From Advertising to Software Engineering: A human mindset in Technology
Some time ago I did a Pecha Kucha 20x20 presentation called "Human mindset in Technology" at the ThoughtWorks University Program, this presentation has been adapted to the text format. The original can be found here.
Hello! My name is Andrei Rupertti, I’m a developer at ThoughtWorks Brazil and I’m currently doing my bachelor degree in Software Engineering. However I’ve not always followed this career, as I flirted for a long time in the past with the idea of being a developer, but at some point my passion for code diminished. There were too many ones and zeros for me =).
As a result of my sudden lack of interest in programming, I started to look for a new passion apart from technology and found me emerged into the Human Science area, more specifically Advertising, which made sense for me at the time since I always pictured myself as a creative person. The funny part is that I had NO IDEA what an Advertising person was supposed to do, I just thought it was "cool" and I would be able to do "cool stuff".
And not gonna lie, working with Advertising can be stressful, but studying it, was awesome! Actually, was way more appealing than studying software development, really! I got to make arts, come up with some crazy ideas for ads and once I even had to do some homework that required me to find memes on the internet. Pretty great, isn't?
Eventually Software Development pulled me back, but I really miss the mindset from people who study Advertising. My college teachers and classmates were really welcoming for people from different backgrounds, races, genders or really anything different from society standards.
This behaviour, I believe, comes from a core skill needed to work with Ads: Empathy. Because when creating an Ad you must impact your target audience, and to do that, you need to see through their eyes and understand the audience’s perspective. A empathic mindset is a skill that you practice often as an advertising agent, but also, ends up using it in all aspects of your life.
On the other hand though, my current experience studying Software Engineering is full of patterns. From both perspectives, technical, like the coding patterns, or more behavioural coming from the students themselves. The classes are filled with white straight man, wealthy enough to pay for college and students that don’t quite fit in this standard are often treated with indifference or even hostility.
I've been studying at a (very) expensive university and the only reason I'm able to afford it is because I have a scholarship and also a job to pay for the transport. Essentially, it’s a very privileged place to be at and what scares me the most is that people from Advertisement knew about that at the time, but people from Tech, just don’t. It’s easy to spot the differences in mindsets when you have friends in both environments like me.
Don’t get me wrong, I'm not trying to paint Advertising as this beautiful problem-free place, it has a lot of issues as well, battle of egos between artists and crazy deadlines being two of them. However, it helped me realize my own privileges of being a white man and realize that even talk about privilege, it’s a privilege of its own. How so? Imagine a single mom with two jobs and three children to raise. She cannot pause her day to even talk about privilege and social injustice because she’s too busy trying to put food on their plates. Being able to talk is, indeed, a privilege (even if it’s not supposed to).
Even though I consider myself a nerd and I love to hear about tech, I think we should spare some time to both raise awareness about important topics and act upon the future of our society. That’s what I meant by “Human Mindset”, I believe that (and I know this may sound unnecessarily deep) to understand other people’s point of view, we must first understand ourselves, including our biases and limitations.
Fortunately, not everyone will be like you, so the next step would be to hear other people with different opinions and life experiences, despite of agreeing with them or not. The problem is: different opinions may lead to conflicts, and most people, myself included, don’t like conflicts. Even on social media! It's common to follow only people that we agree with, and that’s not healthy, different opinions are still out there and, eventually, we will have to deal with them. So how can we do that?
Well, my dad always said: “You have two ears and one mouth, so listen more and talk less!” and thinking about it now, it makes a lot of sense, listening is one of the best ways that we have to actually understand an outside perspective completely. Active listening to someone helps to build a connection, defuses the tension and makes the speaker fell comfortable.
The reason that advertising classes were so interesting for me is exactly because of that, even though each person had a different way of looking at the world, everyone felt heard and we were able to openly discuss about polarising topics. Having these discussions are extremely important to pop our "Social Bobble" and understand how the work we do, affects the society we live in, therefore, avoiding the perpetuation of toxic behaviours.
Personally, I want that in tech as well, I wish that in the near future technologists are gonna be able to go to college and discuss not only about bytes and code, but about human interactions and the problems our society faces, and also, how can technology help with it? Discrimination, accessibility and unconscious bias are just some of the issues that affect our industry at a daily basis, and yet, we don't necessarily associate these topics to IT.
We, as a collective, need to tear down the misconception that technologists work with systems or machines and the only thing worth talking about is the new shine tech that just came out. Machines don't get sick, machines don't have bad days and machines don't suffer discrimination, but people… People do.
Each person that we work with is a complex individual with a unique background, and above all: a human, so it’s only fitting we have a human mindset as well.
