As the first talk featuring RedMonk analysts reimagined (and not by AI) as Bluey characters, Rachel’s Monktoberfest talk was already breaking new ground. But in a world that feels increasingly bleak from layoffs to burnout to 9/9/6 workweeks, Rachel blends humor, heart and lessons from Bluey to help us navigate the precarious landscape ahead of us – both in and out of the office.
Transcript
All right, Monktoberfest, I am so excited to be here and I am also really relying on your excitement as well. Because in the grand tradition of Amanda and Julia, this first part is participatory. It’s really easy. All you have to do is say what you see on the slide really enthusiastically when I point to you, and I also wanted to just let you know that this next part — like, the presentation absolutely peaks right here. I commissioned these. I’m very excited about them. I hope you love them. So here we go.
Ready?
>> James!
Steve!
Kate!
Rachel!
All right everybody. Well done!
[cheering and applause]
So as you have figured out, I am Rachel Stephens and I’m so excited to have introduced you to the RedMonk analyst family, so to speak. I have to say that when James and Steve onboarded me almost a decade ago and told me that my first principle was family first, I’m guessing they did not have that in mind. I’m the research director at RedMonk, my job is to read a lot, write a lot, crunch some data, talk to people, and make ridiculous slides and today’s ridiculous slide deck is about Bluey, and I think if you talk to any parents of young kids in the room you will probably hear that there is a lot that we can learn not just our children learning from Bluey, but we as parents also can take a lot away from Bluey, but what I am here today is that we can learn just as parents and children, but also as employees, employers, colleagues, community members. There’s a lot that we can take away from this show and it has lessons that are for all of us. And so today we’re going to talk about working in dance mode or understanding our humanity via cartoon dogs.
And if you are saying Rachel, I am not interested in taking advice from a cartoon dog, I would like you to know that you are in good company, because the show writers actually have a meta joke about the wisdom of taking advice from cartoon dogs. But I would like you to know that these are no ordinary dogs. Bluey is an oasis among children’s programming, it is smart, it is funny, and it is routinely thoughtful enough to make me cry and it’s not just me, because Amanda Casari has created a Bluey channel in Monktoberfest Slack and you should all come join. It’s been here for years, we can all celebrate the delight of this show together, come on in.
It really does. It does rule!
Maybe your question and concern, though, is not necessarily the value prop of the show itself or taking advice from cartoon dogs, it’s maybe that working in dance mode concept that you’re entirely not convinced on in 2025 and that’s a fair objection.
Things are pretty profoundly bleak and broken right now, and many of us are not working in dance mode right now at all. We are working in survival mode. And it is totally, totally valid to say I not have no the health points available for anything else than putting one foot in front of the other, but if you do have the capacity, this talk is about what you can do to make our work lives better for ourselves and our colleagues and anything we can do is really helpful, because things are bleak right now. How bleak? You’ll see in that blue line on this slide that there’s a lot of factors that go into it, but you have like the pandemic hiring boom and bust is reflected in here. You’re going to see changes in the macroeconomic factors around zero interest rate phenomenon and you’re going to see AI and all of those things together mean that it’s a rough market right now. And this is a frequently cited paper about canaries in the coal mine and the goal of this graph is to convince you that it is a rough market right now for early-career devs and as the title implies it’s due to AI. I think that that correlation is perhaps overly specific. As we talked about, there’s a lot of things, there’s in particular that macroeconomic trend and points, but I do think that it’s like whether you decide you’re going to assign correlation or causation to this, I think we can all agree, even if we don’t agree on cause that the market is really rough right now particularly for juniors and people trying to enter the industry.
And there are some bright spots. We heard last week that CloudFlare is going to try to start hiring more interns. We’re going to see the people that are incorporating AI into their jobs are going to be bringing new and interesting opportunities and perspectives. But I think that what we’re seeing is that the labor market is in the midst of great disruption and chips are still falling out and we don’t know how it’s going to play out yet and even the people who are employed are feeling pressure to sacrifice like the life portion of their work-life balance. So this is credit card data with from ramp. it’s a fintech company and they have shown that there is increasing evidence of people doing 9/9/6 work weeks which means you start working at 9 a.m., you work until 9 a.m. and you work 6 days a week. And maybe, just maybe, that’s not so bad, like junior investors on Wall Street routinely work like 80 to 100 and I think it’s fair to ask, is that what we’re going for? Is that the sign of a healthy society? Is that what we aspire to? And maybe let coke and money fuel everything everywhere, I don’t know. But to that t Bluey would respond, “This isn’t the ’80s, Pat!”
Although in Bluey he’s talking about birthday parties.
But it exacts a physical and mental toll. It’s already hard to devote that much of your life to work, it’s hard and it disproportionately. So in Bluey they say Pomeranians are a small but hearty breed. It’s ageist and it’s ableist. There’s a lot of people who aren’t able to do that for health reasons, for family reasons, for all kinds of reasons and so 9/9/6 is an issue not because it burns people out, it’s an issue because it narrows who’s even able to participate in the workspace to begin with and even if you are a fortunate Pomeranian, you’re hearty, I want to share a lesson that I learned early in career. And it sucked learning it at the time, but it is actually one of the most important lessons that has served me very well and it is, the company doesn’t love you back. It’s incapable of loving you back, and so for example, if you devoted so many waking hours that you gave yourself corneal distortions from being in front of a screen too long and then the economy turns and they do mass layoffs, there’s no box that people check that say she created share holder value by literally ruining her vision for us. That’s not how it works. You have to protect yourself, the company does not love you back and you can love your job, you can love the people at your job. You can be fortunate to work at a place that are more ethical others, wore for a team that is tighter knit than others, all of those can be true and none of that changes the fact that the company cannot love you back. And it’s really worth embodying that in your soul as you’re thinking about what sacrifices and choices you’re willing to make in your career.
[applause]
So to recap, things are going great! The world is on fire, the job market is disheartening at best, and well, companies have Constitutionally protected speech, they do not in fact know how to love.
So it’s a bleak start to the talk called dance mode. I promise that’s going to get better.
Because in Bluey what we learn is that your legs don’t get as tired when is you’re having fun, and I think that there’s a lot that we can do as an organization, of just humans, not relying on our companies, but on ourselves, to bring moments of joy, lightness, and just levity into our work. We need to find places where we can spark energy and connection with each other and we need to remind ourselves that we are human, not productivity machines and so this starts with the proletariate serenity prayer. We have to think about what in our culture is actually available to change. So there’s going to be some things that you cannot change. Like, you can’t change your founder’s politics, or who they decide to take selfies with. That one is out of your control. There are some things that you might be able to change if you think back to Joe Hildebrand’s wonderful talk yesterday, are you able to actually exact some degree of feedback into a process. Maybe you’re privileged enough to be in one of the positions where you can give input and not just be informed. That’s a process that hopefully you at least in some scenarios have some chance to do. But even if you’re not there, you can also influence things as a group sometimes. It does not require being unionized to have impact if something is unfair or unjust. And then, there are things that are just directly in your control all of the time, thinking about agency. You have the ability to control the tone with which you communicate to your colleagues. You have the ability to decide when you’re going to apologize.
You have the ability to decide whether you’re going to horde information or disseminate knowledge. You have the ability to think about what your boundaries are and how you’re going to communicate them. You have the ability to decide how you recognize and celebrate your peers, and you have the ability to decides when you’re going to grant someone grace versus when you’re going to require accountability and where that balance point lies. All of those things are within our control and all of those actually make culture come together in an organization.
The caveat here is that you don’t control when all those things are reciprocated back to you or whether they are rewarded in your organization, and a huge cause of burnout is unilaterally caring about something.
So this is where we’re going to get into like agent or if I was on TikTok I think it would be like I have free will. You have free will to decide to decide whether or not the things you value are also valued by your company and you can make choices accordingly, and the other thing that’s just true every day all the time is you have the agency to decide how you’re going to be treating other people and that’s something that is really important in 2025. But beyond just the culture of our organization, let’s think about what are the crucial elements of job satisfaction. These are some of the ones that I think are really common across wide groups of people. Do you have autonomy in how you work? Do you get variety in what you’re doing or is it really monotonous? Are there opportunities for growth and learning? Are you feeling recognized and appreciated? Is feedback given from a position of psychological safety? And do you feel purpose and meaning in what you’re doing? So some of those common things we’re going to dive in more specifically.
Moments of control. I want to talk about autonomy. At RedMonk we talk about engineer autonomy a lot and we use the phrase the new kingmakers. A lot of the times this gets misinterpreted as giving developers unfettered access and ability to do whatever they want and that’s not what it is. It’s about having increased power to make day to day choices that both shapes the future of technology and also increases the developer’s happiness in the process. Which means that as someone who is in a leadership position, you ignore developer happiness at your peril. Because developers are incentivized to make themselves happy but are also continually helping to define our industry.
So you need to create a system of guardrails where obstacles are removed, rough edges are smoothed so that your developers can work efficiently that you’re honing that developer happiness into the actual activities and actions that you want your developers to be taking.
As a leader that can be really hard to do. It is a fluid system it requires — again I’m going to point you back to Joe can’s talk yesterday about the importance of metrics and measurements and how hard that is to get right.
Autonomy without respect is negligence. This is not just about turning things over to people and assuming they are going to do the correct system. You have to have those feedback systems and the ability to understand what this is they’re working for and whether they’re doing things that are actually working in the right way. OK, autonomy, let’s talk about variety. Variety is the spice of life as they say. Avoiding monotony helps our brains not go numb. If it feels like you’re answering the same ticket all the time, you’re having the same standup every day. All of that really drags on you and so we need to have the ability to have variety.
It fuels our creativity, it sparks new ideas, brings new energy, all of those are important, but the other thing that’s really worthwhile for both employer and employee is that it makes teams less brittle. So if you’re an employer and you’re thinking about variety in terms of things like cross-training and making sure that your teams know how to back each other up, how to do different tasks, that’s amazing for your team, because it makes you more resilient.
And if you’re an employee, if you’re thinking about where are things going to be most automated away, that’s the tedious things. So you want to make sure that monotony is not defining what you’re doing day to day, that you’re bringing things that adds value, that you know lots of things and you can apply this broad context to what you’re doing, because it is understanding that is increasingly the important part of having a tech job can.
And then I think I feel very confident speaking for all of RedMonk when I say that we love Leah McGowan, I recommend that you go find her last talk.
Talking about learning in 2025 can feel fraught as we learned this morning, because there’s a lot of just moral objections, there’s a lot of confusion on what does it mean to acquire new skills in an age of AI. I think there’s not an easy answer here. It can be all of these things — it’s one of all of those things are true at the same time questions, but I think — this was a talk that — or a quote from Leah earlier this year at Salesforce TDX and she said tomorrow’s jobs belong to today’s learners, and I really do believe that. Because technology does not slow down for our comfort. It doesn’t mean that you need to become an AI evangelist or that your value is going to disappear when you code with autocomplete or whether you don’t code with autocomplete, but you have to stay curious. You need to learn the tools even if you decide not to use them and it’s that active learning and refusing to stagnate that’s going to protect you in the future, regardless of how the job market shifts.
Next I want you to think about finding your people. Just like corporations can’t love, you shouldn’t be trusting corporations either. But you trust people within the organization. And no tech talk billion culture is ever complete without quoting Ron Wes trom. So I’m not doing all the — some of the key takeaways that we should all be aware of is when you’re looking for people that you can trust in your organization, these are the things you can look for. Is there high cooperation in and across departments? Is there free flow of information? Are messengers shot? If there’s a failure, does it lead to inquiry, not blame? Are new ideas welcome? And does authority support and not protect?
Those are the things that are key elements of how you can trust a person in your organization. There’s lots of other things, but these are signs that you can look for that this is a way to build your people and people who support you.
And then when you find your people at your job to appreciate the hell out of them. You need to celebrate wins, you need to give credit freely, you need to see people as whole selves, you need to protect them when they’re not in the room, and you need to give feedback. And I think a lot of times — I want to dive into that last one a little bit because a lot of people think about feedback is gift which is a really great one-liner to throw it out there. But it’s only a gift if you give it well, or “all too well”
Just because feedback is true doesn’t make it constructive. It has to come from a place of care with adequate context and a genuine desire to help people, because if you’re not doing it from that place, it’s just being casually cruel in the name of being honest.
[applause]
And then last, I want to talk about redefining growth, because I think historically when we think about it, we think about growth is coming from climbing the ladder at work, it’s a complicated one, especially when we start to get into engineering contexts where people want to talk about like IC ladders versus management ladders, all of those things complicate it more, but really what I want to talk about today when we’re talking about agency and control is beyond promotion and title changes, what does it mean to find growth within ourselves in this age?
And I think one of the things that I love in Bluey is the episode of baby race where they are learning about kids basically picking up life skills faster than other kids and one of the moms who’s panicking that her child is not developing quickry enough has another tell her, “you’re doing great” and that’s the version of growth that we need in 2025. It doesn’t mean that we’re racing our peers, it doesn’t mean that we are climbing that ladder, it doesn’t mean we have a title bump every 18 months, but I think internally, it’s growth that is measured in terms of persistence and showing up, and learning, giving the best of yourself to your colleagues whenever you can, and reminding each other that we’re doing great.
This is hard. It’s a hard market right now. It’s trifficult, as Bluey would say. Sometimes you can just put one foot in front of the other, but you have agency, you can create micro-moments of control, you can find your people and you can redefine growth and yes, I’m sorry, I’m trying to teach you something and maybe you do just want ice cream. Everybody does, but when you stitch these pieces together: Autonomy, variety, feedback, learning, that’s what turns work mode into dance mode. Because you don’t get as tired when you’re having fun, and work, in an authoritarian hell scape is better when we learn to dance.
