What if I told you not to trust your friends? Or perhaps more appropriately for developers? What if I told you not to trust your colleagues and work? There's actually a good reason for why I'm asking you this question. My name is Jonathan Cutrell, you're listening to Developer Tea. Thank you for joining me today. Today we're talking about the idea of eliminating overlap. Or more specifically, we're eliminating collective error. On the show, we've talked about a lot of different biases that may affect our way of thinking and therefore they affect our work. And this is no different in today's episode. We're talking about a collection of biases. We're going to name every single one of them. But for example, we're talking about selection bias. You can go and look up some of the biases or biases that we're talking about in today's episode. But I want to talk more specifically about the effect of these biases. As we go along, I may mention a few of them. What does occur for multiple reasons? In fact, perhaps an endless number of reasons or at least so many reasons that we are not able to quantify them. And that's because biases are entirely based on the person who is experiencing the bias. Where they grew up, what are their genetics? What are their experiences? And who do they know? What kind of food did they eat today? There are so many biases. And it's impossible to know exactly which biases are affecting you at all times. Perhaps the reason that it's impossible is because these things come and go and our biases are highly related to our current environment as well. But there's an interesting thing about the environmental and perhaps the longer term environmental biases that we end up carrying with us. And we have a specific bias that is important to recognize for the sake of the validity of the rest of the conversation today. And that bias is that we simply tend to find people who agree with us. We be friend or we end up working with people who tend to agree with us. And this isn't necessarily a fault. This is the way our brain is wired. It's what Daniel Coniman in his book, I mentioned this in the last episode of Developer Tea, he calls this cognitive ease. The times when we are actually agreeing with the people who are around us, our brain is at ease and it's not having to work as hard as if we were in conflicts. Or if we didn't agree with the people around us. So in a very similar way that your body is more at ease when you're not struggling and straining, for example, on a workout, the average pace that you would tend to walk is not going to be a sprint. You are at ease at a certain level and your brain is at ease at a certain level. And so we unintentionally strive for this sense of cognitive ease. And one of the things that gives us ease is to be around people who agree with us. Ultimately, what this creates in combination with multiple other biases, for example, even the temperature, the average temperature where you live can change the way you think about things. What we end up with is a group of people that we've surrounded ourselves with that share a large overlap in bias. Now this is generally okay. We actually have found a way to survive even though we are collectively wrong about many things together and often about things that we don't realize that we are wrong about. And it may not be necessarily the right word to use their wrong, but certainly we have a particular way of perceiving. And sometimes that way of perceiving may or may not line up with reality. So why does this matter? Well, if you surround yourself with people who have similar biases to you, and if you're attempting, if you're listening to the show, hopefully you are attempting to eliminate the effect of bias on your decisions or at least on the work that you're collaborating on. Unfortunately, if everyone in the room shares similar biases, and it's going to be harder to eliminate those biases because it's going to be harder to become aware of those biases. This is one of the most direct, economical reasons that diversity is good, assuming you want to eliminate error and error that is resulting of bias, then diversity increases your awareness of multiple biases. Diversity allows you to pull from different groups of people who may or may not share the same biases. And obviously right now we're not talking about diversity only in race, but also in background and ethnicity and belief systems in age, all of these things that change the way that we think. Because contrary to the way that we intuitively believe, perhaps, people are not necessarily mentally equal. I want to qualify what I'm saying. People do not have the same exact brains. In other words, we are all prone to different biases. But when we collaborate, we actually tend, and this is backed up by research, when we collaborate, our average collaboration tends to eliminate the errors created by bias. Okay, we've said the word bias probably 100 times in this episode. I know you're tired of hearing it. So let's take a quick sponsor break and talk about today's incredible sponsor role bar. By the way, if you are depending on your users to report errors to you, believe it or not, your users are not going to be able to accurately report errors every time. And this actually happens to do with bias as well. Sorry, we had to use that word one more time. Errors are going to be in your code. They're going to lurk around in your code and detecting and diagnosing those errors is really hard. Relying on your users to report them is very hard. They're not developers. So those reports sometimes are incredibly hard to understand. And on top of that, digging through logs, trying to debug issues, that's a painful process for anyone who's ever experienced it, you know, it's a painful process. RoboRox works with all major languages and frameworks to eliminate this problem. You can start tracking production errors in minutes. And basically, you're going to get the error before your users see it. You can integrate robot into your existing workflow. And you can send error alerts to places like Slack or HipChat. And you can link your source code and GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab. You can turn errors into issues in JIRA and Pivotal Tracker and Trello. Some of their customers, by the way, and this should give you a pretty good vote of confidence. Their customers include Heroku, Twilio, Kayak, InstaCart, ZenDesk, and Twitch. These are huge, huge companies that are relying on Rollbar to get their errors in front of the developers before they get their errors in front of users. Go and check out what Rollbar has to offer to you today. Rollbar, by the way, is providing you the bootstrap plan for free. Go and check it out. Rollbar.com slash Developer Tea. Rollbar.com slash Developer Tea. Thank you again to Rollbar for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. Once again, don't rely on people to give you mission-critical stuff if you can rely on a system like Rollbar. This is going to be so much better to understand the errors that are happening in your application. Thank you again to Rollbar. So we're talking about bias today. I said that we've said that word 100 times in this episode. That's because it's a real thing. And it's a real thing that we often ignore. So I'm going to give you three ways to hopefully short-circuit these biases. Okay. Three things that you can do in your work every day to help eliminate the biases that you and your coworkers and your friends you may all share. Step number one, survey the people who are using the things you built. Quite simply, the people who are using the things you build are going to have different biases from you in most cases. Now, you have to also understand that the selection of people who are using the things that you build may also share a common set of biases. But those biases are going to be different from the ones that you have. And in fact, you may need to be aware of those biases. It's good for you to understand the biases of your larger user base. Why is that? Well, if you're going to build a product for a group of people who share a common bias, then building that product with the knowledge of the bias may allow you to create a better product. It's a very simple equation there. The more you know about your customers, the better you're going to be at building something for those customers. So you need to get to know your customers, get to know your users. Whatever the word is for the people who are using the things that you build, understand those people, understand the things that they're facing, the things that you have created for them, how they are good or how they are bad, learn from your customer, that's going to allow you to eliminate some of the bias that you have about whether or not the thing you build is good. Step number two, intentionally seek out things that disagree with your position. Perhaps the most powerful bias that we experience on a day-to-day basis is our self-confirmation bias. We hate being wrong. This is both a psychological factor and a physiological factor. We hate being wrong. We fear being wrong. And if you can learn how you are wrong, and if you can constantly remind yourself that being wrong is a part of being human, then you can eliminate this accidental stigma that you've adopted into your brain about being wrong. If you can constantly remind yourself that there are things that disagree with you, that there are people that disagree with you, that there are studies, perhaps proof that disagrees with you. Seeking out information that doesn't confirm what you believe already, but instead actually opposes what you believe. This is going to help you reform or at least become aware of your biases. Now a quick point of warning here, seeking out this kind of information can lead you down a rabbit hole of feeling unconfident. What I don't want you to do is start believing that you are always going to be wrong or that the things that you do or the things you believe somehow limit you from becoming better. In fact, when you seek out this information, part of what is happening, part of the reason you may feel this way is because it is tiring. It is quite literally physically tiring your brain out to seek this information out. So remind yourself that you are doing this because you want to become better, not because you want to downgrade yourself, but instead because you want to, as we say, it's back, you want to level up in your career. Becoming aware of your biases is not reminding yourself why you're wrong, but instead learning how you can become more right. If you view it with that lens, it's an empowering thing to learn that you are wrong. It's kind of a catch-22 there. Knowing that you're wrong is psychologically difficult to handle, but also realizing that you are wrong is better than never knowing that you're wrong, assuming that you want to get better, assuming that you want to be right. So actively seek out information that disagrees with your position. Step number three, and this is going to be stolen directly from Tim Ferris. He has a podcast talking about the questions that changed his life. This question is a powerful one. It's actually in a different context here than it was on his episode. He was talking more about experimentation and trying to find things that work. Here, we're talking about trying to eliminate bias in the work that we're doing. Ask yourself, what if I did it exactly the opposite way? Or perhaps more applicable to this? What if I believed exactly the opposite thing? Now for some things, believing the opposite is somewhat impossible. So for example, I have a strong belief that 2 plus 2 equals 4. If I asked myself what the opposite of 2 plus 2 equals 4 would be, the logical opposite would be 2 plus 2 is not equal 4, but a lot of people would also say that the opposite would be 2 plus 2 equals negative 4. This is an intuitive opposite response. So don't get caught up in the semantics of what opposite means, but ask yourself, what if I believed an opposing position? Or what if I implemented an opposing feature set? What if I supported a completely different group of people in this application? These are the kinds of questions that allow you to explore and hopefully identify holes where your biases have filled those holes in. These are three practical things that I've given you today to try to start becoming more aware of your collective bias. And you've noticed that I didn't tell you to go and collaborate with the people that you're working with. It's because we're specifically talking about bias that is shared between you and your coworkers, you and your friends, you and the people that you are directly associated with on a regular basis. And I want you to hear me clearly. This does not mean to stop working well with those people. Instead, it means that you have a responsibility, or at least if you're listening to the show, you have the drive to become better. You have the drive to eliminate errors that you're making, whether that's cognitive errors or quite literally errors in your code. You have the desire to get better at what you do and to be more holistic and more correct in your approaches. Unfortunately, we're all limited by biases. But these three tips that I've given you today, hopefully they will help you overcome some of the biases that you are still facing, even with a fantastic team that surrounds you and keeps you accountable within that team. I hope this episode provokes discussion. I hope you will reach out to me and let me know how these things work out for you. Some of the biases that you have had left to hear those. Reach out to me on Twitter and Developer Tea. Of course, you can email me at developert.edgmail.com. Thank you again to two days incredible sponsor at Rollbar. If you don't want to rely on your users and just sit back and wait for them to tell you what's wrong with your application, if you want to be proactive and fix it before they see it, you need to use Rollbar. Go and check it out Rollbar.com slash Developer Tea. They have the bootstrap plan waiting for you for free. It's very easy to set up. I have done it on many applications. Once again, Rollbar.com slash Developer Tea. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. You can find everything related to Developer Tea and other awesome shows for designers and developers at spec.fm. Do something today to level up in your career. That's my challenge to you today. Thanks so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.