Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? | JS Conf 2019

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Thank you all very much. My name is Chidema. I am Nigerian. I am also a front-end developer at Nulab. Love to drink tea. That's a fun fact about me. Another fun fact about me is this is my first time speaking at a conference So please be kind to me, okay? Okay, so I'm going to just go straight into my talk. I wanted to... When I was preparing my slides, I thought about how do I...

talk to people about how we can all get along, about the diversity, about everything that happens in our community. So I decided, okay, let me look at what has happened in the past, and I... Who remembers the Dr. Katie Bowman saga, the woman who discovered she was part of the team of the people who discovered the black hole? Who remembers? Okay.

Who remembers how much she was bullied on Twitter, on Hacker News? Yeah. Who felt very angry and you wanted to find those guys on Reddit? Good. So it means we are all together. Who has ever posted a question on Stack Overflow? Good. Who has... I like the communication we're having. Who remembers, who has ever, like, posted a question and then gotten, like, very negative feedback? Oh, yeah. We're all in the same shoes.

My personal story is I posted my first time ever, I posted a question on Stack Overflow, and I think it was about jQuery, something about jQuery, and somebody said, can't you read? And he said, go read the docs. If you can read, go read the docs. And I was wondering, after refreshing for over three minutes to get an answer, and somebody said, go read the docs. I mean, I'm coming from the docs, right? If I'm coming from the docs...

And I came to Stack Overflow where everyone is meant to ask questions. And I'm getting that kind of feedback. How do you want me to feel as a beginner, right? And that was very devastating for me. I tried to remember all the stories when I was coming up with this talk. Today, we're going to have a conversation about why this talk is important. We're also going to look at practical examples.

We are going to look at a proven solution. We are going to explore ways to apply this solution to our community. And we're also going to look at how working on this problem can actually benefit us as individuals and help our community. Why do we need to have this conversation? We need to have this conversation because we are unique in so many ways.

We all come from different backgrounds. We have different parents, even if we're sisters and brothers. I mean, we have different ideologies, right? We need to have this conversation because... despite our differences. Instead of embracing our differences, we are actually allowing it to cause discomfort, disconnect, and friction within our community and amongst ourselves.

Okay, practical examples. I'm going to talk about the condescending tone. If you've ever asked a question on Reddit and then somebody downvoted your question, right, or somebody said... this is not right for this thread. Is it called a thread or a room? Right? Somebody says this is not right on Stack Overflow. Have you ever, like, been in a code review with your manager or your team lead and somebody says... Or your team lead says...

What you did makes no sense, right? Maybe puts you down in a very bad way. How did you feel? Did you feel anger? Did you feel sad? If you felt anger, just do like this. Who felt sad about it? Okay, so... The reason I'm talking about the condescending tune is I think we have a problem as engineers. In our community, we have a problem with communicating. I'm not sure everyone wakes up in the morning and says, I want to be condescending.

i don't think people wake up and say every junior developer in my office has to hear it from me today i think it's because we do not know how to communicate and it's especially because when we learn something new i'm guilty i'm guilty of this too when we learn something new we think Oh, yeah, anyone that wants to talk to me today has to know that I've learned this, right? Let's say you learned about React hoops.

For example, so you tell yourself, anyone that asks me this question, I don't even think we look in the mirror and say this is what we're going to say or this is what we're going to do, but a junior developer says something to us and we're like, no, that's not how it's meant to be done. And we do not actually tell them why, we just put them down.

And that is not nice. This is a problem in our community and we need to work on this. Yeah. Go through that. Also, one that gets to me the most is the backend versus frontend. If you've ever heard about people say front-end developers do not do a lot of work, front-end developers are just there. I mean, you can relate to what I'm trying to say here. I've been in situations where people tell me...

I'm a front-end developer, so I'm not doing as much work as the back-end developer, so I shouldn't probably get paid as much. or I'm just there for decoration or something. And maybe they did not mean it that way. Maybe I'm trying to be nice to them and they did not really mean it that way. But this is a problem. We're having so much division in our community because we feel that there are some people who are doing all the work and some people are doing...

Absolutely nothing. Developers versus non-developers. I actually went around talking to people about this. I spoke to designers. I spoke to people in the group. team, I spoke to sales, I spoke to marketing, I spoke to logistics, and people actually feel that we don't treat them nice. Shame on all of us. We don't treat them nice. We do not think that they play an important role in the company, and that is really bad. We need to work on this. Everyone in the company is...

working hard to make the company profitable. We shouldn't make them feel that we are smarter than them. We shouldn't make them feel that we are the most hardworking or we are doing the most important job. I mean, if we finish working on the product and there is nobody to sell the product. There are no salespeople or marketing people. Do you think the world will see what we've done? No.

Okay, as a tech community, we must treat documentation. I saw this tweet and I had to put it. As a tech community, we must treat documentation, marketing, logistics, infrastructure, etc. work as much respect as engineering. We do not. And we have to actually work on this. Yeah. I'll just give you a minute to read. Really quick. Okay.

This one, we can all relate to it, and I was guilty of this a few months ago. I used to be a React developer, and I got hired to be a Vue.js developer, but guess what? I was always... I always had the bias against Vue.js developers. I always said Vue was trash, right? I mean, why would you use Vue when you can use React? Why would you use Vue when you can use Angular?

i'm here to tell us today that this framework was shouldn't shouldn't be so we shouldn't have these words i mean they're all tools right We are supposed to use these tools to actually work on something, like create product. The fact that we've had one bad experience does not mean that we should spread our biases. And if you ask me why I had the bias in this view, I don't know.

Maybe somebody told me Vue was trash, and I said, okay, everyone, Vue is trash. And I did not even put in the word. And that is if we actually search ourselves, why do we hate Angular? Why do we hate Vue? Why do we hate jQuery? Sometimes we do not have a concrete answer. It's just because somebody told us, or we've seen maybe our mentors have talked about this on Twitter, and then we said, okay. I mean, if he's smarter than me and he says, view is trash, then maybe view is trash, right?

I think this is a problem, and we should. I mean, it's discouraging beginners from actually spreading their wings. We're discouraging beginners from being open-minded because we are just being biased. How can we make this better?

Empathy. I'm sure we've heard about empathy so many times. So this is not new, and I will not waste our time. But empathy in the simplest forms is... Trying to put yourself in other people's shoes is trying to understand why people are acting the way they're acting. It's trying to... When somebody flares up, it's trying to understand why is this person doing this, right? That's what empathy really is.

Filling with a group of people, so not just your colleagues, also people in different communities, people from different demographics. So, I'm sure if I ask everyone here today, we're going to say, yeah, we show empathy, right? And that's why I put the more in the brackets, because we all show empathy here. So, how can we show more empathy towards one another? It starts with a question.

How would I feel if I was on the receiving end? So let's say you're going through Stack Overflow and you see a question and you want to answer the question. Before you press send, why don't you ask yourself, If I was a beginner or if I asked this question, how would I feel if I got this answer I'm about to send? That's a question we should ask ourselves before we do anything. Put yourself in the shoes of the person who you are about to bully.

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who you're about to reply. I mean, it may seem like it's just a random answer, but would you like it if you got that kind of answer from people? I'm sure it's no. Why show empathy? I'm sure we already know we've seen talks about why you should show empathy, but I would just list a few of them. You should show empathy because you are going to be treated better.

you're going to treat other people with care. You should also show empathy because you understand the needs of your colleagues and you also understand the needs of your end users. You should show empathy because when you show empathy, you actually understand what people say when they're not even speaking.

You understand my body language. You understand that I'm uncomfortable. You understand that this is not something I want to hear. You will also learn how to deal with conflicts better. Also, I understand that we did not start this problem. I mean, we've had it. I mean, I feel that when we started, when we came into tech, we were answered in very rude ways. But I mean, we have the solution. We can actually take a stand and say we do not, we shouldn't speak to other people this way.

So how do we actually come together to make this better? Imagine a community where there are more mentors and very few bullies. Maybe we should just tune into our inner minds. And try to imagine a community where there are more mentors, less bullies. Imagine a community where you can actually ask questions on Stack Overflow or Reddit or anywhere and not get...

Maybe rude answers. Imagine a community where everyone from every demographic is welcome. Imagine a community where there are no gatekeepers. People want to see you succeed. Nobody is trying to bring you down. Imagine... how much we can achieve if we are focused on bringing each other up and not trying to bring each other down. So, in closing, I will encourage you to see something, say something. I will encourage you to pause.

I will encourage you to listen. I will encourage you to change your point of view. I will also encourage you to apologise when due. I will also encourage you to speak up for others, because it's not... enough that we understand how to empathise, but when you see somebody actually bringing other people down, say something about it. I will encourage you to share what you know. And trust me, our community will be better for it. Thank you.