Lately, I’ve noticed a convergence of forces encouraging an ever-greater overlap of what have traditionally been fairly discrete roles on cross-functional teams; and pushing them into blurrier territory. The sense of urgency and uncertainty from tech workers on the socials is strong. Fallout from layoffs certainly isn’t helping. Computer-assisted generative tools blur things even more, a threat of reframing whole disciplines into output of “ideas” any founder can conjure thanks to certain visionaries who apparently didn’t learn their lesson from Dr. Ian Malcom. Oh, and somebody wants to create an entire tech-bro city-state caste system. I won’t link to that twaddle, but you can find it for yourself with a quick search.

If you remember 2008+, this particular moment in 2024 feels very similar for me. I was equally confused, a bit burned out, and wondering if I’d ever be able to work in a way that doesn’t require me to contort my soul in order to fit into a box.

If you’ve been in the trenches of tech, you can see how a slippery collective cognitive debt is being created, yet again, and has real world financial impacts once the hype cycle completes. Only this time, it’s not the housing and mortgage markets, it’s the information ecosystem, and I’d argue, constitutes a direct attack on collective intelligence itself. Frankly, I don’t want you or I stuck holding the bag. How do you start to prep for a world where you can’t possibly “know” as much as a LLM, but you still long to use your creativity and problem-solving skills while retaining a humane wage and working conditions? I’m glad you asked 😀. I’m going to have a go at answering that in the coming months/year(s?).

Here’s a hint, I think it starts with getting extremely good at fluency.

Hi friends, I'm Coby. I live in Austin, TX and I spend most of my time teaching folks in the public sector how to build software the way I learned it while working at Pivotal Labs. (I just hit my 7 year mark and can hardly believe how much has changed since I sat down for my first pairing session).

Pivotal was a software...cult. A very good one, for the most part. We joked that each office was a Montessori school for software, with all the rituals and strong opinions you'd expect. When I interviewed, I got to pair with a PM, a designer, and engineers, and my world changed. Something stood out to me that first session, I felt energized in the room, like being swept up in a game night, or kids at a playground, there was something different there. Peals of laughter were common, the sound of conversations happening all around me amidst the clacking of mechanical keyboards, a kind of enthused and sincere excitement shared between friends at a coffee shop or a bar. Then it struck me, I was in a foreign country yet felt like I’d come home.

I was being immersed.

You're reading Full Stack Syntax, an exploratory writing project on attaining fluency in our software-saturated world. This is an effort at me giving back, and building my voice in service of a way of being and working I've come to deeply love. I'm so glad you're here.

How you learn to speak your first language matters, a thing that keeps me up at night as we're teaching our kids to converse at home. I'm getting a first-class education in the plasticity of the brain as I watch each kid attempt, fail, self-correct, get frustrated, and reach new combinations of sounds to make themselves heard. Similarly, my wife and I make similar observations in ourselves as we come face to face with our own un-examined internal patterns of communication, seeing them mirrored in our children. "Did we teach them that?" mouthed to one another happens often. The answer is usually “yes", but not actively, rather it was passively acquired by way of what I felt in the Pivotal Lab main floor, by way of immersion. But what does that mean?

"Practice makes permanent" is a popular truism making the rounds in pop-psychology literature. I've found the adage useful, when it comes to ways of working. What we often do, we train our minds and bodies to accommodate, regardless of how good that might be for us. Reciprocally, what we think and believe prepares the mind and body for more, or less, of what we need. A concept here to remember is called autonomy of space. I’ll be returning to this topic later.

Why am I writing about these things? Well, because I believe we bring all of this with us into our working environments. And those environments are structured for a particular way of relating to one-another that either encourage or discourage continuously learning how to speak each other’s language of craft in the fundamental business unit of value delivery, a balanced cross-functional team.

I'm writing about this because I've seen and lived a way of working that truly upends the normative command and control dynamic that disempowers workers. Now, you can totally be immersed in that other culture and perform adequately, go home each day, get paid, and live your life. But you will be immersed in something that reminds you that your individual performance is being compared to that of your peers (read:your competition), that at the end of the day, you can’t trust each other. This is not the environment in which free-association and playful creativity as part of a group necessarily thrives. Watch this talk by John Cleese and come back. It's worth it.

If you haven't read Finite and Infinite Games yet, I highly suggest picking it up. The general gist of the book is that there are some games where the only goal is to keep the game going no matter what, and there are other games where the goal is for it to explicitly end with some observable agreed upon outcome, like a checkmate, or a clock running out. Whereas the larger infinite game here is to continuously improve your ranking as a chess player and see how good the collective community can be at the game itself, played out in smaller, finite games.

We can observe this dynamic all over the place, but for now we will look at it in the context of work, very briefly. At Pivotal, we played both games every day in a fractal dance of chasing outcomes by way of continuous improvement through craft. Tests pass? Won the game. Refactoring? Keep the game going, can always make things that much better. Get the features out before your competitor? First to capitalize. Pivot to a new problem or stream of work? Dance with the entropy that affects all things.

A person's view on theory of change affects how they view the stakes, which describes the game they are playing, and consequently their behaviors. Their worldview compounds with this, impacting who they share resources and information with. All of this, like technology itself, is never neutral. It must be leveraged for perpetuating good. Now, I know certain Silicon Valley types have written vehemently against anything resembling "do no harm" in tech. I don't think they truly believe their own arguments, not really. If they did, they'd end up coming face to face with their own inevitable end, and the legacy of how they lived and treated others written for them. Instead, they use tech as escapism from the horrors of realizing the futile vanity in playing dishonest games. Better to busy themselves with delusions and great-man theories.

What does this have to do with immersion? I was once told the phrase, "you become that which you behold". If you are immersed into a workplace that silos disciplines and business units, discourages cross-cutting collaborative work, and retains executive authority at the highest levels, you're going to believe that these ways of relating to and treating others is "the way the world works”. But, if you work in a place where leaders truly love the people they hire, and delegate their authority down to the people closest to the problems, you build a dramatically different set of beliefs about and with these people who don't necessarily look or sound like you.

Immersion in this second scenario creates an empathic momentum machine like none other. Pivotal attracted people who had seen things and wanted to go fast only bound by a set of shared values and principles that informed a way of ways. There's some perceived waste, sure, but it's a purposeful margin, some slack in the system protected for the sake of trying things, failing in ways that aren't fatal, sharing what is learned with the rest of the whole, and moving ever faster toward good, together. It's this kind of world that I stepped into and got swept up in. It was marked by something I'd never seen in a workplace before, a sincere and earnest joy, just in being together, moving together, belonging...together. "I'm not alone”, I had to remind myself over and over again, un-learning all the old corporate survival instincts I'd developed over the years.

It was in this moment, in this water, that I began to breathe again. I began working on code with engineers, analyzing database schemas, directly observing users, negotiating with stakeholders alongside my product manager, building language, owning metaphors and idioms, translating jargon, and deciding what mattered most, as a team willing to be wrong.

The difference wasn't just the office setup, that was a natural result of an intentional decision on how people were going to interact with one another. The difference was kindness, and a value for ravenous curiosity embodied by people who have become experts at being beginners, consummate generalists in their craft, and very very good at shipping software while teaching others.

At design conferences, I'd talk shop with other designers who would scoff at my answers to "so what's it like where you work?" "Is that for real?" "I don't believe it." "I wish that were possible."

I realized in those conversations that you can't read about a way of relating to others and expect to change. You have to experience it yourself. These ways of living and working are caught, not taught, and they change you forever. The key choice you make when joining an organization, is to align your immersion experience with the implicit and explicit values of the leadership running things. That’s the brine. You’re the cucumber.

My chief assertion is that true fluency requires immersion. Being immersed requires an intentionality, a choice to move into an uncomfortable and foreign space, and a willingness to stay there and be stretched at the boundaries of your capacity. In the future, I'll examine the numerous, fine-grained interactions that generate momentum, as well as explore the more material technical concepts you'll need if you want to work on a team that collectively shares the outcomes of working software, be you a designer, developer, PM, data scientist, or some other new role yet to be invented. I'll tie in what I've been reading, and point you to folks who can explain things better than I.

Until then,

Coby