustFest Barcelona - Katharina Fey: The human cost of development

Description

People talk about cost in software development. We know about runtime cost, compile-time cost, and even monetary-cost. People are aware that all of these are metrics that are important when discussing productivity.

What about the human cost?

What causes people to burn out, why do we work in an industry where everybody only ever focuses on “productivity” and what really needs to happen to stop any of this from happening.

https://barcelona.rustfest.eu/sessions/human-cost-of-dev

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All right, sorry for that.. I had it working immediately the last time and now I was kind of confused why it caused.

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Problems., so thank you all for coming and thank you for watching and to one particular person.

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On the live stream right now., I hope you've had a good rustfest, so far.. I know I have.. I really like the way that the talks were split across two days because it gave me more.

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Time to think about them and to talk to people about what I've heard.

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It was less crammed so a big thumbs up to the organisers.

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I really like that.

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I have been given the privilege to close out the talk track today, and it also means that.

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I'm the last hurdle before lunch, so I will try not to take up too much of your time.

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I want to take this opportunity to talk about something, that's pretty important to me and.

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I feel that it should be more important to all of us as a community.

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So, for those of you who don't know, me, here is a quick intro.

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My name is katharina fey,. I have been involved in the rust community since 2017.

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I started writing rust because I wanted to write a dns server.

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Please don't ask., I'm currently a freelancer and you can hire me, but please don't do it all at once.

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I write a lot of free software and I am also one of those people who says free software.

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Instead of open source., also, I like shaving yaks,, and my current yak is emails.

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I will be giving a lightning talk later about this by the way.

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I travel a lot and I write some software and I have a pet shark called nibble, which is.

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The smaller sibling to a larger shark called bite.

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I think this tweet sums up what I do pretty.

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I don't really like doing questions on stage,, it's kind of awkward for me,, but you can send.

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Me an email or for the five other people using xmpp. It's the same thing as my email.

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I'm on twitter,, also known as the hell site, or just come talk to me.

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I don't usually bite.

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So this talk comes with a few disclaimers.

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The first disclaimer,- and this was already mentioned,- is that this is not a technical.

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I will try to visualise some problems in the industry and none of that really requires.

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Any code. just more abstract things., there's no code on the actual slides, well,, except for one.

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I recently used async-std and it was really awesome and I just wanted to say that I really.

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Disclaimer number two is that this talk is not based on personal experience.

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Well, okay,, it's not only based on personal experience.

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All of these issues can and do affect us all, and I think it is important that we talk about.

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Them. disclaimer number three is that my slides are kind of boring.

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I wrote this talk as a sort of essay, and I will mostly the slides are a way for me.

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To get through my speaker, notes., I think it is more important to listen to what I say and also the script is in the speaker.

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Notes- and I will upload the slides.- the slides are mostly there so that you have something to look at. That's not my face.

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The talk also comes with a content warning for anxiety, burnout and depression and if.

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You are one of those people who don't like content warnings,. I invite you to grow up,.

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Please. so there's a few things that I want to talk about and at first glance you might think.

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That these issues aren't really connected,, but I feel that they are, and I hope that over.

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The course of this talk you will come to agree with me that there's a larger perspective.

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To consider, and maybe together we can start working towards a better world.

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I don't claim to have any answers, but I do want to start a discussion.

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But it will be okay., it's fine..

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So, first of all I want to talk about technical debt.

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What exactly is technical debt? well, as rust developers? You probably don't really know what that is.

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It's a term that only recently more recently came up as large companies have started dealing.

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With their technical, debt.

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unfortunately,, this means that a lot of the discussion and talks about it happen as to.

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How to get rid of it,, not why it is happening.

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Technical debt is just like any other debt, but for the tech stack of a company.

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Generally, when developing systems, sometimes engineers take shortcuts or make bad choices.

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Stuff happens and then, poof, there's legacy code.

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Maybe someone was fired, who understood it all and then no one else, can, or maybe you.

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Had to push yourself to make bad decisions for release or something, so either over time.

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Or sometimes with bad decisions, technical debt is created.

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Now,, I want to run through a small example here and again this will have no code, but.

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I think it will sort of demonstrate how this happens, and I think this will feel pretty.

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Familiar. so take foo ltd, a fictitious company.

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They ship their first product that does serverless cloud computing on the blockchain and they.

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Are very proud.

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unfortunately, to push out their product? They had to do some write. Some hacks.

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Some of the code isn't as cool as they would want it to be.

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It kind of looks weird and pointy.

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Some of the engineers want to go back and re-write some of it to be nicer and have a.

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Nicer architecture., the next funding milestone is due and they also have a large client, oogle,. Who would.

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Like to use their tech,, so instead they hack around it and they ship this.

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They apply some duck tape. And, you know,, get more money and do more cool things, but it.

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Can does mean that the investors are now happy,. It also means the work that should be done.

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Never gets done.

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what is happening. Here? well, money from either investors or clients is exchanged for technical debt.

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So when you start looking into why technical debt happens, or if you generally look into.

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The issue, most of the articles, most of the discussion is how to deal with it, and I guess.

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That's fair.: a lot of companies have large technical debt issues and it would be an obvious question.

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How to get rid of it.? There are some good resources out there, how to do this,, and I don't really want to get.

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Into this right now., some of it is just refactoring techniques,, throwing away code,. All of these things.

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I feel it's a space, that's pretty well covered and I don't think me sitting here or standing.

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Here and talking about it is going to add anything.

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Needless to say,, I feel that if your company has technical debt, there are resources out.

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There to learn how to deal with them.

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In my opinion, it is much more interesting to ask the question: why.

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Why is technical debt created?.

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So I started researching this a few months ago. I think at this point and really there's.

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A few reasons, but the most prevalent ones that I could find were these four,. So the.

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Internet says: making sacrifices for a deadline,, which was the example we just saw earlier;.

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Bad decisions from engineers. you know,, sometimes people make bad choices and then it bites them in the arse.

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Systems getting old or talent going away,, someone just leaves the company and no one.

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Understands it, and bitrot, which in this case means a module that gets re-factored over.

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And over and over again, to do more and more things to the point where it doesn't really.

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Do anything well anymore, and it's not really understandable.

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Now,, I will grant you that there's a lot of reasons why technical debt happens,, but none.

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Of them are technical., they are all social problems.

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people make bad decisions sometimes, but it's in the framework of their company that these.

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Decisions become technical, debt., not letting your engineers go back and fix. Their mistakes is how you create technical.

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Debt and honestly, the same applies to making sacrifices for a deadline.

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If you as a company,, not an individual,, have to write some hacks to get your product out.

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The door and then you don't go back and let the people who did those hacks go back and.

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Fix it,, that's creating technical debt, but it's not the engineers' fault.

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People don't really work in a vacuum., it's the people's fault, who did the time planning and who didn't allow for the people that, for.

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The engineers who worked on this to sort of build a working environment where they can.

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Do the things that they wanted.

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companies make a lot of decisions all the time and some of them are greedy,. I guess,.

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And then, after a while of doing this over and over again,, they start to pay the price.

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So I want to run through another example with foo ltd, and by the way I want to thank my.

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Friend, rebecca @hazelnutxyz on twitter, who made these in two hours' notice and my design.

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Direction: was: engineering, fuck, up.

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So for my last example, foo ltd is doing pretty well,. They have two clients, oogl and amadont.

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Unfortunately, your product is a bit of a monolith, so there is a module in there that interacts.

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With your cloud, and it can't really be removed.

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The most sensible way of dealing with this would be to pull out something from your core.

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And write a thing that enables plugins to interact with your core, but that sounds expensive.

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So why not just copy and paste some code and build this wonderful tech, stack?.

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So again, being put into the situation where either you can do something right or do something.

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Fast,, the fast way is the one that ends up with an unmaintainable code. Base.

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I want to take a small step back here and at least mention in part. Why I'm giving this.

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Talk. a few months ago, I was at a conference that I don't want to name, and I saw a talk there.

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That I don't want to identify and it handled the subject of technical debt and how throwing.

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Away things can lead to nicer projects,, instead of just refactoring,, throw away your code,.

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And for the most part, I really liked this talk right up to the point where it fell: kind.

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Of flat. see,, it's always possible to add new things and when you are tasked with doing something.

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You can either do it in a maintainable way or in a bad way.

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Depending on your situation,, you will choose one or the other, but the question that this.

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Talk never dared to ask is:. Is there really a need to add more things,? Are potential clients.

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Really that important that you sacrifice whatever you are building to the pictures that I just.

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Showed you earlier?, they look huge as graphics.. They don't look as cute as hundreds of thousands of lines of c++.

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Don't get me wrong, here,, I'm not saying that writing features is bad or that we shouldn't.

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Make stuff. what's the point of being alive, if you can't write bad code?.

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I simply take issue with the idea that an.

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Engineering department has to bend over backwards because some management people promised some.

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Other management, people a feature and the people who then have to do the work. Don't.

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Get a shot at either coming up with alternatives,, with more realistic, deadlines, or finding.

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A nicer way of implementing it.

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Even if you look, if you leave this aside and you only look at the effects of technical.

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Debt, pretty much all the time the focus is on the company, and I did this in my own talk.

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Until this very moment.

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I focused on how does technical debt impact foo ltd and not the people working at foo.

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Ltd?, most of the articles that you will find on the internet does this, or do this pretty.

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Much always, and the talk that I mentioned earlier did this all the way through to the.

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End. yes,, even some research papers do this.

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Productivity is the focus.

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So what kind of effects can any of this have on people who actually have to work with these.

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Systems, and are humans with feelings and actual limits?.

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People talk about burnout very often the same way that they talk about technical debt.

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This happens at conference talks and in online articles, and, yes, also some research papers.

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A lot of the stuff that you will find is stuff like this.

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Articles that go into detail how you personally can prevent yourself from burning out.

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The issue of being overworked in your job is being put on you to deal with.

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In a way,, this reminds me of climate discourse..

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You personally are responsible for killing the planet,, not the system that you are forced.

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To live in. I talked to quite a lot of people over the last few months, when preparing for this talk,.

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About their experiences with burnout,, especially in tech;, how they tried to deal with it;, what.

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Support they got from their companies or friends..

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Needless to say, I have bunch or dirt on a bunch of companies now,. So that's fun.

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More importantly,, it's a common theme,, even when people describe their own burnout,, not.

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To focus themselves in that conversation.

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There are people I kind of had to pry it out of, what their experience had been and what.

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They had gone through. at times it felt like a taboo thing to even talk about, on a personal level, anyway.

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Most were happy to talk about burnout, industry-wide and oh yes,. The tech industry has a real issue,.

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But I'm personally never affected.

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you know? productivity,. Again, it's a term. That's most often used and it frames the entire conversation.

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About burnout,, something that happens: "to" individuals with regards to a company and.

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The loss of labour that it causes.

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this is very common..

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The only real sources of this that take burnout seriously. I found were medical papers and.

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Studying the negative effects that burnout can have on people with excruciating detail.

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And charts and numbers of really just things that happen to people.

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There's no slide here because it's depressing.

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so instead of doing any of that,, I want to be a bit more personal for a bit.

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Part of changing the conversation means giving people the space to share their experience.

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And so I want to be at least one person on a stage that takes the issue. Seriously.

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Burnout is losing yourself to a job that you hate, doing.

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Whatever you do,, it's never enough,, but you also feel like you want to do. More.

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You are not being compensated, whatever that might mean,, but you are too greedy. If you.

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Ask for more money and you are letting down your colleagues if you ask for vacation days.

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Personally, I also notice my creativity taking a dive whenever I burn out.

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I usually make music or write stories, and yes,. It has happened a few times before.

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Burnout, isn't something you even entirely realise is happening to you.

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Sometimes it makes people anxious,. Sometimes it means people cry themselves to sleep.

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For others,, it means focusing so much on what they do, it becomes. Their whole identity.

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They think of nothing else.. They speak of nothing else. literally,, their job becomes their life.

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How many people like that? Do you know?

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the phrase "oh no,, I'm just stressed, but not like ... burnt out",, is pretty common, and.

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I guess for some it would be admitting a kind of failure?.

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I know it was for me.. Why am I talking about this at rustfest?.

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I can already hear someone complain about how this is way too political,. You came here.

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For the rust. first of all, okay,, everything is political,, whether you like it or not.,.

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But secondly, and I think more importantly, rust is a young language and the people who.

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Write rust are largely people who do it because they think it's fun.

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We are a community, that's built around hobbyists..

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The previous talk mentioned this,. The compiler is largely being developed by volunteers.

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Some people are even learning rust as their first programming language and maybe a rust.

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Development job will be their first gig in tech.

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I think we owe it to those people, and to ourselves, that we give these issues a stage.

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And talk about them because rust projects often don't have technical debt yet,, but the.

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Management structures that create it still exist and burnout can just as well happen.

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On a rust project, as it does on any other project.

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Burnout is something that affects us all,, and I feel that as a community, we need to.

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Talk about it because it's important.

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These issues aren't going away.

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So I submitted this talk because I just generally saw how conversations about burnout went down.

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Most of the time, but it's the larger context in which this happens, which I find concerning.

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The tech industry has a burnout problem,, I do have some charts in a second, and it feels.

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Like most people in it are grasping at straws as to why it's happening or what we need to.

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Do to stop it..

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I will say that finding actual numbers, solid numbers on how many people in the tech industry.

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Are burnt out is incredibly difficult..

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I could find numbers that were more representative of the entire workforce,, but I'm not sure.

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How much you can actually extrapolate from that.

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There's a lot of numbers on or there's a lot of, data on studying the effects of burnout.

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On people, so take, I guess this is like a single source of they are fucked up, but.

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Even if you apply a margin of error over half is not a great number.

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Interestingly, enough, from the same set of data and the same sources and the same sort.

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Of methodology,, this chart emerged.

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It doesn't say in the picture, but if you do a reverse image search, you will find the same.

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Article that linked the first one., it's really interesting, that rates of burnout in the uk versus the us versus the rest of.

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Mainland europe,, it's not something I would have expected.

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I will say that.

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say that you are a team lead at foo ltd and you want to take this issue seriously,, but.

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You don't know what to do.. You go on the internet,. You find some ideas and follow some popular discourse on what.

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To do to help your colleagues or employees with their struggles.

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A lot of the discussion is about a 40-hour work week..

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This seems to be largely an artefact of us tech companies branding themselves as progressive.

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For not having a 60-hour work week and explaining how much free time you have in such a model.

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In germany, a 60-hour work week would be illegal because there's such a thing as labour law,.

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Yet there are startups in berlin right now that advertise their 40-hour work week as.

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Progressive and generous to workers.

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Another proposed mechanism is to make the office more friendly,. Add a ping-pong table.

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Or a nintendo 64 emulator, and noncommittal statements like:? Why don't we just try chilling.

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It with the deadlines, or have you tried, not being in so many meetings?.

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I feel that these conclusions are unsurprising, considering the lens through which the analysis.

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Of burnout is happening., your focus or the focus of these techniques is on the productivity of a company.

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Think of your kpis,, not the mental health of your employees.

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Actual solutions to burnout would include things like switching to a four-day work week.

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Or even putting someone on several months of paid leave to recover, the same way that.

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They would be allowed to recover if they had a severe physical injury.

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So if we know that there's good approaches for aiding people recover from burnout,, why.

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Aren't these things that companies are proposing??

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Wouldn't you as a stakeholder in foo ltd, also gain from keeping your workers healthy and.

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Productive?, what we end up with, or what we end up getting are these fake solutions that make sure that.

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People's recovery from burnout is always grounded in the office environment.

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You are allowed to recover from burnout, but please think about work in the meantime.

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Solutions that have been shown to work,, like the ones that I just mentioned, but are expensive.

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Are often not considered. also, this screenshot is from a paper.. There is a link in my speaker. Notes,. Please read it.

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it's amazing.. There is a wider trend in our culture of seeking solutions that make everybody happy,. Sometimes.

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Called a win-win., it frames our ability to facilitate change as a quest to a solution that benefits those.

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Who need help as well as those who don't.

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you are allowed to address a? But I, as a stakeholder in foo ltd, also need to benefit with b,. Is.

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Essentially, how the conversation is framed., so discussions about burnout turn into conversations about productivity.

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Discussions about technical debt turn into conversations about productivity.

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This happens because the stakeholders of companies have a vested interest in letting the conversation.

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Go down this route,, but there's a common thread: here.

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When the stakeholders of an organisation make decisions,, people will end up in situations.

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Where they burn out,, regardless of how well intentioned they thought to have been.

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By being disconnected from the reality, their conditions exist, in, people will burn out.

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Analysis done through this framework is inevitably lacking and will fail to describe why these.

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Things are happening and keep happening,, even though we know why.

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It's a work week that's way too long, deadlines that get made by people who are too detached.

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From both how much work, something is as well as not having to do that. Work.

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Changing requirements, technical debt that already exists and keeps piling on,, adding.

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More stress to the people who need to work with these systems every day, and these things.

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Will keep happening as long as we don't fundamentally change the way that we work and can relate.

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To it., so what are the alternatives?.

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What if the stakeholders of a company were the people doing work?.

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What, if you remove management from the equation,, let workers take control of their work?.

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When I say take control, I don't mean require little oversight,. I mean something much more.

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You might think that you are being overpaid in your cushy tech job, but even your high.

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Five or six-figure salary is nothing in comparison to what someone in upper management makes.

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And they hold power over you and your life that you will never have.

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When I say "take control over your work",, I don't mean you personally either.

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Get connected with your colleagues. together, you are stronger than you could ever be alone..

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You might think that your company needs you,, but it's also exploiting you,, so fight back.

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Against that and honestly unions are a great tool to achieve this.

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Working without bosses isn't entirely easy either., it requires organisational structures and it requires everybody involved in a team or.

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Company to understand the relationships between the work that is being done and how power.

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Dynamics factor into the decisions that get made.

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When you work under a management,, the power dynamic is very explicit.

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Your boss has power over you. in a way. Removing management from the equation means being better able to understand your.

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Role in group dynamics and how you relate to the work that you want to do.

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Lastly,- and this is, I think, maybe the most important point that I want you all to take.

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Home,, when we talk about burnout,, can you please stop mentioning productivity?.

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How often did you and actually think about this? How often have you thought in these.

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Terms when you've thought about someone burning out,, if you thought about burnout being an.

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Issue in the tech industry, did you think about it being a danger to the bottom line?.

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And how often, in recent times, have you legitimately thought that a win-win is something that actually.

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Exists,, where you can help someone and then you also get help, or, however, that is supposed.

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To work., none of the issues that I talked about exist in a vacuum and you will find that once you.

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Accept that we are dealing with a larger social issue, that really only manifests in our little.

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Bubble of society in very particular ways, the world will look very different to you.

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As a result., thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy the workshops. Today.