Discussing Radical Candor by Kim Scott (Part 1) - Care Personally, Challenge Directly

Nathan Toups (00:00)

If you feel like you have to protect yourself and have a performative layer of what expectations are, you're never going to feel that you fully fit

Carter Morgan (00:14)

Hey there, welcome to Book Overflows, the podcast for software engineers by software engineers, where every week we read one of the best technical books in the world in an effort to improve our craft. I'm Carter Morgan, and I'm joined here as always by my co-host, Nathan Toops. How you doing, Nathan?

Nathan Toups (00:26)

Great. Hey everybody.

Carter Morgan (00:28)

Well, thanks for listening everyone. always, like, comment, subscribe, share the podcast with your friends and coworkers. Helps the podcast grow. Helps us keep doing this. And if you want to book anytime with us on Leland to get some feedback or some help with your career, do that too. The links are in the episode description. We have a new book this week. We wrapped up finite infinite games last week. And so now we're taking a look at radical candor. This is what this is a ⁓ pretty famous book, right, Nathan?

Nathan Toups (00:57)

Yeah, and it's been out for a few years now and it's something I've actually had on my list of books I would love to get to one day kind of situation. Have you read this book before?

Carter Morgan (01:09)

No, I mean, I've heard about it a lot. It's interesting. Sometimes on the podcast we'll cover kind of like hidden gems or things that, know, like fundamentals of software architecture, I think is a great one. We're like, I'm not hearing people talking all the time about like, oh, fundamental software architecture, but you find it and it's a great book and you love it. But sometimes we don't read a book like this, which is, uh, you hear about it a lot and you kind of come in with some ideas about what it's about, but it's always nice to kind of.

actually see what it's about.

Nathan Toups (01:39)

Yeah, exactly. it's a, I felt that way about this book. It's one of those where it's considered just sort of, especially if you're gonna get on the management track, ⁓ just sort of an important reading. People will kind of reference, well, so-and-so uses radical candor. And I'm like, I kind of can guess what that means, but I don't really know what that means. So ⁓ glad we read the book this week.

Carter Morgan (02:02)

Yeah, well, we read part one this week. We'll cover part two next week. A little introduction about the author and about the book for those who maybe aren't as familiar with it. The author Kim Scott, she is a former executive at Google and Apple who developed the radical candor framework while teaching a management class at Apple University. After leading teams at some of tech's most successful companies, she co-founded radical candor LLC to help organizations worldwide in like the passion and direct communication.

Her work has transformed management practices globally, making her one of the most influential voices in modern leadership. And the book introduction we have, Radical Candor offers a simple but powerful management philosophy. You can care personally and challenge directly, avoiding the traps of being either a pushover or a jerk. Kim Scott, drawing from her leadership experience at Google and Apple, shows how to build relationships where both praise and criticism help people grow. The framework has become required reading for successful organizations, teaching leaders to create cultures of compassionate candor.

build cohesive teams, and achieve results collaboratively. Well, like we said, we read the first part this week. We're going to read part two next week. Nathan, give us your thoughts on part one of Radical Candor.

Nathan Toups (03:08)

Yeah, so ⁓ there's one of the quadrants and we'll get into this. That's unfortunately like the largest one you can slip into if you're not careful. And I feel personally called out by this book. ⁓ So ⁓ I will slip into what we're going to talk about called ruinous empathy quadrant. ⁓ And she makes a really good argument as to like why you're not doing anyone favors. If you do this, sidestepping difficult conversations and that, ⁓ you know,

why it's actually like a caring thing to give feedback directly and to not leave room for interpretation. I think the framing in this book is actually really good. ⁓ There's also some really funny misunderstanding and ⁓ criticisms of this book that I think are also justified if these tools are used in the wrong hands. And ⁓ it's a very Silicon Valley high growth way of looking at the world. And so that's not for everybody.

Carter Morgan (04:00)

Yes.

Nathan Toups (04:04)

But I also appreciate that something like this exists so that you can recognize it, right? That's part of our job is to understand, you know, why is my manager acting this way? Or are they trying to follow radical candor, but they kind of missed one of the critical points, right? Even if you're not a manager, I think this is like a good book to kind of wrap your head around.

Carter Morgan (04:22)

Yeah. When was radical candor first published? Like 2017. Okay. So that is, yeah, that is later than I would have thought. Cause my thoughts reading this book is a lot of this struck me as kind of common sense. Um, but some of it, but I also kind of thought a bit like we've talked about this on the podcast before, like that TV trope Seinfeld isn't funny.

Nathan Toups (04:29)

Okay, so it's not that old. Yeah.

Of course.

Carter Morgan (04:50)

because Seinfeld was so revolutionary at the time and really almost any modern sitcom is a descendant of Seinfeld in that way that you can watch Seinfeld and be like, what's the big deal? I don't get why, you know, why people like this so much. So I thought like, well, is this book written like 2003 or something? But 2017, it's a little sooner than I would have thought. I am enjoying this book. I'm enjoying it more as it's gone on. We're going to talk about it a bit. But I think at the beginning, it's there's a little bit of like

being a bad manager is really hard for the soul. I'm kind of like, you know what's harder than being a bad manager? Having a bad manager, right? And like, I get it. Like the book is, is targeted towards managers and we're going to talk about our experiences with our various managers over the podcast. We're going to talk about our experience with the managers during the podcast. I don't mean to imply that we've like had a manager who runs the podcast. It's just the two of us. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Toups (05:45)

yeah, no, we don't. This is ⁓ completely

lawless.

Carter Morgan (05:50)

We should have a manager. ⁓ Yeah, but it's a I've liked it more as it's gone on. And I believe kind of part one is a little bit like explaining the framework and everything that goes into it. And I believe part two gets into more practical advice. So very interested to see kind of how that goes. But yeah, overall, very interesting book and

Nathan Toups (05:51)

We probably perform at a higher level.

Carter Morgan (06:17)

I'm enjoying reading it if only because like we said, it's a very popular book. so it's important to understand, especially if you're like a Silicon Valley tech company, odds are your manager has either read this book or at least had some sort of training that has been influenced by this book. So getting a peek into what might be going on inside their head is super valuable.

Okay, well, let's get right into it. So this is the second edition of the book. She talks a bit about what changed in the first book. And I actually thought the introduction, or I guess the preface, was really interesting, because she talks about how this book was mentioned on Silicon Valley, the TV show. Have you seen Silicon Valley, Nathan?

Nathan Toups (06:54)

Yeah, I loved Silicon Valley. It was happening while I was CTO at an early stage startup. We were actually going from pre-seed to seed to series A funding. And some of it felt too close to home, like really hilarious. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love the writing of Judge anyway. He's also done lots of other great shows like King of the Hill and other things.

Carter Morgan (07:00)

⁓ fun.

yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Toups (07:24)

Yeah, it was funny because she uses radical candor about herself, some really nice introspection because in Silicon Valley, the TV show, they poke fun at why bosses that are real jerks have this new framework, ⁓ basically to just tear people down in an empathetic way. It's very funny because it's like most Silicon Valley roasting, Silicon Valley TV show roasting of something that's considered like a norm.

Carter Morgan (07:40)

Right.

Nathan Toups (07:54)

in the startup world.

Carter Morgan (07:56)

Right. And she points out that in Silicon Valley, the location on the TV show in particular, there's a real tendency to dress up business in like really lofty, idealistic terms. Right. And so you're not a jerk. You're experiencing radical candor. ⁓ So she is aware of maybe the reputation this book has. And I thought it was impressive of her to kind of

really reflect on that ⁓ so personally. And her origin story of Radical Candor is interesting. I guess she had a startup kind of back in the, it's really funny because she had a startup like back in the 2000s, like during the dot-com boom. And listening to this startup, get some of those things, I'm like, wow, there was a lot of venture capital money floating around back then, right? It was like some sort of like automated spreadsheets startup. And you got the impression that this should have been like,

Nathan Toups (08:49)

yeah.

Carter Morgan (08:55)

two people in their garage and instead she has like 30 employees or whatever. ⁓ Anyhow, ⁓ but one of her employees, she says, is just doing really bad work to the point, and like it's a startup, you don't have any time or effort to, you don't have the resources to be able to correct bad work, but she doesn't tell the employee this. Everyone just says, ⁓ you're doing great, or we can fix it, or don't worry about it. You're so valuable to the team until it gets to the point where.

She has to fire the poor guy. And he says, he's like, why didn't you tell me? And then he says, why didn't anyone tell me? And her, that's kind of the thesis of this book is that like her management style was not kind to that employee. It would have been kinder to, to be honest with him, even if that had meant maybe even firing him sooner.

But at any rate, kind of getting blindsided by this ⁓ was not fun for either party.

Nathan Toups (09:59)

No, it's a disservice to everyone involved. I think this is a good reminder because I think what happens is, you know, they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think in the moment you go, oh, you know what, they're not meeting expectations, but let's just give them another chance. Or maybe if I wrote the ticket in a little more detailed way, they'd get it right. Or, you you just kind of go through and you realize like, I'm not helping this person grow. And especially an early stage startup or even in, you know, a more mature company, you need everyone to pull their weight.

Carter Morgan (10:08)

Right.

Nathan Toups (10:28)

they need to understand what pulling their weight means. If you have expectations that are unrealistic, you need to be able to have enough candor for them to push back. One the I loved about this book was the stories, right? So there's like lots of really, lots of, and lots of stories where Kim Scott is basically just like, I was screwed up royally at this point in my career. And she kind of reminisces like, I wonder if I had used these tactics earlier.

Carter Morgan (10:42)

lots of stories.

Nathan Toups (10:57)

who I could have actually corrected their course better, right? Or maybe, and again, there's all these like really great examples. There's also one of the things that was an excellent glimpse, especially since we've read in the Plex and we've read some of these other books, is that we got another angle of the stories of how Sergey Brin and Larry Page operate within Google. It was interesting that like how they really cultivated pushback, even folks who are very junior, like straight out of school.

Carter Morgan (11:09)

Yes.

Nathan Toups (11:27)

if they're on a project, they could get in a straight up fight with Sergey or Larry Page on ⁓ really crazy topics and they would even disagree and because of the organizational structure, it was okay. It wasn't a shut up, I'm in charge situation. And it's interesting because like, think for radical candor to work to its full extent, you really do have to have an environment that rewards ⁓ not just candor coming from the top down.

but candor coming from the bottom up. And I think she actually spends a good bit of time saying, hey, if you want to switch to radical candor, you got to show that you can take it first and like ask for honest feedback and just shut up. Like ask for honest feedback and don't give counter feedback. well you do this, know, which I thought was cool.

Carter Morgan (12:08)

Yeah.

Yeah.

I thought it was interesting that, one of the stories she tells is about a manager who says that he has a goal that in every one of his one-on-ones, his one-on-ones are an hour for 10 minutes. And those one-on-ones, he doesn't say anything. He just listens and he makes no expression on his face. ⁓ and he says, that's when he really hears. says, that's when I hear what I don't want to hear. That's when people tell me what's actually happening.

Nathan Toups (12:38)

Mm-hmm.

Carter Morgan (12:41)

Because I think you're right about that idea, like radical candor, if you're to do it properly, is a two-way street. And maybe the kind of the best way to help readers understand. So what is radical candor exactly? ⁓ She defines kind of like four quadrants along two axes. So the y-axis would be care personally, right? Really authentically care about the people you're talking or you're working for.

On the X axis would be challenged directly. So Y care personally, ⁓ X challenge directly. So if you get, if you care personally, but do not challenge directly, you wind up with what's called ruinous empathy. And we're going to talk a bit about that. If you don't care personally, but do challenge directly, you wind up with manipulative insincerity. ⁓ sorry. This is, this is if you don't care personally and also don't challenge direct.

This is manipulative insincerity. If you don't care personally and do challenge directly, you get obnoxious aggression. And then the sweet spot is that the upper right quadrant, which is you care personally and you challenge directly. And that results in radical candor.

And you know, I think. ⁓

Well, there's a lot of experience with these kind of four leadership quadrants, right? Nathan, do any these stick out to you or have you fallen into one of them?

Nathan Toups (14:11)

Yeah,

I have. I'll be honest. ⁓ If I'm not careful, I'll be on this ruinous empathy side, right? I think if you're a people pleaser or if you really like getting along with folks, sometimes you'll skirt over challenging people in an effort to have cohesion of the team. The thing is, that if you're in a leadership role,

this can be ruinous, right? The thing is why it's called ruinous empathy. People will lose respect for you as a leader. She actually talks about this and saying that, and again, it's an oversimplification. think it's also worthwhile criticism, but people would actually prefer to work for a jerk who gets things done than a nice person who's ineffective, right? And I think we've all seen, we've seen this in school teachers, right? I remember some of my absolute favorite school teachers growing up were the ones who were the absolute strictest in the classroom.

Carter Morgan (14:59)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (15:09)

right, would not tolerate. Now, there were certain types that were just strict for being strict and the class was awful. But if I remember the ones who really cared, the ones who really got the bad kids and you know, preppy straight A students to be on the same page, they were, they ran a tight ship, right? They, they expected a lot out of us and we got a lot out of it too. And I, I remember having those first like sort of influences teachers that you still remember, right? You remember the particularly bad ones and you're the particularly good ones.

Carter Morgan (15:25)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (15:37)

Managers are the same way. The absolute best engineering manager I had was a expert of radical candor. And it would be one of those things where if he was disappointed in you and gave you this feedback, I was disappointed in myself. And I was just like, no, I'm not pulling my weight on the team in this one dimension. I had maybe seven other areas I'm doing great, but in this one, you're right. He can't make predictions about the output if I'm not following the

Carter Morgan (15:52)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (16:06)

this thing that we've all agreed to. And I'm not pulling my weight on this social contract. And I've been in teams where the manager is kind of like, oh, it'd be nice if we did this. And you're like, I don't care. But if you were on a team where there's high output and we all take a lot of pride in it, you'll probably have someone who stays on the side of radical candor. She also says this isn't like a personality test.

So it's not like, ⁓ it's your essence. Like I have radical candor and so therefore I do these things. Like all of us multiple times per day, depending on the social hierarchy can slip from one to the other. ⁓ think what, again, this is useful for me and I would love your feedback on this too, because obviously our personalities are a bit different. I would love to see where you kind of default to. I think it's interesting because this is one of those like frog in boiling water things.

Carter Morgan (16:36)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (17:00)

where sometimes you can just kind of get into the culture of a business or culture of any relationship. And I'll say this is relationship advice, not just work advice. ⁓ If you watch two people in like a codependent relationship, like a sibling and a parent, right? And you're like, your dynamic is so weird compared to my dynamic with this. And then you realize they're actually in one of these weird radical candor quadrants that you're like, this is why.

Carter Morgan (17:17)

Right, right.

Right, right.

Yeah, as far as I go, like I don't want to read this book and be like, well, I think I do a lot of this right all the time, right? Because one, I'll say I've never been in like a real deal leadership position. I've been a senior individual contributor, right? And held influence, but I've never actually line managed people. And so I understand that that's a difficult job.

I'll say that in my personal relationships, I'm a pretty caring guy. I really like people. I always say I find people much more interesting than I find computers. And ⁓ so it's not hard for me. It just comes naturally for me to be pretty empathetic and caring about other people. But then it also is very easy for me to speak my mind. ⁓ I think if there's one flaw I have,

that I maybe lean into too much, although I'll actually say it's kind of better having done this podcast. It's that I really do value ⁓ peace and team cohesion, and I will sometimes play the peacemaker a little too much. again, I do not think Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs are people you should strive to emulate in your life. I think these people...

I have a lot that about them that is not admirable in the slightest. I do really admire when I read about them, like when they're right, they'll fight for what's right. And they admire being right over having peace. And again, you can't lean. It's a very fine balance. You have to walk. And I think Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs absolutely lean into obnoxious aggression way too much. ⁓ but

Nathan Toups (19:05)

Mm-hmm.

Carter Morgan (19:18)

The podcast actually really helped me with that from a technical perspective, as we've been discussing. It's very interesting being at a growing startup now, which is in a lot of ways really seeking to establish ⁓ a strong technical culture, which they just haven't had to up until this point. ⁓ And so there's a lot of discussion amongst the teams about like, well, what kind of testing should we do or what should our CI-CD process look like, or how are we doing alerting and monitoring?

I was just talking with one engineer about our code base is just, I, it's a little like you would benefit reading, working effectively with legacy code before diving into this code base. It's just, it's a little complicated. It's a little all tied together. And so I was just talking about kind of the need to refactor it. Like, like I said, maybe one day we'll, be able to devote like time to actually refactor this. And, and I was saying like, you know, it'd be nice to have unit tests.

when we do that and like more comprehensive unit tests, right? Honestly, right? My coworkers is like, Oh no, unit tests are stupid. Like why would we ever need unit tests? All we need are ED tests, right? And I did kind of put my foot down there and said, no, no, no, no. Like if we're talking about a refactoring, like we 100 % need unit tests because otherwise how do we know that after we refactor something, it even does what it did before, right? And so, right. Yeah.

Nathan Toups (20:15)

Yeah, that would be nice.

on.

Kent Beck probably just like smiled from having a happy thought in

the back of his mind. Somewhere, somewhere in the universe, a good thing is happening right now.

Carter Morgan (20:45)

⁓

Yeah.

But I think in the past I would have been like, ⁓ well, maybe your point is valid. And so I've gotten better at saying like, no, like I actually have a good argument for my point. And so I'm going to make it all that to say that like, yeah, radical can.

Nathan Toups (20:58)

Mm-hmm.

more than your coworker

reading a blog post on Hacker News being like, unit tests are terrible. And you're like, mm, I mean, yeah.

Carter Morgan (21:06)

Right. Right. Honestly, like that's

the, the, the, that's why the podcast has been good to just understand the arguments behind a lot of these practices. ⁓ and hopefully you as the listener are getting some of that by osmosis. cause I'll, I'll say like, and I feel bad because we, have a dedicated that we, in the notes, we have a dedicated hot takes section now, but the hot takes are too good sometimes. And then they come up before the hot takes section. But I like, I'm going to steal one of yours, Nathan. I like what you wrote, which is that.

You think more careers have been ruined by ruinous empathy than by any other quadrant, by obnoxious aggression or what's the other bad one, manipulative insincerity.

Nathan Toups (21:43)

Yeah.

Well, I don't mean to get political, but I think that this is actually worthwhile. ⁓ Social policy from government can be easily in the quadrant of ruinous empathy. think that while we had real issues with institutionalized mental health care in the United States, like there was a reason that we dismantled them the way that we did. Putting people in tent encampments on the streets and letting them shoot up drugs is also, it's ruinous empathy, right? It's this idea that, if we just give them a space,

Carter Morgan (21:58)

Right.

Right. Right.

Nathan Toups (22:18)

then they'll figure out how to operate in the world. you're like, you can't actually, like the radical candor here is that you're killing yourself slowly in the public, in public spaces. We have to have another way of, like, you're actually not caring, right? ⁓ You know, and so ⁓ you think that you're caring, like, ⁓ I have empathy for these people, but you're not caring in the sense that like, you're actually causing a harm, both to society and to these folks, and that we have to address this complicated issue upfront.

Carter Morgan (22:33)

Right.

Nathan Toups (22:48)

That's a radical view. Obviously, most of us are not at the point where we're causing tent encampments and drug use in the streets. But there's like a philosophical equivalent to this of, hey, if you let somebody have a zombie career, or they don't understand why, they have an idea that I'd love to get to this position one day, but they have no feedback as to why they're not progressing, or why no one's taking them seriously, or why, you know, like, there's all these things.

Carter Morgan (22:55)

Bye bye.

Nathan Toups (23:17)

And I mean this personally as well, right? The best managers that I've had pushed me into places that I was like, oh, this is how I should operate. And the worst managers I had, I'm like, if you weren't happy with this, you didn't give me any feedback. Six months has gone by. I've been spinning my wheels trying to figure out how to best operate in this organization. And I feel like there's like hidden variables that I don't have access to. You're probably dealing with a root and a sympathy, right?

Carter Morgan (23:45)

sucks about ruinous empathy. And that's why I bristled a little bit reading this book at the beginning, because she talks about, again, having to fire that worker of hers. And later on in the book, she talks a lot about how tough it is being fired. And one of the reasons it really sucks firing people as a manager is because you understand just how awful being fired is.

That I thought it was good to talk about later in the book at the beginning of the book. It kind of focuses more on like, and this was a really hard thing for me firing this guy. And this is where I'll get into a bit of career lore on my part. Like I have been fired and I have been fired in this exact same way by a ruinously empathetic manager. And it was one of those things where like, it was a bizarre thing. mean, you know, I was there for a period of time and then kind of get put on like a surprise pip. And I was just like, you haven't.

Nathan Toups (24:29)

Mm-hmm.

Carter Morgan (24:40)

communicated this to me at all. Like I didn't even know I was doing something wrong. And then, you know, work really hard, you know, kind of once I had those clear benchmarks, like ⁓ those performance benchmarks, work myself off the PIP and I'm like, okay, great. Cause now I know what I need to do. And then six months later, again, this manager just couldn't hack it. Wasn't giving any feedback. I kind of thought like, well, I've been very clear at this point that if I am doing something wrong, I just need some feedback and, and, but I'm not getting any feedback. So that's probably good.

And then, ⁓ yeah. And then he gets demoted from being a manager, but they were going to new manager. And that one was, I think could have worked in like a more radically candid way, but I had about six weeks before, ⁓ before I just got canned. ⁓ and it's just, it's a little like, what's really, really frustrating about a ruinously empathetic manager is that first manager, the one who kind of really.

Nathan Toups (25:27)

Right.

Carter Morgan (25:36)

He was my manager through this whole thing before the, six weeks before the last manager just kind of came in and did the deed. he's probably my favorite manager from a personality perspective, like as far as who I'd want to hang out with and like, you know, go see a movie or go grab dinner or whatever. I really, really liked it. And that makes it that hides it because you kind of think like, so and so is a really cool guy.

Nathan Toups (25:49)

Mmm.

Carter Morgan (26:05)

so-and-so seems like a nice person. Like, surely he has my best interests at heart. ⁓ Whereas like, if you work for like a jerk, you know what you're dealing with. It's all upfront and you know how to navigate that. like, yeah, it sucked that when the day came, it was just like, again, I had that exact same thought. Like, why didn't you tell me? Why didn't anyone tell me that this was happening?

Nathan Toups (26:28)

Right. I know it's, it'll

eat up a culture in the company from the inside, right? It's like, it's like getting rust on some sort of piece of metal that's not supposed to be exposed to the elements. I live in Costa Rica. A lot of cars get shipped down here from the United States on the secondhand market. Cars are just expensive because there's a lot of Trump tariffs in the United States. Well, Costa Rica has been doing tariffs forever, right? If you want to get a laptop down here, 50 % tariff, right? It's been like that forever. Yeah.

Carter Morgan (26:36)

right.

Yeah, yeah.

Brazil was the same way.

Nathan Toups (26:58)

And so, and it's

just part of, you know, the protectionist ways that this government runs and how they finance things. It lets them keep taxes very low and you know, all these other things domestically. But if you're not careful, ⁓ you will buy a car that was, because four wheel drive is really important here, right? There's a lot of dirt roads. You'll buy a car that was used in Minnesota and Minnesota uses salt on the roads. And so there's like salt buildup.

from all the treatments and then you get down into the jungle and it's incredibly humid. And then all of a sudden, an otherwise sound vehicle just completely corrodes from the inside. you have, you know, unless you really have somebody who's good at looking at stuff and seeing things, ⁓ it'll just, what you thought was a good investment into being something awful. And I think that this is the same thing that happens with these cultures in which, ⁓ you know, it's hard to remove this, right? So you're meant...

your manager was probably being measured on some set of metrics and saying, hey, what you're managing is underperforming as measured by this, this and that. And the manager's like, okay, well, I'm gonna, I'll rally the troops and we're just gonna, working on stuff together. And then that person's under so much pressure. They're like, you put folks on pips or you're out, right? Like we don't see you enforcing behavior. And then they do this, not really equipped to do it. And then...

they get replaced eventually. And then the new person comes in and goes, well, we just have to clean house, right? Like they have no relationship with you. It's not really a thing. It's just like, they look at this and go, this is not how I would have built the team. This is, you know, there's no ⁓ relationship there, whether it's fair or not. It doesn't, it doesn't matter. They look at this as like, I have to stop the, you know, the bleed or whatever. And then, and I've seen this happen. This happened. ⁓ So I've, and maybe it's cause I'm too skittish, like a cat. ⁓

Carter Morgan (28:24)

Right, right.

You

Nathan Toups (28:48)

I've never been fired and I actually kind of, I don't mean that as a badge of honor actually. I'll jump ship. Like I'll be one of these people where I'm like, well, I'm not going to wait and get fired. I'm just going to get out of here. there's a few times where I've jumped ship way too early. ⁓ You know, it's one of those where I'm like, I've tried to navigate. I've given feedback. I've done these things. ⁓ One of those, twice now, I think that there, should have just written it out and seen what happened. And even if I did get laid off,

Carter Morgan (28:54)

Right, right.

Right,

Nathan Toups (29:17)

or I got fired, I think that would have been more exciting and more like stick to my guns, but I didn't do it. The last one though, when I was at, when I was at Flyer, ⁓ my boss's boss got let go. There was like a reduction in force. was like the head, it was the VP of platform, right? So was like very important person, kind of led the vision as sort of the commander's intent ⁓ initiative. And they didn't replace this person with anybody. They put a temporary person in. The person didn't understand what platform was doing at all.

Carter Morgan (29:35)

Right,

Nathan Toups (29:47)

And all of sudden, fingers get pointed everywhere, right? Like, why isn't this happening? This shifted six months and all these other things. the manager that was directly under me completely switched personalities. And he's like a professional manager. He's survived a bunch of like big tech. He's worked in a bunch of big tech. was at Amazon and ⁓ Nike and a bunch of other companies. And he went from being a very excellent manager

Carter Morgan (30:10)

Right,

Nathan Toups (30:15)

for way that we work together and honestly use radical candor to one who like all of a sudden a relationship was fundamentally different. And I felt like I went from being like, I got redefined expectations, you know, I was like on this like cool trajectory. I'm like, oh yeah, I'm going to get, I wanted a path to getting to principal engineer. That's what I was shooting for. was like staff. was like, I want to get to principal. I felt like building my portfolio of like cool stuff and how I'm like changing things and how I've taken on tech lead and all this other stuff. And then all of sudden I'm like,

Carter Morgan (30:29)

Right.

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (30:44)

I'm about to get thrown under the bus for something that has been, I've been very vocal about being complicated and that everyone who's been involved, it's been just kind of take things sideways. And I jumped ship. Like I should have written it out. I should have stuck to my guns. I should have like continued to be like, look, I haven't changed. This is what we're doing. We're doing awesome stuff. You don't want to get rid of somebody like me, but instead recruiter starts sniffing around and it sounds kind of fun. The comps what I want. Uh, it's a problem that looks interesting. And I'm just like,

Carter Morgan (30:50)

right.

right room.

Nathan Toups (31:14)

I'm going to go have fun. I'm going go over here. And I would say that that's part of that job hopping problem. And it's also like, I think it's a character trait on my side of like, I didn't reciprocate this idea of like pushing back, right? I didn't feel that I was in a position to say, you're the one moving the goalpost. We've worked our butts off on this and make sure that if he's acting unfairly to me,

Carter Morgan (31:16)

Yeah

Nathan Toups (31:41)

I go through the rest of the power structure in the organization who did care about me. Cause when I said I was leaving, ⁓ they actually offered me like the CEO called me. Some of the VPs were like, Hey, is there another role in this company that you would like to take? And it wasn't a counter offer situation. But it was, it's one of these things where I'm like, ⁓ actually what I had decided that this company doesn't care about me is not true at all. Right. That I wasn't being thrown into the bus. was like being paranoid and I should have actually had.

Carter Morgan (32:06)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (32:11)

uncomfortable conversations earlier before I was actually going to jump ship all the way. ⁓ And part of that, again, is like as an end user, my whole point to this whole ⁓ like side argument here is that like, you don't have to be in a leader to trust in the radical candor stuff. Even if I was so unhappy that I felt I was going to leave, I should have just said that. If they valued you, they're probably going to be like, boy, we don't want to lose this person. ⁓ As opposed to being like,

the immature part of me, which is like, I'm going to get a job offer in hand and they're going to be sorry when I leave. And you're like, that's just infantile silliness. But in the moment I was like, you can't treat me like this. I'm getting out of here. And so anyway, even if you're not in a leadership role, I think the radical candor piece, it's a personality trait that we should aim for. Right. Being very clear and honest with the fact that like, if I care for my team and I care for the company,

Carter Morgan (32:44)

Right.

You

Nathan Toups (33:09)

⁓ I should push back. I should challenge. I should challenge that, is, y'all changed the rules and this isn't the way it should be. And I didn't express that, right? I didn't do that.

Carter Morgan (33:20)

I didn't realize that this book is the origin of the phrase, bring your whole self to work. Okay, well, she uses it, is, I don't know, is that actually?

Nathan Toups (33:25)

Is it? ⁓ cool. She uses it, but I didn't. Yeah.

If it's not, probably popularized the term, right? I mean, yeah, I like this. It's very woo-woo Silicon Valley sounding. And I think the bring your whole self to work thing is like, I think that's a good litmus for do we have the psychological safety to, okay.

Carter Morgan (33:51)

Okay, it is not the origin according

to this is according to chat GPT. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt, but it does have some citations here, but so, okay. It's not the origin, but it is probably popularized.

⁓ yeah, so I, I don't know. remember this was really popular during the pandemic and maybe it just kind of got like bastardized. Cause I, there came to be a point where bringing your whole self work to work meant like bring every political opinion you have to work and let's all hash it out. And I just. Right. I remember when, ⁓ the Coinbase CEO back in like the summer of 2020 kind of like drew a line and said, like, we are a mission driven company.

Nathan Toups (34:07)

Yeah.

⁓ boy.

Carter Morgan (34:36)

We don't discuss these sorts of things. We are not issuing statements. We are just focusing on the work. And he got a lot of flack for that. And I think he's been proven.

Nathan Toups (34:45)

Yeah, he gave a severance package,

right? He basically was like, if you disagree with this, then, you know, we're going to give you this like six month severance package or whatever. Like you're welcome to take it right now. Right.

Carter Morgan (34:52)

Exactly, right. ⁓

But I think, you know, and this is my opinion, I think with the benefit of hindsight, he's been proven right. I think a lot of the company's kind of attempts to really get into politics backfired and they did not contribute to a successful company. And so I remember reading an article back then that was just like, maybe you bring the part of yourself to work that's really good at its job. Right. And like, and I think I do think what we saw in kind of the summer of 2020 was

Nathan Toups (35:15)

Right.

Carter Morgan (35:22)

a misappropriation of this phrase because reading this book, it's not her saying what people were saying back then, like bring every political opinion you have, every minor grievance, you know, let's just all air it out and, you know, work through it together. But rather what she's saying is that like, you should be able to bring your concerns if you are, you know, worried about the direction of the team, worried about the direction of an employee, worried about the direction of the company, like

you should be able to talk about that. And you shouldn't feel ⁓ like you constantly have to put on like a different version of yourself at work, which is always a ⁓ balancing act, right? Because obviously I act different at work than I act at home. Then I act around my high school buddies. ⁓ But I do think it's important to be able to be a fairly authentic version of yourself.

Nathan Toups (36:17)

Yeah.

Yeah, I think if you in an environment in which you're like, you find yourself biting your tongue all the time, or you're like, oh, I can't express myself or blow back will happen, things like that. I think that is the, it's an excellent example of where the culture is such an important part of, know, if you're gonna have, if you want a culture of radical candor, it has to be a place in which someone feels comfortable bringing their whole self. And again, I agree with you though, like,

Carter Morgan (36:26)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (36:47)

virtue signaling and flag waving, to me those are not authentic. Those are performative, right? And authentic is I tell a joke and you laugh. Performative is I tell a joke and you laugh in a way to make sure that everyone knows that you think that I'm funny and it's like a fake laugh, And I think that we, especially with like the world of social media that we're in, unfortunately, a lot of us default.

Carter Morgan (36:52)

Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (37:14)

to the performative nature of things. this will be a great post or, I should share this thing. Well, that's inherently performative. That's not authentic, right? ⁓ If your kid's having a birthday party, ⁓ being present in like singing happy birthday is better than being behind a camera and like ⁓ never being actively involved in that scene. And I think the same thing happens with whether you bring your whole self or not. You're like,

Carter Morgan (37:33)

Right,

Nathan Toups (37:43)

If you feel like you have to protect yourself and have a performative layer of what expectations are, you're never going to feel that you fully fit

in. ⁓ I've been in environments where I do feel like I very open. Again, I go back to that when I was at that FinTech ⁓ VC ⁓ funded group, the head of engineering was very clear. We had some junior talent. We also had senior talent. had PhD researchers. We had a bunch of folks.

we would do these sort of like very formal, ⁓ you know, RFCs, like these requests for comment documents on certain important architectural decisions. A lot of stuff we gave autonomy, you could just make decisions for yourself. But if it affected other people, you'd have to write an RFC and we'd all talk about it. And we would duke it out. mean, no holds barred.

getting pedantic about whether this date range should be, you know, date inclusive or data exclusive and like how a pins work for a database and like super detailed into the weeds. And a junior engineer could bring up a concern as much as somebody who was principle level. And it wasn't performative. It was real. And the head of engineering would listen to the voice of the lowest person on the totem pole. And if it was valid, and it reminded me a lot of actually in the radical candor book,

they talk about Steve Jobs and how Steve Jobs was ⁓ a force of nature and he would vehemently make an argument for something. But if you made a counter argument and you could back it up and you would really push, all he cared about was the right outcome. And so sure, because he's a force of nature, he probably ended up being right a lot or it was very difficult to like sway him, but he loved it when somebody could sway him because it meant that the right decision came out of the process. ⁓ We did this on a micro, yeah.

Carter Morgan (39:06)

Yes.

I it was

so interesting with Steve Jobs because she tells a story about him where he's going back and forth with an employee. Finally, the employee kind of gives up on his side. like, whatever, you win, Steve. Six months later, it turns out the employee was correct. And then Steve Jobs comes in angry at that employee. He's like, we should have done what you said. He's like, yeah, of course we should have done what I said. Why didn't you listen to me? He's like, that's your fault. It's your fault for not convincing me.

On the one hand, like that's a little obnoxious. On the other hand, like that is impressive behavior from a, leadership kind of showing like, cause that communicates two things. It's one, I believe that doing what's right is more important than doing what I personally might believe. And two, I'm giving you permission to fight as hard as you can for what's right. And I will be more frustrated with you fighting less than, than maybe fighting too much.

Nathan Toups (40:01)

All right.

Carter Morgan (40:31)

they talk about that. She was like, with Sergey Brin and then some meeting going back and forth and Sergey has an idea on how to do something. And like all the engineers are saying like, no, we're not going to do it that way. He's like, well, okay, just try it. Like, no, like we're not even going to try it. Like it's just wrong. And he's like, at any other company, you guys would just have to do what I say. But she said he was smiling when he was saying that, like he was proud of the culture he'd created, where his engineers felt empowered to be able to do what they thought was right.

Nathan Toups (40:32)

Wait.

Yeah. I came out of those thinking, what a cool environment that has to be. Even if I have good back and forth and stuff like that, I would say in my current setup, I don't feel that we have that. I think very few companies do. Very few companies. And I guess if we expand the idea of caring, you could say caring is really just about your peers. ⁓

Carter Morgan (41:07)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (41:29)

But caring is also about the business itself, right? You could redefine whether Steve Jobs was obnoxious or caring or not, depending on is it just caring about the humans in Apple or did he care about Apple itself? And he wanted you to also defend the idea of like what Apple is. If you're okay with hanging like that, if you're okay with having the wordplay and swordplay of duking it out to come up with the best thing,

and you can hold your own, that's such an interesting and rare thing. it makes sense, right? How many trillion dollar, multi-trillion dollar companies are there? And I think the culture of that radical candor is part of that. I am curious what the difference is with Tim Cook. ⁓ Do they still duke things out like that? Or do they do it at the highest levels? How does that operate currently? Because it feels like...

Carter Morgan (42:19)

right

Nathan Toups (42:27)

Steve Jobs was such a cult of personality and sort of like encapsulated a lot of these ideals. I don't know the answer. I'm just curious.

Carter Morgan (42:35)

It's, been really interesting working, uh, this, my current company, because I have, uh, I did not grow up in Utah. I grew up in Washington state. I've only, I was born in Utah, um, and lived here for the first three or four years of my life. Um, I don't remember any of it really. So grow up, live in Washington state, came back to Utah for school, lived in Florida for a bit after school, and then just moved back here at three years ago. And so this is my first time. And so when I moved back, I was remote.

So it was my first time working for like a Utah company and small company, about 35 employees. ⁓ but the really fascinating thing about it is that, ⁓ everyone at the company it's Utah, right? And so everyone at the company is either a Latter-day Saint, ⁓ you know, a Mormon or was raised as a Latter-day Saint and has since left, but still kind of has that kind of Latter-day Saint cultural upbringing. have a few people who aren't. And so what comes with that?

is everyone at the company is unfailingly polite to like, you know, dig into stereotypes, right? And like, people are very polite, they're very kind, they play nice with each other. And I always say, like, that's my biggest concern about our team is everyone is too nice to each other. And so there's one engineer in particular that I work with where we have a little bit of friction, as much friction as to, you know, Utah, ⁓ Latter-day Saint or Latter-day Saint adjacent people can have. ⁓

But I've made sure to communicate to him and to my boss. like, I think this is good. Like, I think it's good for us to have this kind of friction because I worry about us. Like my biggest concern is that we will build the wrong thing because no one is willing to challenge each other. And so I'll say personally, given the two options, given working at a place that is too polite or too combative, I choose too polite. Like it's really exhausting when everything becomes an argument. ⁓ But you got to be careful that you don't become.

ruinously empathetic.

Nathan Toups (44:32)

Right. Well, I think also if you can be, you can be, and she talks about this too, right? She talks about how this has been challenging across cultures and how she had to change her tactics for radical candor amongst this Japanese team, right? Where the culture of politeness in the way that you can, and I forget which company she was talking about. They actually had to have like a baton or a plaque or something that they handed off being like, you're the contrarian voice.

Carter Morgan (44:47)

Yes.

Nathan Toups (45:00)

Like you had to anoint someone and it... Yeah, I think it was. I don't remember. Yes. ⁓

Carter Morgan (45:01)

Yes, yes. That might have been Toyota. I, Toyota had the great story about how

when you showed up, they drew a red box on the factory floor and you had to stand in it and you weren't allowed to leave the box until you criticize something about the process. Yeah, which is crazy. But anyhow, you were saying.

Nathan Toups (45:17)

Wow, yeah. Yeah.

So I love these things though, because it gives you permission to sort of take on a character, play a role where, and I would imagine this also is helpful for things like for women or minority groups in an organization where they might have this lens of like, well, how does this make people think about women who are in management roles or how, you know, black folks that are in management roles. If you have a culture in which you're like, no, I'm taking on

Carter Morgan (45:26)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Toups (45:46)

this contrarian voice because that's how we do better stuff, then I think it allows folks to just be who they are, right? Which is what you want. You want people from diversity in different backgrounds not to check boxes, but because those help you with blind spots, right? It's like they've had a different lived experience and they might see things a little differently than you, and that's valuable. You need that socioeconomic, every reason, right? There's all kinds of reasons.

this person's been in 10 startups, but this person's only been in one, right? Like every one of this, that's real diversity. There's like tons of dimensionality to it. And so companies that can cultivate that. Here's something, is in chapter three. So I'll do a little segue, understanding what motivates people. This one kind of surprised me because there's a term that I absolutely hate called rockstar.

Carter Morgan (46:16)

Right, right.

I was gonna

ask you about this.

Nathan Toups (46:39)

Yes, so I absolutely hate this term. I think it was like so overblown. It became just like obnoxious. Like this was the mythical ⁓ 10x developer. What's funny is that it's not what this book means by Rockstar. Rockstar is not the stellar talent. In this book, that's a superstar, which again, whatever. ⁓ Superstars are people who are on this trajectory. The world can't stop them. The best thing you can do as a manager is to help their velocity go up.

Carter Morgan (46:45)

The 10x developer.

Right? Right? Yeah.

Nathan Toups (47:07)

through the trajectory as quickly as possible. These are the Sheryl Sandbergs and the Kim Scots of the world, right? Very rare, very driven. If you don't get out of their way, they're gonna go find a way to do it themselves and then go somewhere else. That's the superstar. And superstars seem to, according to Kim Scott in this book, she only optimized towards these superstar trajectory folks for a while, to her detriment. She brings this up.

She actually says that rock stars are the bedrock. These are the folks that ⁓ are actually more stable, high performers, but in a role that they thrive in. They're the ones who don't wanna move up too quickly because what's above that maybe isn't interesting to them. But you can make important decisions around the high performance behavior of a rock star. I didn't think of there's this trajectory above rock star. Rock star to me was like,

Carter Morgan (47:50)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (48:02)

we're just a team of rock stars. And it kind of have this idea of like high ego, high performance, you know, slash playing the guitar kind of rock star thing, not bedrock star player, which is how she defines it. ⁓ so yeah, I, I don't know, did this, did this chapter strike you in a similar way or, ⁓

Carter Morgan (48:12)

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, I thought that was great to see. ⁓ cause I do think like, again, like the 10 X developer is overrated. ⁓ where, and I think a lot of developers instead are just, you know, doing a good job and, you would be lost without them. mean, I, I've been pretty, I'm thinking about developer. had one of my teams who maybe wasn't moving as fast.

Haste as, as the company might've wanted, maybe wasn't really positioning himself for a lot of growth and promotions, but very, very good at his job. ⁓ always brought a very valuable perspective to the team. ⁓ and so I think the, the dissonance here is sometimes you will meet a rock star, someone who

steady yeti, good at their job, brings a lot of value who sees themselves as a superstar and kind of says like, well, I'm executing well. And so why aren't I getting all these promotions? Why aren't I getting all this praise? Why, why isn't the company really valuing me? and I think, you know, this engineer I'm thinking of, you know, I remember just talking with my manager about them at one point and they were saying like, listen, this person can work here as long as they.

Nathan Toups (49:25)

Hmm.

Carter Morgan (49:48)

We're never getting rid of this person. We're also not going to necessarily do a ton to retain this person. Right. And I think, and I think if you look at that and you know, those, that those balances and trade-offs and you say, you know what? That's great because this is just a job to me. And I just kind of want to get my stuff done and go home. I'd like to be good at what I do, but I'm not really interested in like, you being very ambitious. Like I think that's fantastic. I struggled.

earlier in my career with the opposite of kind of like wanting to do like a good enough job or a pretty good job and then being surprised like, well, why aren't I getting all this praise? Why aren't I moving up? Why aren't I doing this or that? And, ⁓ that dissonance can be really challenging.

Nathan Toups (50:33)

Yeah. I also, I appreciate it in this book and I'd be curious if it was in the 2017 version versus the updated version. She talks about the fact that in any point in our lives, we might want to optimize towards growth and we might want to optimize towards stability, right? If you know that you're about to have another kid or if you know that in the next three years, you want to have a couple of kids, right? You're probably going to focus on stability, right? You may

turn down an exciting early stage start funding engineering position in favor of a senior level or staff level software engineering position at a more stable company, because you know they're going to support you, that the ship won't stop running if you leave for ⁓ maternity or paternity leave. ⁓ And that at this point in your career, maybe you want to go deep on something, right? You're at Google, you're doing distributed time series

Carter Morgan (51:21)

Thank

Yeah.

Nathan Toups (51:32)

database stuff in a really juicy way. And you know that that opportunity is not available to you elsewhere, right? That doesn't mean that you lack ambition, right? Honestly, that means that you're doing something deeply interesting. You know that what role you can play. You're very clear. And Google's getting a lot of value out of you, right? They're like, ⁓ well, we need these domain experts who are willing to spend multiple years deep diving into this stuff. If you just have high churn of

Carter Morgan (51:42)

Hmm.

Nathan Toups (52:02)

career motivated folks, you're going to get, know, what we've talked about, resume driven development, right? Where you have a bunch of like projects that were really cool, you know, burned bright and then got abandoned. And that's in its own form of instability. And so you need, she makes this argument, you need both rock stars and superstars, right? Again, there's a little cringe as far as when I say these terms, but you need this bedrock talent and you need career focused trajectory.

Carter Morgan (52:08)

Right, right.

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (52:31)

And partially because, you know, if you have somebody who comes out of your team, who's moving their way up through the company and you've inserted values like radical candor, or maybe a certain way of solving distributed database problems or something, that person will represent that viewpoint as they move up, right? These are the kind of like important strategic goals, which is that, you know, your team or the division of your company benefits both from depth and breadth of talent, whether they stay on your team or not.

And so I, I hadn't thought about this from a radical candor standpoint, which is that, um, you know, there's a seasonality to this that you shouldn't also say, Oh, well, I'm a rock star personality versus Oh, I'm a superstar personality. If I'm not moving up every, you year, then I got to get out of here. get ANSI. I'm going to go switch companies. And, um, I think it's interesting, much like radical candor quadrants.

is you go, am I in a season of my life where I want stability or am I in a season where, you know what, I really, I know I could be an amazing VP of engineering, right? Maybe you get a kind of fire under you've been a staff for a while. You're like, you know, I, I know that if I was VP of engineering, either in this company or another company, I could do amazing stuff, right? Sometimes that might be a fire that gets under you after eight years of being a staff engineer, right? And I think she says that that's important to like,

Carter Morgan (53:52)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (53:56)

listened and cultivated. And she has examples of folks who rising stars straight out of college, and then folks who, know, kind of steady state, stayed some places. I also I loved again, great stories. Google is a very superstar optimized organization. Apple is a rock star optimized organization. And I, I'd never thought about the juxtaposition. And I think it was absolutely correct, right? She had to be on the inside of both of these.

Carter Morgan (54:15)

right.

Nathan Toups (54:25)

But Apple celebrated someone being in the same division, same job for 10 years, 15 years. You could even get a 30 year award, right? At Apple ⁓ of being doing just an amazing, you know, maybe you're the, you know, Bluetooth hardware signals expert. And you've been doing that at Apple, doing an amazing job of making Apple's Bluetooth stack awesome across all their hardware for years. Apple

Carter Morgan (54:34)

Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Toups (54:54)

celebrated that. They didn't go, well, why hasn't this person moved up and why aren't they doing part of the keynote team and all these other things? ⁓ Where at Google, they looked at you and said, hey, if you're not moving up quickly, then what's happening?

Carter Morgan (55:03)

Yeah.

Right, right. Well, and I like, ⁓ I like what you said and it kind of alludes to what she said earlier in the book, which is that like just in the same way that you were not always radically candid or always ruinously empathetic, like we move in between these quadrants, right? You were not always a rock star, always a superstar. I guess I would say that it's not like, I'm a rock star today, but I'm a superstar yesterday or whatever. Right. But it's more like you move in phases in your career. Right. And like, right now at my current place, like.

Nathan Toups (55:30)

Right.

Carter Morgan (55:39)

I have to toot my own horn, like I'm more a superstar than a rock star. Like I've made a lot of really, you know, it's funny because I was chatting with you, Nathan, about like the way we were doing some of our things. You're like, well, what's your back and running on? I'm like elastic beanstalk. You're like, what is this? 2013? I'm like, you know what? Screw you. And then I spent like, I went on like a two week tear. like, we're getting, we're moving the Docker. We're moving to like, we were using ECS instead of like a straight Kubernetes.

Nathan Toups (56:07)

This was

radical candor, right?

Carter Morgan (56:08)

Yeah,

exactly. Right. Um, we, weren't doing CICD. so I built like a whole CICD process, right. And, and like, just kind of solved like a lot of these kind of like engineering, like challenges and got buy-in from the CTO, walked through the team, created comprehensive documentation, did lunch and learn, right. All these sorts of things. This was not just. Yeah. Um, why do you, why do you think we read the DevOps handbook, right? Immediately after joining my company, I was like,

Nathan Toups (56:28)

My heart was glowing. Every time you give me an update, I'm like, this is so cool. This is so cool.

Carter Morgan (56:38)

feel like I should learn this stuff. anyhow, ⁓ and so I've been doing a lot of that, that sort of stuff right now. ⁓ and I've been working a lot more than I have in the past. I've been working like in the evenings. ⁓ a part of that is cause I'm not doing my masters anymore. And like, I'm not really like a golf or like, I should find a TV show to watch kind of guy. Like I find the work interesting. And I, I, I'm clear with my bosses. Like I refuse to be the kind of guy like, boss wants more tickets done. So I'm to get more tickets. Like for example,

We're trying to set up affiliate marketing. It's been a big nightmare. The product reward full. I freaking hate working with it. It's a bad developer experience. Um, anti-shadow to reward full and, uh, Anyhow, but I told them, I'm like, I will never work on this past 5pm. Honestly, between the hours of nine to five, I'll probably put it off a bit because I freaking hate doing this, but then we're getting into things like trying to use Terraform more. And so like I got permission to like, we're experimenting with the different kind of like managed Terraform platforms and like

I am doing that at night because I find that really interesting and it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. Anyhow, all of that to say that like right now I'm leaning a little more into like that superstar persona. ⁓ but I've absolutely been in places before where like I've been more of a rock star or even not even a rock star, right? ⁓ because I've been doing my master's degree or because I've been moving across the country or because I'm a very young dad, I'm still a young.

dad, but you know, maybe my kids are even younger than they are now. And like, that's fine. It's fine to move in between those. And I think organizations should appreciate your, your steady eddies. I think it's tough when you're a steady eddy rock star kind of guy and you are expecting all the praise of a superstar. And I know I've said that, but I just, I struggle with that earlier in my career. And I remember I used to teach the university of central Florida coding bootcamp. This was back when like a bootcamp actually.

made sense for some people. And I would have students would hang out after the bootcamp to like chat with me and we'd chat for an hour or so, right? And I'd tell other students, I'd say, I'm like, this is not a requirement of the job, right? And it's not a requirement to stay after and chat with me to be successful. However, when it comes to like time, like if I need to recommend someone for a job, like just odds are it's the kind of person who stayed and chatted with me and formed a personal relationship.

who I'm going to recommend for a job. ⁓ And I just, and I think sometimes like you can be a little like, well, I'm not a workaholic, like so-and-so, but that doesn't mean I'm not good at my job. I could do all those things if I was working as much as so-and-so, but it's little like, yeah, but so-and-so is actually putting in the effort. So-and-so is actually getting the results. So-and-so is gonna get the rewards. And if you don't want those rewards, that's fine, but you have to acknowledge that trade-off and make peace with it rather than be like perpetually bitter.

Nathan Toups (59:32)

Yeah, no, think it is, it depends on the type of game that you're trying to play too, right? Like we're going to take a step back to finite and infinite games. There are those finite games that you need to play along the way, right? If you want to work in a culture of people that inspire you, you actually also have to be inspiring, right? Like an inspiring person is not going to be like seeking out kind of dull, uninteresting people. And the only way that you can...

Carter Morgan (59:39)

Right?

My favorite book.

Right.

Nathan Toups (1:00:01)

be inspired by one another to be like, show that you're not a box thinker or stick around and, you know, shoot pool or do whatever, right? And just kind of get to know a person and be like, Hey, you know, this person's got some cool ideas. Like, they really care about what's going on here. think another book that we should absolutely put on the backlog is another Cal Newport book called So Good They Can't Ignore You. Yeah, because like, I think it's that idea that yes, sometimes it can be staying extra hours at work.

Carter Morgan (1:00:24)

Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.

Nathan Toups (1:00:31)

Sometimes it can just be that your work's so impeccable, people take notice, right? ⁓ And I think both of those are good strategies, depending on whether you're sort of extrovert or introvert. ⁓ Or maybe how you want to push things around. ⁓ But I think you're right. The rock star versus superstar thing, it really comes down to what are your end goals and not in a manipulative way. It's like, if you're looking at yourself and saying the trajectory is the fun thing for me right now, you're probably in superstar mode, right?

I like solving these higher order problems. It brings me joy when we've categorically fixed certain things. And I'm able to do that in the position I'm in right now, but I would love to do this sort of like meta programming, whatever, ⁓ give me those challenges more because I think I can find these like force multipliers. That's cool. And that's like, if you're in that mode, your job is going to change. You know, the types of problems that you're taking on are changing. You're going to stop doing the things that you're doing right now. I think that's...

valid. You might say, look, I've seen the meta pattern. I want to solve that meta pattern all the time versus ⁓ if you're in rockstar mode, it's wow, the work I'm doing right now is deeply interesting. I like my team. I like the stuff I'm doing. I like this thing. And if I continue doing this, I'm going to be happy, right? Like I'm going to be, and by happy, don't mean like big smile on my face. I mean, content. I mean that you are, you are

you know, vibing with something that you wake up in the morning and go, huh, I'm working on a juicy problem. It's challenging. I can make my commitments. ⁓ and I think, I think that's, I don't know. To me, that's the sort of like indication that these radical candor environments work is that hopefully in your one-to-ones with your manager, you're able to talk about this kind of stuff, you know, like, Hey, I just want to let you know, I'm enjoying what I'm doing, but like, I kind of stepped up and did this.

kind of more abstract thing. When the opportunity arises, I like solving these types of problems, right? Like just being very open. It kind of also signals to them like, hey, I'm thinking about these bigger things, right? That's superstar behavior, right? That is the, I see this is the pattern you gave me. Here's this pattern that solves this categorically. Give me more of this. And a good manager is gonna go, okay, I don't have anything right now.

But when I'm in meetings and we're talking about stuff and we're looking at the trajectory, I'm going to keep that in mind. I'm going to keep in mind that Carter likes doing this kind of stuff. ⁓ And it gives them more tools to... Because obviously, making your manager look good, very good career advice. If you look good, the manager looks good. If you help the manager look good, it's just a nice reciprocal ⁓ benefit right there.

Carter Morgan (1:02:58)

Right, right.

Ha ha ha.

Well, why don't we get into maybe some of our hot takes. We've discussed a lot of them throughout the, uh, the episode. Um, you know, I think I'm looking at some of the ones we have here. We talk about the rocks are super star dynamic. talk about how, yeah, it's, hard. It's hard to fire people. a lot of hard being fired. Talk about ruinous empathy and how maybe that's a little more prominent and anything else Nathan, you, you think we haven't covered.

Nathan Toups (1:03:38)

No, think we can get into, there's a little bit of stuff on like driving results and the collaboration pieces. I think we can get into that in part two as well, because I think they're going to give us a lot more implementation advice, which I'm excited about. I'm glad we got the stories and like the sort of like grand picture. I will say, I love books structured like this. Like I like knowing the why. I know we, I could see it being like back and forth, back and forth, but she's made a very good case as to why you should care.

Carter Morgan (1:03:47)

Right.

really? Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Toups (1:04:05)

And so my interest has peaked. And so now I think when we get into the practical implementation, I'm going to be like, OK, well, that seems counterintuitive, but I understand the deeper reason and whatever. Yeah. Good, please, steal away.

Carter Morgan (1:04:17)

Yeah, I'm going to steal one of your hot takes. ⁓

Yeah, you wrote here, you said radical candor requires psychological safety, job security, and cultural capital that most workers simply don't have, which I agree. And I think that you need, so I do think there is, you can be relatively radically candid. Like if you're a manager managing an employee, then with that kind of power dynamic flowing down,

You can almost always be radically candid and that's probably always going to be the best decision for that particular relationship to be generally radically candid. Just like, for example, we did our work offsite, ⁓ last week. I do not love the idea of a work offsite for a place that's nine to five in person Monday through Friday. Right. I think we see plenty of each other. ⁓ I was, you know, I was, and we were carpooling there, right? We weren't even going anywhere fun. was bear Lake,

And my, we're, sorry, I was carpooling with my CTO, but like they've created the kind of culture where that kind of radical candidness from like the bottom up works. Like I told my CTO, like he started talking about like, are you excited for the offsite? And I said to like, be totally honest, not really. Right? Like I don't see a big point of this, but I did tell him, was like, but you guys have convinced me in the past about certain things. I'm willing to be convinced this time. Right. And then while we were at the offsite, we had this funny moment where we were doing these breakout groups. We were assigned to kind of read these three essays.

So we break out into three breakout groups for each of the essays. We read it and then it comes time to discuss it. Our group finished reading it first. And so before anyone else had, so the room is still really, really quiet. And so someone asked like, okay, so what do you think of the essay? And I said, like, be honest, I think a lot of this is bull crap. like, you know, like the group laughed and like the whole room heard it. Like everyone kind of cracked up. But.

But then like the head of HR who had put on the training, like my CEO was busting up the head of HR came up to me after he's like, that's exactly what I want to hear. He's like, I want to hear people be honest about this sort of stuff. And so I'm really fortunate to work at a company that does value that kind of honesty. Lots of places don't. And I worked at a particularly big company, which will not be named, but you know what I'm talking about it where I used to kind of hear online about it, like, it's very team dependent. Like, you know, if you can find the right team, then it really works. And that's true to an extent.

Nathan Toups (1:06:24)

Right.

Carter Morgan (1:06:36)

This company also my big takeaway leaving it, it is rotten from the top down and that there are some teams that get away with like having a good culture because they kind of just explicitly ignore the tools and the company has given them and the advice that they get from leadership. But just in general, this company is absolutely rotten and you cannot be radically candid in this company. It's just, it is not something leadership is determined as important. And so I think.

Radical candor kind of has to flow from the top down and by flowing from the top down, sometimes you enable an environment where it can flow from the top, from the bottom up. But I respect any individual contributor who decides I'm not going to be radically candid. Are you kidding me? Like I've got a mortgage. I've got bills. I got kids to feed. You know, I get it.

Nathan Toups (1:07:27)

Yeah,

Nathan Toups (1:07:27)

So my thought is you can't read this book in a weekend, decide that you're going to adopt radical candor and then change the culture of the company. This will take work. is one of those things where you can't just cargo cult this. can't just say, we declare that we're doing this. It may put you on a trajectory where you say, I want to find a company that does this. It might be that you say, you know what, I'm going to do my best here. I'm going to be more candid. I'm going to try to effect change. But if you run up against a wall,

Carter Morgan (1:07:40)

right.

Nathan Toups (1:07:57)

you might decide, next time I'm looking for a job, I want to find out what their approach to radical candor is.

Carter Morgan (1:08:05)

Absolutely. ⁓ and you know, I'll just put out a, advice to anyone listening, ⁓ the best way you can position yourself to be picky about which companies you joined to select a company that values your work style is to be very good at your job. ⁓ and you know, I think you're, making a good choice here by listening to book overflow. think that means you're curious about technology and, know, and want to get better at what you do. ⁓ but if you get good at what you do.

You open up a lot of doors and give yourself some options and you don't have to take a job, a crappy job just to have a job. get that not everyone can do that. And sometimes the economy is so bad that you do just have to take a crappy job, but you'll never. It's never bad to be good at your job. Well, let's talk a bit about, uh, what we're gonna do differently in our career. Having read this book, what are your thoughts?

Nathan Toups (1:08:54)

So

I looked ahead a little bit, so I'm stealing a little bit of something as one of the tactics, but it's called... No, yeah, no, it's not in this part of the book. yeah, there's something called feedback debt. So basically, if you feel like ⁓ you didn't feel like comfortable giving radical candor in the moment, write it down. And if you write it down twice that you avoided it, you must give it back immediately, right?

Carter Morgan (1:08:58)

Okay, good, because you said this and I was like, wait a minute, I don't remember this part.

Nathan Toups (1:09:20)

or you're letting that person fail, right? So this is sort of like a tactic. It's a little look ahead, ⁓ because I was like, I need something that I'm gonna do different. So that was my approach.

Carter Morgan (1:09:30)

Yeah, I think, I, just want to be careful to avoid ruinous empathy. think I already do a pretty good job with that. I have personally been burned by, ⁓ you know, someone else practicing ruinous empathy, but I just really agree with what you said, Nathan, that this is by far the biggest destroyer of careers, at least in the tech industry. ⁓ and so I think when you know something is happening, very common, you know, commonly like that, like

Sometimes you are just build different and say, that won't happen to me because I'm, you know, I'm just built different and I don't, I don't do that. But I also think it's important to look at the common pitfalls you see and say, you know what? This is happening a lot. It's happening to smart, capable people. No reason to think it couldn't happen to me. So I'm going to kind of keep an eye out for it. And then who'd you recommend this book to Nathan?

Nathan Toups (1:10:15)

Okay.

Yeah. So what I ended up settling on is new managers who are terrified of being seen as mean. I think that's the ruin of sympathy side of this. That's somebody that's something I've struggled with various points of my career. Tech workers, startup employees, anyone in a flat organization where there's not a formal hierarchy, you're at a critical point that if you can get a norm of a radical candor, I think that you could change the trajectory and honestly the success of the organization.

Carter Morgan (1:10:47)

Yeah. You know what? I'm going to give this another general recommendation to kind of just anyone I think should read this book. And I don't mean, sometimes they give that recommendation because it's like, this book is so good that anyone should read. I felt that way about made to stick. like, I just think this is a fantastic book that I don't get that from. The reason I would recommend this to anyone, I guess I would should qualify anyone in the tech industry, which I would assume you are if you're listening to this podcast is because it's so prevalent in the industry. So many people have read it.

that it's helpful to understand what might be going on through the heads of your manager or the heads of people who created your HR trainings. ⁓ So I think again, I'll just recommend this to pretty much anyone listening to this podcast. I think this one would be worth your time. And I think that wraps up this week. We'll finish part two next week, excited to read the rest of this book. And yeah, we will see you around. can always find us at contact at bookrefoiler.io on Twitter at bookrefoilpod.

I am on Twitter at Carter Morgan and Nathan has his work with Functioning Imperative at functionimperative.com. Thanks for everything folks. Thanks for listening and we will see you next week.