Everything except Kotlin: Andrei Breslav on gender balance in IT, emotions and more

Andrei Breslav ( abreslav ) is known primarily as the person leading the work on the Kotlin language. But recently, he began to make reports about something completely different: in the spring he talked about the importance of emotions when working in IT, and in August at TechTrain he will present the report “This is beneficial: why do we need more female programmers?”

And we took the appropriate interview: not about Kotlin, but about the social and emotional. What excites Andrey besides developing the language? Does he have impostor syndrome? How will his report on female programmers differ from most other discussions about gender bias in IT? Why can you feel bad when your project is going to publicly support Google?
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The name Kotlin appears in the text, but not in the context of “when the ternary operator will appear”, but in the context of “Andrey's emotions on Kotlin occasions”. There are already a lot of texts about programming languages. But it seems that very little is felt about what their creators feel.

Departure from Kotlin

- Previously, all your lectures at conferences were about language, but now about something completely different - why did this happen?

- I have been reporting about Kotlin for about eight years, and I'm a little tired. When you talk about a relatively narrow topic for a long, long time, it seems like everything has been said for a long time, and there is nothing to add. You can probably come up with more topics, just want some changes. I have other interests that I want to realize. Therefore, I began to make presentations on some more human-oriented topics, and the presentations about Kotlin were made by my colleagues, they are doing very well.

- And what was the reaction of the audience? For example, in the spring after the report “Empathy in IT”, what was the discussion in the discussion area compared to the “Kotlin” reports?



- Responses to human-oriented reports, of course, livelier. After the technical report, those gathered in the discussion area usually disperse, but here, an hour and a half after the report, when I needed to leave somewhere, people still remained in the discussion area. They no longer even needed me, they discussed among themselves.

This is a much more versatile thing. Someone needs Kotlin, someone does not, and in the second case there are no questions. And emotional things affect absolutely everyone. Unlike technical conversations, people begin to tell personal stories from their experience that are understandable to everyone around them: they don’t need to know the context of the product that the person is working on. Therefore, discussions arise between those who came to the discussion area, and this is a much more lively process. So the feedback, of course, is completely different. And I don’t know how to make technical reports with the same feedback intensity. I have not seen such reports, but perhaps it can somehow be done.

- How do you choose topics for new reports? From the side it seems that you prefer socially significant ones that can improve the lives of developers.

- Indeed, I want to do things that somehow affect the lives of people. And not only developers: it’s easiest for me to get to IT conferences, but in general I have no purpose to narrow this down only to developers. When I talk about “empathy in IT”, I give examples from IT, but the essence is universal for all people, at work and at home.

What I will talk about on TechTrain about gender balance in IT is a little more complicated: not everywhere there is such a bias and not everywhere such economic considerations are possible, that is, this report cannot be repeated everywhere. But it seems to me that the very issue of gender balance is universal, and the report would be understood by a very broad masses.

- And if it were not easier to get to IT conferences, where I would like to speak and what to talk about?

- From an unapproachable this spring I already recorded one TEDx talk about honesty and polyamory, and it turned out pretty well, although I think I can do better.

This format is very interesting. I spoke in this format for the first time, and it took me some inadequate amount of time to prepare, the number of hours of preparation per minute of speech turned out to be unreasonable. But I roughly understood how to do it, and in the process I even managed to understand some new things about myself. The result was a very sincere story, and from this point of view I really liked it. And from the point of view of how I talked, I see what can be done better. Next time, if I record another report in TED format, I will do it differently. In general, I like TED as a platform for the dissemination of such universal ideas.



It’s also interesting for me to talk with the Timlids - with people who lead people. And in front of IT team-mates I will speak soon.

There is also a fairly wide circle of people who want to develop in one way or another, and for them it would be very interesting for me to make presentations. If you know the conferences at which they are going, then tell us in the comments.

- Thanks to the spring report, we learned about some topics of interest to you, such as psychotherapy, but hardly everyone. What, apart from Kotlin, occupies a large place in your life?

- I'll try to move from specific narrow topics to wider ones. One narrow topic is gender issues, their practical implications. Another is that which is connected with the psychic: with psychotherapy, emotions, with the way people communicate. How is the balance, roughly speaking, emotional and rational? There is a topic of polyamory, about which I have already told several times and am ready to tell more, it seems to me that there can be a lot of interesting things.

And there is a more general philosophical thing about which I have not yet made a single report, but someday I will surely do it: these are fundamental values ​​(either my worldview, or fundamental values ​​in general). This is what freedom is for me (like freedom of choice), how important it is in my worldview, what truth is, and why concepts of responsibility and adequacy are very important to me, how the idea of ​​continuous development fits into this picture, why it matters to me and why I I think that this should be important for other people.

And much more comes down to this topic. Ultimately, talking about gender is actually talking about freedom of choice, that stereotypes established in culture do not prevent us from making our own choices. The same goes for psychotherapy, and handling emotions, and so on. There, at the very center of everything, there are questions of freedom of choice and truth or the adequacy of how we think about the world. Well, and, of course, development issues too - in this, psychotherapy, in my opinion, is one of the most effective tools.

Polyamory is also largely a conversation about the conscious, and not stereotypic, choice of a model of relations. So all this is immediately invested in the discussion of fundamental values.

Work / life balance and productivity

- After listing the interests, many will be surprised “how it all fits in your life when you head Kotlin and participate in the development of Alter .” How do you maintain balance when work tasks can probably easily take a lifetime?

- I'm not that master of work / life balance. But, of course, I realize that when this balance fails, I feel very bad, my strength runs out quickly, and I can no longer do anything useful.

It seems to me, the main thing that I focus on is the reduction of friction. There is such an illusion: if I do something and I succeed, then if I do more, I will get more. But this is not true, this thing works non-linearly. Being twice as busy doing some work, I won’t do twice as much: I’ll get tired, my eyes will be blurred, my fuse will end. Friction will increase, efficiency will decrease, and everything else will be launched.

Therefore, it is important not to invest in one 100% of the time. It is very important that there is a balance of emotions, so that I feel not only the desire to complete the task, but also the joy of some kind of game, communication with close people, learning new things and so on. These things are no less important than everything else. Because if they become few, everything else ceases to work.

That is, when doing one job, the amount of friction increases with time, it becomes more and more difficult to do. And if you switch, then the friction becomes a little, and in every direction that I pay attention, I am quite effective.

But if I don’t consciously pay attention to what I’m doing, then intuitively I’ll slip into the illusion that you can “just invest more and get more.” I do not have a constant good awareness that the world is not working as it might seem. Therefore, you have to consciously plan, share time, apply different techniques ... I am gradually learning this. Now it’s getting better than two years ago, I hope that in a year it will turn out even better. So I look optimistic.

- Often the work “sucks” even ordinary developers, and you lead a large project. Does it make maintaining balance difficult? Relatively speaking, do they call you in the middle of the night because something is broken and only you can help mend it?

- It seems to me that it complicates not from the point of view that only I can fix something, but rather in a different sense.

In any large project, there are a lot of operational tasks for which you need to quickly do something right now. And it’s easy for a leader (especially if he didn’t join an existing team, but grew up with the project) to get into a trap when you do a lot yourself. As I understand it, the central managerial wisdom is that all this must be delegated. And now I'm pretty close to this state: all the things that can be done without me are more or less done without me. And this is quite a lot of things. Some time ago I went on a long vacation and for four months the project lived without me, while I came to my senses after eight years of working with short vacations. It turned out that a whole bunch of things happen fine without me, there is no need for me to do this - and fine. I returned from vacation, and everything that was temporarily delegated before the vacation is now permanently delegated.

But what is fundamentally difficult is the work of strategic management and even medium-term management. You just need to keep in mind a lot of different aspects of some big enough thing. And this is not only about Kotlin: this also applies to Alter, and my plans for performances.

For example, I can generate ideas from speeches over several pages. And it is clear that you cannot implement all of them. So, you need to somehow think and decide what to do and what not to do. And accept, based on some considerations, and not just on the mood. And so in any project. You need to realize why everything is done. Questions arise about what our mission is, what goals. For what reasons do we consider one thing more important than something else.

And it turns out that there are simply no answers to a bunch of questions on the go. First you need to find out something, figure out, put forward some kind of hypothesis, set up some kind of experiment, and then it will become clearer whether there are serious reasons to do this, or not that.

This is the place where the maximum of uncertainty. And the more uncertainty, the more nervous. We have to learn to live in a state where nothing is clearly understood and to clarify what we need to understand right now.

- And more about productivity. According to the report “Empathy in IT”, it is clear how psychotherapy can improve communication, but developers are still very worried about problems like procrastination, which also appear without communication. How much do you think psychotherapy helps with them?

- Among the examples that I give in the report about emotions, there is an example about procrastination, although it is not there in the spectrum of psychotherapy. In general, procrastination is one of the important factors that reduce productivity, and so many people have it. For example, when I was preparing my TEDx talk, I procrastinated completely wildly and had to use the pomodoro technique to somehow focus (it was too late to go to psychotherapy, two days later I had to tell everything).

If you procrastinate and don’t understand why this is happening, the therapist will probably help you find the answer and help manage it. You can learn to procrastinate less (or more if suddenly you want more). This is absolutely accurate.

In general, issues related to productivity very often rest on psychological things. I work with people quite a lot and I see that some with remarkable talents in solving technical problems can, in their development, rest against some psychological things.

Such things are much more than we used to notice. Most of the people around do not resort to any means of reflecting something that is bothering them, but simply intuitively trying to cope with it.

If there is a good manager nearby, he or she will be able to help with something in such a situation. If we compare the work of a manager with something from the field of helping practices, then it will be more likely the work of a coach than a psychotherapist. That is, simply finding a solution to something, and not helping a person change his personality.

But a manager can only help within a certain framework, at least because he is a person involved and interested. Perhaps, in order to move forward, a person needs to quit this job altogether or completely change his profile, and the manager may not be interested in this at all. A colleague cannot physically participate as an impartial person.

And so it’s useful to think about psychotherapy. This is an indispensable and super-effective tool compared to all the others (from the ones I know) for improving your life. In all senses. And at work, and just in communication with colleagues and relatives, including in the realization that I generally want. I think a lot of people involved in programming and other engineering issues understand: they are very different effective depending on whether they are interested in what they do. And the question of what is interesting (“it used to be interesting, but now fed up with it, what should I find now to be interesting? How can I return to this state of enthusiasm again?”) - this is a question largely related to psychotherapy , in simpler cases - with coaching.

Gender balance in IT

- There are questions related to the report “Why do we need more female programmers”. Last year, JetBrains established a teacher award designed specifically to increase the number of women in the engineering profession. Do you have anything to do with this?

- Yes, I participated in the coordination of this initiative. At some point, the idea arose that we want more girls at the school level in the maths in mathematics, physics, and programming. Because in the fifth grade there are the same number of girls and boys, and by the seventh grade it becomes very, very different. I wanted to somehow influence this.

For some time we tried to figure out what measures might work. Of all the measures available to us, we chose this one: to encourage those teachers whose girls succeed at the level of the Russian Olympiad. I participated in all of this - in discussions, in inventing this project, and so on.

“In foreign discussions about gender balance, the word“ pipeline ”is often spoken, companies say:“ we would gladly hire women from among the graduates of technical universities, but there are almost none there, the imbalance does not occur with us, but earlier. ” And you intentionally decided to infiltrate the beginning of this pipeline?

- Yes. This is a complex problem. To begin with, we see this dropout to the seventh grade. In addition, we know that later a noticeable part of women are eliminated: having already chosen the appropriate education, they do not then go to work in this area. A certain amount still does not develop in this area, because there are some obstacles along the way. That is, it is really a pipeline, and at each stage there are problems.

But, really, now it seems that the biggest dropout in this funnel is at the very beginning. And if enough people don’t arrive at the entrance, then little can be done at the exit (any funnel, for example, a sales funnel, is so arranged). So optimizing the next steps is not so interesting.

- In order not to spoil the report, we ask not about the situation with gender imbalance in IT, but about the public discourse associated with it. On the Internet you can see a breakthrough of discussions on this topic, but often they look like a thousandth repetition of long-known arguments in which the parties do not come to anything, but simply let off steam and remain at their own. Do you think that there is not only a problem of gender balance, but also a problem of discussions about it?

- There is a problem with discussions about all gender issues, but this, in fact, is a problem not only of gender issues, but of any cultural changes.

A significant number of people are accustomed to the existence of some kind of status quo. People grew up as adults and have never heard anyone question this status quo. And then suddenly someone starts to bet. And it just makes life harder. A thing that seemed obvious ceases to be obvious. All the explanations that I came up with myself or heard somewhere, suddenly come into question. "What a nightmare, my life is becoming much more complicated than it was before." People generally do not like it when they are told that they were very mistaken. And nothing can be done about it.

Similar disputes arise in absolutely all areas, from artificial intelligence to some political considerations. If you listen to the arguments of the free market adherents with the adherents of the regulated economy, you can also hear the same arguments that have been repeated for 50 years. Moreover, both sides repeat equally thoughtlessly (if there are no specialists in the discussion or those who really spent a lot of time studying the topic). Someone grew up in the tradition that one thing is good, someone - that another is good, and they do not agree.

But in the case of specifically gender discourse, a large numerical superiority is on the side of those who have grown up in the view that IT is for some reason not a female profession. That is, these are not two positions that have long been familiar to everyone, but a “traditional” position, which many people adhere to, and a “progressive” one, which has fewer apologists. When there are two already familiar strong cultures, it’s a little easier. And here, in such things that began to be discussed relatively recently (in Russia very recently, and in the West not so long ago), people's cognitive dissonance is stronger than if it were a somewhat familiar story.

And one of the tasks that I pursue in the report is to talk about the gender balance in IT, this time using non-political or ethical arguments that annoy many. That is, not arguments about who owns the power and who discriminates against whom, and not about what is moral and immoral, what is good and bad to do. Instead, I’m going to look at it from a completely different perspective — economic arguments. About what is profitable and not profitable.

Of course, all the same, I’m unlikely to be able to avoid absolutely all political, moral and ethical issues. But at least I will try to emphasize everywhere that within the framework of this conversation these issues are everyone's personal business. That is, the conclusions that I draw have no moral, ethical or political grounds, only economic ones. I have a political position and a moral and ethical position, but I will not talk about them.

- As you mentioned in your previous report, the arguments of people in disputes often are emotions that are very different from what people say. In gender issues, as you say, the arguments may hide “I am uncomfortable with the destruction of the status quo”. Isn't it worth it instead of economic or political arguments to take a step back and talk not about the gender balance itself, but about emotions that force people to take a position on it?

- It would be great if people knew how to "take a step back", but it is very difficult. This is a separate skill, I have great respect for those who can do this reliably (that is, at least in some given percentage of cases from all conversations).

It seems to me unrealistic at the scale of TechTrain, where there will be more than a thousand people, to expect that we can all take a step back. Of course, I will call for this, but I understand that this will not happen.

In this sense, herding seems to work much better. Nobody canceled Overton's windows . And it turns out that people choose the position of "wholesale". If, on the whole, you adhere to, for example, conditional “liberal Western values”, then you choose everything that is associated with them: attitude to same-sex marriage, attitude to gender issues, attitude to economic policy, and something else. There is a conglomerate of values, and he is wholly either like it or not. Because, as a rule, they actually choose not values, but the desired way of life and whom to consider “their own”. If later it turns out that “your own people” profess something that you don’t like, you still get involved with it and start supporting it too.

Moreover, the import of new ideas is very fast. According to my feelings, the arguments in Russian disputes, for example, on the gender theme, are now very little different from the American ones. Despite the fact that in America these disputes have been going on for 50 years, and we have 5. If we had also talked about this for 50 years in isolation, we would have different considerations. And since we simply imported it from the Western community five years ago, we are already almost at the forefront in terms of argumentation.

Once upon a report on sociology, I heard a wonderful fact. Sociologists conducted a study on the predictors of the number of people with higher education in different countries. They took many, many countries, analyzed, and it turned out that the number of people with higher education does not particularly depend on a whole bunch of factors: standard of living, labor market. And it depends on the number of international organizations in which this country is a member. That is, the best predictor of the prestige of higher education in the country is the factor of integration into the international community.

And this speaks of how the spread of ideas occurs. If we want to be in a club of some countries, then we begin to use the practices that are accepted in this club. And so, a wide variety of values ​​are disseminated, including gender considerations.

But this does not mean that you can stop talking about them and we all just somehow absorb it along with other things. It doesn’t work, we must speak. Of course, few come out of one such conversation reborn. It is unlikely that having talked with someone once, I will dramatically change the worldview of this person. But from every conversation people have, the feeling will gradually shift in the direction that the people they like think so. And at some point you wake up and discover that you think not like a year ago, but in the opposite way. And so you ended up in "another camp." Just because there are those people whom you sympathize with.

- In discussions about gender issues one can find the position “while you are dealing with far-fetched problems, in Africa children are starving, it would be better if they were taken care of”. I do not support this position, but I want to clarify: how do you choose which of the social problems to speak about? Even if we consider specifically the imbalance in IT, then why is it the gender imbalance that matters, and not, for example, ageism?

- In my opinion, there are two parts. One about the fact that someone says to someone "you are talking about the wrong problems." It’s hard for me to politely answer such an argument, because no one has any right to tell others what to tell them. They are talking about what they want. If a person chose to deal with some issue for himself, this is his absolute right, no matter how strange the question may be.

And no one has any moral obligation to help those who are “worse than anyone”. Any socially oriented activity is absolutely voluntary.

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