Impostor Syndrome on Major Hayden

Reaching the fork in the road

major@mhtx.net (Major Hayden) — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 16:18:51 +0000

Walt Disney said it best:

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

The world of technology is all about change. We tear down the old things that get in our way and we build new technology that takes us to new heights. Tearing down these old things can often be difficult and that forces us to make difficult choices.

Rackspace has been a great home for me for over 11 years. I’ve made the incredibly difficult choice to leave Rackspace on March 9th to pursue new challenges.

Humble beginnings

I came to Rackspace as an entry-level Linux administrator and was amazed by the culture generated by Rackers. The dedication to customers, technology, and quality was palpable from the first few minutes I spent with my team. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had landed at the epicenter of a sink-or-swim technology learning experience. My team had some very demanding customers with complex infrastructures and it forced me to take plenty of notes (and hard knocks). My manager and teammates supported me through it all.

From there, I served in several different roles. I was a manager of technicians on a support team and had the opportunity to learn how to mentor. One of my favorite leaders said that “good managers know when to put their arm around to people and when to put a boot in their rear.” I reluctantly learned how to do both and I watched my people grow into senior engineers and great leaders.

Datapoint office closing in 2011

I was pulled to Mosso, Rackspace’s first cloud offering, shortly after that and discovered an entirely new world. Rackers force-fed me “Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby” and I started building scripts and web front-ends for various services. Rackspace acquired Slicehost after that and I jumped at the chance to work as an operations engineer on the new infrastructure. That led to a lot of late nights diagnosing problems with Xen hypervisors and rails applications. I met some amazing people and began to realize that St. Louis has some pretty good barbecue (but Texas still has them beat).

Slicehost humor in 2009

Not long after that, I found myself managing an operations team that cared for Slicehost’s infrastructure and Rackspace’s growing Cloud Servers infrastructure. OpenStack appeared later and I jumped at the chance to do operations there. It was an extremely rough experience in the Diablo release, but it taught me a lot. My start with OpenStack involved fixing lots of broken Keystone tests that didn’t run on Python 2.6.

Working on OpenStack in 2012

If you’ve attended some of my talks on impostor syndrome, you may know what came next. We had a security issue and I sent some direct feedback to our CSO about how it was handled. I expected to be told to “pack a box” after that, but I was actually asked to lead a security architecture team in the corporate security group. It was definitely a surprise. I accepted and joined the team as Chief Security Architect. My coworkers called it “joining the dark side”, but I did my best to build bridges between security teams and the rest of the company.

Talking at Rackspace::Solve in 2015

This role really challenged me. I had never operated at the Director level before and our team had a ton of work to do. I found myself stumbling (and floundering) fairly often and I leaned on other leaders in the business for advice. This led me to take some courses on critical thinking, accounting, finance, and tough conversations. I’ve never had a role as difficult as this one.

Our cloud team came calling and asked me to come back and help with some critical projects in the public cloud. We worked on some awesome skunkworks projects that could really change the business. Although they didn’t get deployed in one piece, we found ways to take chunks of the work and optimize different areas of our work. An opportunity came up to bring public cloud experience to the private cloud team and I jumped on that one. I discovered the awesome OpenStack-Ansible project and a strong set of Rackers who were dedicated to bringing high-touch service to customers who wanted OpenStack in their own datacenter.

Impostor syndrome talk at the Boston OpenStack Summit in 2017

During this time, I had the opportunity to deliver several conference talks about OpenStack, Fedora, security, and Ansible. My favorite topic was impostor syndrome and I set out on a mission to help people understand it. My first big talk was at the Fedora Flock conference in Rochester in 2015. This led to deep conversations with technical people in conference hallways, evening events, and even airport terminals about how impostor syndrome affects them. I took those conversations and refined my message several times over.

Talking about impostor syndrome at Fedora Flock 2015 (Photo credit: Kushal Das)

Gratitude

I couldn’t even begin to name a list of Rackers who have helped me along the way. I wouldn’t be where I am now without the help of hundreds of Rackers. They’ve taught me how to build technology, how to navigate a business, and how to be a better human. They have made me who I am today and I’m eternally grateful. I’ve had an incredible amount of hugs this week at the office and I’ve tried my best not to get a face full of tears in the process.

I’d also like to thank all of the people who have allowed me to mentor them and teach them something along the way. One of the best ways to understand something is to teach it to someone else. I relish any opportunity to help someone avoid a mistake I made, or at least be able to throw something soft under them to catch their fall. These people put up with my thick Texas accent, my erratic whiteboard diagrams, and worse of all, my dad jokes.

Another big “thank you” goes out to all of the members of the open source communities who have mentored me and dealt with my patches.

The first big community I joined was the Fedora Linux community. I’ve been fortunate to serve on the board and participate in different working groups. Everyone has been helpful and accommodating, even when I pushed broken package builds. I plan to keep working in the community as long as they will have me!

The OpenStack community has been like family. Everyone - from developers to foundation leaders - has truly been a treat to work with over several years. My work on Rackspace’s public and private clouds has pushed me into various projects within the OpenStack ecosystem and I’ve found everyone to be responsive. OpenStack events are truly inspiring and it is incredible to see so many people from so many places who dedicate themselves to the software and the people that make cloud infrastructure work.

The next adventure

I plan to talk more on this later, but I will be working from home on some projects that are entirely different from what I’m working on now. That adventure starts on March 19th after a week of “funemployment.” I’m incredibly excited about the new opportunity and I’ll share more details when I can.

Top photo credit: Wikipedia

Impostor syndrome talk: FAQs and follow-ups

major@mhtx.net (Major Hayden) — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 15:34:34 +0000

I’ve had a great time talking to people about my “Be an inspiration, not an impostor” talk that I delivered in August. I spoke to audiences at Fedora Flock 2015, Texas Linux Fest, and at Rackspace. The biggest lesson I learned is that delivering talks is exhausting!

Frequently Asked Questions

Someone asked a good one at Fedora Flock:

How do you deal with situations where you are an impostor for a reason you can’t change? For example, if you’re the only woman in a male group or you’re the youngest person in a mostly older group?

I touched on this a bit in the presentation, but it’s a great question. This is one of those times where you have to persevere and overcome the things you can’t change by improving in all of the areas where you can change.

For example, if you’re the youngest in the group, find ways to relate to the older group. Find out what they value and what they don’t. If they prefer communication in person over electronic methods, change your communication style and medium. However, you shouldn’t have to change your complete identity just for the rest of the group. Just make an adjustment so that you get the right response.

Also, impostor syndrome isn’t restricted to a particular gender or age group. I’ve seen it in both men and women in equal amounts, and I’ve even seen it in people with 40 years of deep experience. It affects us all from time to time, and we need structured frameworks (like OODA) to fight it.

How do I battle impostor syndrome without becoming cocky and overconfident?

The opposite of impostor syndrome, often called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, is just as dangerous. Go back the observe and orient steps of the OODA loop (see the slides toward the end of the presentation) to be sure that you’re getting good feedback from your peers and leaders. Back up your assertions with facts and solid reasoning to avoid cognitive bias. Bounce those ideas and assertions off the people you trust.

When I make an assertion or try to get someone else to change what they’re doing, I’ll often end with “Am I off-base here?” or “Let me know if I’m on the right track” to give others an opportunity to provide criticism. The added benefit is that these phrases could drag someone with impostor syndrome out of the shadows and into the discussion.

That leads into another good question I received:

How can we reduce impostor syndrome in open source communities as a whole?

The key here is to find ways to get people involved, and then get them more involved over time. If someone is interested in participating but they aren’t sure how to start, come up with ways they can get involved in less-formal ways. This could be through bug triaging, fixing simple bugs, writing documentation, or simply joining some IRC meetings. I’ve seen several communities go through a process of tagging bugs with “easy” tags so that beginners can try to fix them.

Another more direct option is to call upon people to do certain things in the community and assign them a mentor to help them do it. If someone isn’t talking during an IRC meeting or piping up on a mailing list, call them out - gently. It could be something as simple as: “Hey, [name], we know you’re knowledgeable in [topic]. Do you think this is a good idea?” Do that a few times and you’ll find their confidence to participate will rise quickly.

Follow-ups

Insides vs. outsides

Someone stopped me outside the talk room at Texas Linux Fest and said a leader at his church summarized impostor syndrome as “comparing your insides to someone else’s outsides”. That led me to do some thinking.

Each and every one of us has strengths and weaknesses. I’d wager that we all have at least once vice (I have plenty), and there are things about ourselves that we don’t like. Everyone has insecurities about something in their life, whether it’s personal or professional. These are things we can’t see from looking at someone on the outside. We’re taking our laundry list of issues and comparing it to something we think is close to perfection.

Don’t do that. It’s on my last slide in the presentation.

You know at least one thing someone else wants to know

After doing the talk at Rackspace, I was pulled into quite a few hallway conversations and I received feedback about my presentation. In addition, many people talked about their desire to get up and do a talk, too. What I heard most often was: “I want to do a talk, but I don’t know what to talk about.”

It reminds me of a post I wrote about writing technical blogs. There is at least one thing you know that someone else wants to know. You might be surprised that the most hit post on my blog is an old one about deleting an iptables rule. Deleting an iptables rule is an extremely basic step in system administration but it’s tough to remember how to do it if you don’t use the iptables syntax regularly.

Rackspace holds Tech Talk Tuesdays during lunch at our headquarters in San Antonio each week. It’s open to Rackers and escorted guests only for now, but our topic list is wide open. Rackers have talked about highly technical topics and they’ve also talked about how to brew beer. I’ve encouraged my coworkers to think about something within their domain of expertise and deliver a talk on that topic.

Talk about your qualifications and experience without bragging

You can be humble and talk about your strengths at the same time. They aren’t mutually exclusive. It can be a challenge to bring these things up during social settings, especially job interviews. My strategy is to weave these aspects about myself into a story. Humans love stories.

As an example, if you’re asked about your experience with Linux, tell a short story about a troubleshooting issue from your past and how you solved it. If you’re asked about your python development experience, talk about a project you created or a hard problem you solved in someone else’s project. Through the story, talk about your thought process when you were solving the problem. Try your best to keep it brief. These stories will keep the other people in the room interested and it won’t come off as bragging.

Slides from my Texas Linux Fest 2015 talk

major@mhtx.net (Major Hayden) — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 19:42:52 +0000

Thanks to all of the people who attended my “Be an inspiration, not an impostor” talk at Texas Linux Fest 2015. Some A/V issues caused my time slot to get squeezed and the audience had to put up with the “ludicrous speed” version of the presentation.

The slides are a little different from the slides at Fedora Flock, but they’re mainly the same:

Fedora Flock 2015: Keynote slides

major@mhtx.net (Major Hayden) — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 15:10:08 +0000

Fedora Flock 2015 is still going here in Rochester, New York, and I kicked off our second day with a keynote talk about overcoming impostor syndrome.

If you’d like to review the slides, they’re on SlideShare:

Quite a few people came up after the talk and throughout the day to share some of their stories and challenges. It was extremely rewarding to have those conversations and share solutions.

I’ll be doing the talk once more at Texas Linux Fest in San Marcos on August 22.