Photo by Felix Mittermeier.
It’s definitely #mozplague. No question. Scratchy throat. Sorta foggy brain. That looming sense that not only are you on the cusp of getting sick, but you can’t even fight it.
In the very old days of Mozilla, Firefox launches were enormous. Sometimes multiple years in the making. The launch was available for download everywhere, all across the world. And after a big launch the teams would get together to post-mortem and reset and high five. Globally distributed teams of people who have been burning at both ends for several months. Getting on airplanes. Flying across oceans. All to meet in person, hang out in poorly ventilated conference rooms, and high five.
Where are my infectious disease specialists??? This represents a major business continuity risk.
In the run up to Betterboss, we knew we didn’t want to do 3 full days of deep work on fumes. So we did smart things. We started going to bed at 9 every night. We cleared our calendars and moved a bunch of the non-urgent stuff to after late Sept. We went all in. We treated Betterboss like it was the most important work because it was the most important work.
We sent emails I didn’t know we were capable of sending. Emails along the lines of…
Thanks so much for reaching out. We’re deep in planning for our thing and don’t have time to focus on your thing right now. We’re prioritizing this very important thing because it’s very important. Your thing is probably also very important to you. We feel that. We will get to your thing on the other side of this thing.
And it worked. People were wonderful and respectful. Our families and our friends and our clients and our alum community all said, no worries. We’re excited. We understand. And we’ll see you on the other side.
This has been a week of digging out. A week of reaching out to all the people who said don’t worry about it, we’ll see you after. A week of saying, it’s after. We did the very important thing. And the first thing they all want to know is how did it go?
It should be an easy thing to answer. But words don’t quite get there. It’s a hell of a thing to do the deepest work of your career, have people fly in from around the world for it. And have them get it. Play along. Do the hard work. And be real and present and vulnerable and excellent for THREE FULL DAYS.
There are these moments where we reflect on it and we’re amazed that anyone came to hear us talk. For three days. There weren’t any other speakers. Who throws a 3-day event with only two mic packs for the whole thing??
The word, by the way, is incredible.
So here’s a thing to chew on this week. What would it look like if you put yourvery important thing first? What would it feel like to make deliberate and dedicated space for your work. If it truly is a very important thing, what do you need to do to give it the time, attention, and space it deserves? What would you need? From whom? And how soon can you start?
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
Silicon Valley Goes to Therapy
This week, both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times had articles about therapy, coaching, and all the ways that work isn’t working for people. And they posted them, no joke, on the exact same day. These are two of the biggest newspapers in America talking about therapy and mental health and work.
In the Times piece Nellie Bowles talks about her own anxiety as a tech reporter. She runs through some of the recently launched venture-backed mental health apps. And all the ways tech and therapy are colliding right in the palm of her hand.
I don’t know about you but I don’t want venture-backed mental health professionals. I want seasoned and evidence-based mental health professionals. The idea that the people who made the mess are going to sell me a broom is unsettling. I understand that the addressable market is growing but can we take a hot minute and understand how we got here, Nir Eyal?
I am beyond over tech parading into established industries and flipping all the tables. It’s not a shitshow every time but it’s also, you know, not not a shitshow every time. This is mental health. This is not a place we want to move fast and break things.
So that’s the NYT. Tech workers are struggling with the fact that they are responsible for making a lot of bad things in the world. They are planning to ameliorate that struggle with…wait for it…more tech.
The WSJ piece is also pretty unsettling. It’s about the blurring line between therapists and coaches. And how the stigma of going to therapy often has people using coaching as a stand in.
For the coaching relationship to be effective, the coachee needs to be willing to share and go deep on real shit. But when the coach works for the company, things can get slippery.
What happens if the thing you need coaching on is whether to leave your job? Or when you want to talk about no longer believing in the leadership of your CEO and you have the same coach? And what happens if you talk about something that has legal implications down the road? The content of those sessions is subject to discovery in a way that, according to the WSJ, time with a therapist is not.
I’ve had wonderful coaches and wonderful therapists. I’ve also had shitty coaches and shitty therapists (one of them is even quoted in the WSJ piece!). If you’re at a place where you’re considering therapy or coaching or apps, be aware of the relative strengths and limitations of each. ♥️
What Johnathan’s reading
The whole Chef thing.
So here’s what happened. Chef is a company that makes a kind of software that nerds need. If you’re a tech human, I can just say “cross-platform configuration, automation, and security management tools.” If you aren’t, suffice it to say that they make some hairy technology infrastructure problems easier to handle.
Well it turns out that one group who uses Chef’s tools is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And when that news came out, a bunch of people, including current and former Chef employees, were upset. They didn’t want their work associated with putting kids in cages. They didn’t want their software making that process easier to handle.
Chef decided to stay the course.
And then, like a spark in a dry forest, things started to happen very quickly.
Sept 19: Seth Vargo, a former employee, deletes some code he controlled that Chef relied on. This causes an immediate outage for Chef customers.
Still Sept 19: The Chef team starts putting out fires.
Still Sept 19: The Chef team has an all-hands meeting about the ICE contract.
*Still* Sept 19: After that meeting their CEO, Barry, writes this email. He says they are going to stay the course (though he personally doesn’t like what ICE is doing).
Aside: a long time ago, I was working for a CEO who was imploding. We were in a crisis and trying to figure out what to do about it. And a friend of mine said something amazing. He said, “It’s already over, he just can’t see it yet.” I’ve thought about that conversation a hundred times.
Sept 20: Their CTO Corey takes a crack at blogging about his feelings on the matter. It isn’t great.
…The weekend happens…
Sept 23: Their CEO Barry writes an update that they have decided not to renew their ICE contracts, to donate the proceeds from those contracts to charities that support separated families, and to build an ethics policy to deal with problematic customers.
That’s how fast it can go. “It’s already over, he just can’t see it yet.”
There’s so much to digest in this mess, I don’t know where to start. And when I don’t know where to start, I try to start with empathy. So here’s some empathy for the Chef leadership team: crisis is really hard.
As a crisis sets in, the first thing to go is your sense of perspective. The cortisol dump is bad enough. But you’re also often sitting in a board room all day fielding bad news, not eating, with too much CO2 in the air to think straight. And the result of that, at least for the ones I’ve been a part of, is that people keep thinking they’ve found the floor. That it can’t get worse. I mean, some people really catastrophize, which is differently unhelpful. But most executives I’ve seen in crisis show a pathological lack of imagination about how bad it can get.
It’s why the #1 piece of advice for companies in crisis is “get outside help.” Outside PR help, outside legal help. Find people who still have perspective. Because at this point you’re in a deeper hole than you realize and the first thing you need to do is to stop digging.
But most of our empathy should be for people suffering far worse than the Chef executives have. And it turns out that empathy with those people is also how you avoid being in a crisis like this yourself.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. If you are part of a team or a company that hasn’t had the conversation yet, it’s time. The conversation about whose money we don’t want. About where we draw the line. About what we never want our products used for. And about what we’re going to do to ensure that doesn’t happen. Punting isn’t going to work anymore. And once the fire starts it will be too late. If you don’t know where to start, start here.
[Postscript: An interesting thing about forest fires is the new life that spawns in their wake. The first things to grow are the things that can take root and grow quickly. Over the weekend, Coraline Ada Ehmke put up this. The open source nerds and armchair lawyers are fighting about it, as they do. I suspect it will need to evolve a fair bit to reach an enforceable form. But I’m excited at the idea of fresh and modern approaches to how we build and share technology. That discussion will need its own newsletter post, though.]
