Ep 12 – Mastering Communication As a Developer

Tim is a Mentor, Consultant, and Podcaster at DevJourney.Info.

What we talked about:

Most rewarding interactions with Developers
What is exciting about building things
The Hard Part about software development
Communication
Mob and Paired Programming
Talking to different groups and their languages.
Mentoring
Listening and Re-Phrasing
You can be a mentor even if you are one step ahead.
Do you have to code 24×7 to be successful?

Links:

Contact:

Transcript:

Douglas Hirsh: [00:00:00] welcome to another episode of the junior to senior dev podcast. I’m Douglas Hirsch,
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:00:06] and I’m Tyler Lemke. And today we’re here with Tim . Did I say that right Tim? Or did I totally mess it up
Tim Bourguignon: [00:00:13] almost right?
Boom. The French would say no from the burgundy regime. Yeah. Bugging you. Okay.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:00:19] Okay. Well, I tried at least I didn’t do it super American, so
Tim Bourguignon: [00:00:22] I tried my best to good. You did good.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:00:25] So Tim is a, he’s a mentor. He’s also a podcaster. he’s a consultant. And would you like to introduce yourself to him? What, what, what, what do you define yourself as, I guess what’s your identity.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:00:37] Okay. I guess you, you read almost everything up, so I’m a people person. I’m trying to connect people together. I’m an engineer at heart. I’m not allowed to code anymore at work. I’m not sure if that’s a good sign. basically I, I transitioned more towards the people side and trying to get people who stuck with one another.
being as a consultant, being in my company as a chief learning officer, being as a mentor and evenings, or whenever I can not being a podcast host, that’s always the same thing. Getting people to talk with me or with each other.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:01:11] That’s great. Looking at your, so your, your PA if you want to go check out Tim’s podcast is Jeff dev journey.info.
And it’s really interesting cause there’s, I see a lot of overlap between our two. I haven’t checked out all your episodes or anything, but I think it’s interesting that you’re so
Tim Bourguignon: [00:01:26] you kind of.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:01:28] Through your podcasts, from what I gathered, you tried to get, a very diverse background of people’s journeys into different, sections of software development so that, your listeners can, try to maybe copy their process or no, no.
The different things that are out there is that kind of, your motive with your podcast.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:01:44] Absolutely. Absolutely. So I come from a very traditional background. I have a, an engineering degree, a master’s degree in engineering with specialization in computer science. So really with what you, what you imagine is the computer scientist.
when you look at it from a, from a 20,000 miles away, but. In reality, we’re the, the anomaly nowadays. And I discovered this the hard way I was consulting for a German bank and they asked me to do some job interviews, throwing candidates at me, and I was doing the interviews and after 20 interviews as well.
Well, let’s, let’s, let’s press the big post button and, and rethink the whole thing. It just wasn’t going great. I wanted to reject never one of them and nah, no, it was, I was not supposed to be this way. And so I picked up my phone and started calling people I knew from conferences and et cetera, and asking them tips.
So when you. Search for someone. W what are you looking for? What’s important for you? What’s, what’s a good developer. And beside getting interesting tips, I started getting stories and realizing all the things. I didn’t know, people coming from bootcamps and who were talking at giant conferences in front of, hundreds of persons and, people who had a career before 10 years, 15 years doing something else, entirely being a nurse, for instance, and suddenly said, well, I need the flexibility of being able to work from anywhere and move around and still be able to do the same job.
So let’s go with developments. Why not? Hmm. I was just abashed. That was just completely new you to me. And I’m very curious by nature. So I started recording this and asking more questions and even more questions, right. Asking my guests, Hey, do you know us, someone that has an interesting story and we’re now a hundred.
18 episodes in, and I’ve still have people to come in and I have new stories that I’ve never heard. And I just want to hear them all. It’s a bit like Pokemon, so I would say, but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s fantastic journey. It’s fantastic journey for me as well. So yeah. That’s the deal behind the podcast.
Yeah,
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:03:51] I think both Douglas and I really enjoy the aspect of getting to know people. And w w we actually Douglas, I met at, Add some, add some meetups and we connected. The second time that we’ve met is when we really connected and started understanding how much we, shared a shared very similar ideas and, and kind of, with a learning and, and software development and things like that.
But, yeah, I think it’s fascinating. There’s, there’s tons of questions that we have for you, but I think it’s, I think it’s a fascinating to get to understand other developers and to, A tick to dig more deeply than kind of the surface level that you get from maybe just social media, how what’s the most.
now you’ve done, you talk a lot about it, mentoring, and you talked a lot about, podcasting at least in your, the episode 100 where he actually, where you actually interviewed, by the, I forgot, I forgot his name.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:04:41] I’m sorry. Say,
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:04:44] okay. Yeah, he was the first person you interviewed on, on the, on, on your podcast.
Right? So that’s pretty, I like that. I love that type of symbolism and stuff, but the. What’s what’s the most rewarding thing to you? What’s the most rewarding relationship? Is it, is it surface level stuff? Is it going deeper? Where do you find the most? the most rewarding interactions you have with developers is on your podcast.
Where, where are those most rewarding interactions?
Tim Bourguignon: [00:05:09] I, I wouldn’t pinpointed at a geographical location or a special situation. it’s mostly. When you, you, you manage to trigger interest. That’s that’s the most rewarding. I try our to always leave the discussions I’m I’m involved with, with an open door at the end, and try to, to leave something open, or we talk about the subject, whichever that is, it can be technical.
It can be a metal level. It can be organizational whichever. And at the end of it, I tried to open the door again. So if we managed to close a topic and we, we had the feeling, we understood everything that I tried to throw a curve ball the end and say, Hey, there’s more and more. And that person, a couple of days, a weeks later, Comes back and say, Hey, I float about this and this triggered me to research a bit more into it and, and come back to me that that is the most rewarding.
This is, I did my job. I helped this person grow. Without me being there, guiding and, and, and holding them your hand. And this is the most rewarding. So mostly that is in a, in a mentoring discussion or, or at work with my teammates, with my, my, my colleagues, whichever, there’s always the beginning, some kind of, of hierarchy, relationship I’ve been in the company for 10 years.
I’m in the top management now. So. I’m always seen as well. I’m one of the old guys and when a newcomer comes in, there’s always, well, how do we relate to one another? And you kind of push them and they don’t know how to, how to behave with you, et cetera. And there’s a lot of, of, yeah. Guiding and really, really being beside them for a while.
And at some point, yeah, they just leave and come back. And this is, this is really the best, this really the best. So it can happen everywhere. It cannot be everywhere that can be with my mentees. It can be with my mentors when I try to, to step up and push them as well. That can be with my boss when I tried to coach him.
which is not always like, but. I tried to do it anyway. Oh, it can be with my colleagues or maybe with you today. We’ll see. Yeah.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:07:22] I’m waiting for a waiting for the curve ball. You’re going to leave at the end. So we actually, we actually, we tee it up. We tee it up for you though at the end. We are. So I think you’re going to have a good thing
Tim Bourguignon: [00:07:31] looking forward to that.

so,
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:07:38] You let’s, let’s start off with your background a little bit. I know inside the episode you talk about when you were growing up as a kid, you were into, video games and you had to learn you kind of learning English because all the video games are in English, which it’s kind of a funny paradigm.
Cause you don’t think about those things when you come from. You know, when you come from the States or whatever you do, like you don’t even think about, Oh, I have to go learn this other language, go have fun. And I think I would have been the same way probably. maybe I would have been too lazy, who knows, but, you said you were really interested and you want it to be an architect, like a real architect, not a software architect when you’re a kid.
what interests you so much? I don’t know if I got this from the episode. Maybe you saw said it, but I was thinking like, what, what interests you so much about building things? What, what gets, what gets you excited about that?
Tim Bourguignon: [00:08:24] I think it’s having something in your mind and seeing it, take shape afterwards and in real life, as much as software nowadays can be in real life.
But anyway, but when we’re talking about real real buildings, it was really having this idea in your mind, trying to translate this onto paper or whichever software. When, when I was still interested in there, it was more people than software and then into software and then seeds, emergency devolve.
I just renovated my house and we had the same process going from my ideas and then laying this down on paper and then trying to see how that could happen and then seed. Happen in real life and see them emerge this thing that this process, I find it very rewarding and very fascinating. And I guess it’s exactly the same thing that you have in software.
You start with an idea, you have this, this, this giant construct in your mind, that can be, an architecture, high level architecture. That can be a low level architecture. You can be talking about classes. You can be talking about patterns, whichever, Level of granularity you are you’re at, and then you try to conceptualize this and slowly, there is something real that emerge as real, they can being software.
And, you always, yeah, I have this complexity of, of, transferring those information to somebody else. So when you’re talking with another architect in the real world, building of buildings or, or talking to, to the, the persons who will, actually build the, the construction of the end or, with all the developers.
That’s exactly the same thing, Frank, to, to, to convey those ideas and do the ideas you have in your mind and, and see them, come to fruition. So I guess this process is, is what I’m, I’m I’m in love with, and yeah. That’s yeah, that’s, that’s why I stick to this, technical field that I love, because that’s always this, this, this challenge.
Will I be able to, to tell it in the correct way, will I be able to, to translate those informations and. There’s a game that I always do when, when I have newcomers with me, I do a bootcamp for the young, the new hires in my company, and I get them for one day and we’ll do some kind of AMA. So ask me anything sessions with some, some of the developers from the company.
And the first thing I do with them. Is I gather, something like, like five items from office supply, some posters, a couple pencils and stuff like this. And I get this in two copies and I put five items in front of one person and five items, one other person, something like five meters away and just turn them back to each other.
And I, as I put the. The items in the special position, whichever that is the post is sunk down under, and then the pencils and crisscrossed on top of et cetera. And I asked the first person to describe what’s in front of them. And the second one should be a I’ll should build it and just replace the items so that they are in exactly the same position.
It’s just five items, five items that we know exactly how to identify it’s pencil it’s it’s post-its I don’t have the old English word for that. yeah, I’m French and I live in Germany by the way. I think we didn’t see this. and so the, the, the newcomers or the highest. They have a really hard time explaining how to place those five items.
And I use this always as a metaphor to tell them communication is going to be the hard stuff. Now you’re talking about post-its and pencils. Just imagine you talking about abstract classes, about things you cannot manipulate, and you have a hard time drawing on a white board. And now you expect that.
You’re just saying one sentence, you just, heritage from this and compose with this, and then yeah, you do this pattern and everybody should be able to understand that right away. Never ever. So that’s, that’s the game that I love. And I love to put it in upfront to say, Hey, pay attention to this. This is gonna, this is what can, is going to bite you in the end and not the technical stuff, not, how do you really implement this thing?
It’s going to be, how do you talk with all the persons
Douglas Hirsh: [00:12:31] and, you know, thinking about that, even, even down to two. A product owner, communicating to, to development. It comes down to how do we communicate this stuff? I actually, I now have a new exercise. If you don’t mind, if I take this from you. Cause where I teach, I happen to teach at a 20 week long coding bootcamp.
So that is, that is something that I do. And I hadn’t even thought about an exercise that would, that would show the students.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:13:00] That,
Douglas Hirsh: [00:13:01] when you started talking about like, you know, how we form pictures in our head, I thought you were going to go down the creativity exercise where tell me what you could do with this, you know, with these five things, give me, give me a description and then you totally just correct called me, right there would you said, Oh, and I asked him.
Them two to describe, and then the other person not seeing the, the way it was to put it in the same places and whatnot. So, yeah, that is, that’s actually a really good exercise. and I see, I actually see that a lot, that communications piece is very important to get down in, in the journey as we, as we go along as developers.
It’s the one thing I think it’s the one thing that we, That we don’t really communicate enough with, with our juniors as they’re getting ready to come into the field. Is that, is that it’s not exactly the technical stuff. It’s, it’s this hard stuff of talking to people. And, I just wanted to say, when you talked about that, how like, it’s so weird how, how we are, where I was going down one path with what you were, even what you were talking about, and then you were like, no, I’m kidding.
Just you just weren’t listening. That’s what Douglass do that. Deep listening stuff. You know, that was that. Yeah, that was, that was kind of, the thing that I w I wanted to kind of bring out there and really hone in on a little bit, because it is communication. A lot of it is, and there’s so many points in the development path where communication really does have problems.
And it really does cause problems.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:14:38] Go ahead, man. Amen to that. I, I do a lot of coaching in, in agility and, one thing that you can do as well. I have no idea how this game is called when, when I flustered something in your ear and you flustered it to somebody else and somebody else flustered further along and at the end, you listen to what, what the message is at the end of the chain.
What’s this game golden phone. Telephone. Okay. So you play telephone and you realize always with a sentence that, but he knows that it’s guessed completely distorted in the end. And now you try to do it with some kind of field engineer, then product management, then a PO or proxy product owner, then somebody as like a team lead.
And then the scrum team, if you’re talking about scrum, So you have five persons talking to each other, playing telephone in a professional context and trying to get the ideas of the client all the way to the devlopment team. How should that work? It’s just exactly the same as what we’re doing in kindergarten and it doesn’t right.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:15:43] It doesn’t, I mean, I have Epic, I’ve got Epic stories about that. Like the one time when I was in logistics and, and, we were trying to make a custom change for a client and. It would come to me from the product manager three times Douglas do this and I would do exactly what they would say. And they come back and they’re, you know, the client was not happy with it.
You know, the custom, the custom software that we, that we did for them. And, and eventually it was like, Hey, can you just let me talk to them? Like, can I just talk to the person, making the request? And when the person actually told me what their problem was, I was like, boom. Absolutely. You know what this is?
I think that’s definitely like what y’all told me. Let me go do this. I’ll have it done in a day. We’ll get it out to them. Yeah, it is. It’s crazy. The, the amount that communication actually does get in our way. Now, let me ask you something then. So we’re talking about this, How have you found like any good techniques or skills for, I know you could illustrate it to the newcomers that are coming in.
Hey, this is the hard part, because let me show you the hard part by making you try to assemble these, these pieces together without seeing it, but how have you managed. or have you had to, or have you been able to improve that process in the company that you’re in, where people are trying to get messages down to the developers and it has to go through all these people, how.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:17:13] That that’s a good question. as soon as you have a running system, then you have to pay attention to are to how you criticize, how you bring feedback and everything, but, you don’t do it. The secret is you don’t do it in one step. You go, you go with, added step-by-step. So you try to, to improve the system a little bit at the time.
So yes, you can improve just system as well. You just try and stop talking to people. Yeah. You, you try to, to get the, the developers one step further, toward the product. If we’re talking about in this context that we’re discussing about, you get the developers one, one step further. I worked for, for Siemens for a while and, one of the exercises we were doing was, Every month.
So almost every month, one of us was in the field was, at a hospital. I was working on now on, linear accelerators for four okay. Cancer treatment and a month, one of us within the field. And every months, one of us was experiencing what our field engineers were skiing and saying what’s the, the technicians were experiencing with our machines and doing so we’re reducing.
The, the amount of, of, hoops, from the customer, the real customer using our machine. So not the patient, our customers were the, the technicians and, all the way to, to what we were doing in the end and reducing this one step at a time. So if you were able to relate. To what those technicians were living.
Then you were more able to go to, to understand what’s happening and, and at some point step up and, and be the product manager yourself, or be beside the product manager when they talk to the customer, et cetera, and doing you reduce this distance. But. It’s it’s a, it’s a long process, especially in those giant companies with a, with a very, very stable and, and, complex hierarchy and some metrics organizations, and you have to go through and do as many hoops to get to the customer.
But. Just talk to people and
Douglas Hirsh: [00:19:07] that’s really, that’s actually a hard thing to do. In some situations. I actually worked at one company where it was passed down. Hey, you know, you’re, this was at a, a, what is it? A gas station. So petrol yeah, gas station and, What we would do is once a quarter, we were supposed to go sit with, with the support center who was using our software and once a year, supposed to go into the field to the actual service stations and observe what they were doing.
And. That’s good and bad, bad, because feet aren’t what they, once were. I worked in retail as a, as a, a teenager. but when I tried to do it again in my mid twenties, I had my legs almost died the first year I did. Cause I hadn’t stood up on my feet and entire day in
Tim Bourguignon: [00:19:58] like
Douglas Hirsh: [00:19:59] almost a. Like almost a decade when they had me do that.
And then it’s like, Hey Douglas, you’re going to stand up and you’re going to your it. Wasn’t just observing. I actually went there and put the shirt on and I was behind the counter dishing out cigarettes to people. That’s a, that’s a fun, that’s a, there’s a lot of fun in that. Cause everyone has their own.
No one, I, I, you could not tell me a cigarette. I’ve never spoken in my life and I wouldn’t know what any of that stuff was, so they’d have to go, okay. Here’s how we’re going to handle this problem. I’m going to point at you tell me which way to take my finger to get to the one you want. Go down am five, left three, you know?
Yeah. Communication. That was how I was delivering cigarettes. You could see what you want. I have no clue what it is. If you tell me, so let’s use that communication to do it, but that was. I’ll tell you, man, do you service the, working in the service of the service desk and working in the gas station was probably the least fun part of, of that job.
Cause it just, I wasn’t physically built for that stuff anymore. I used to, I could stay on my feet. Like I did like nine, eight, nine hours a day. I was standing on my feet when I worked in retail, but when I tried to do it again as a. In my twenties, it just wasn’t my legs. Weren’t having it. I felt it for two days after that, man, it was like, Oh, but no, I get it.
How did you feel doing that? Was that, was that cool for you to jump in there on the field or
Tim Bourguignon: [00:21:24] it, it was very humbly, I would say. the field was specially hard. And so, when, when you see, a technician spending hours preparing a plan to, to, To irradiate, basically your patient and just telling you a way this patient is really young.
And then she has breast cancer and I want to do the best I can. So every half of a millimeter counts, and then you realize, okay, we’ve been fighting internally to, to gain even more accuracy to us, tenths of a millimeter. Yeah. That makes sense. The real difference. And then you see it with your own eyes.
And then two hours later, this patient walks in. And you can relate. You really you’re really sold the technician, work hard to prepare the plan. And then the patient comes in and you know, your machine is going to do execute exactly this and that. That was very humbling and eye opening. And so, I love these field trips.
It was really, you could relate to what you were doing and I must admit I haven’t, lived through this, ever since, nothing came close to that. to that, that cake back then.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:22:29] I think when you see that you see like, your, your, your work is saving lives, right. You’ve done the work you’re doing. If you can get it to a 10th of a millimeter, then, then you actually can CA might be able to do a little bit better than, than it was before.
That’s. That does sound like that would be an amazing, like you could walk back and go. Yeah, that’s cool. I wish I had stories like that where I could say that stuff was saving people’s lives. but no, I mean, that’s. That’s really cool,
Tim Bourguignon: [00:22:56] but even, I guess, even Baron and saving lives, it’s when you see that you’re using are, are being helped, is I said it before.
our customers are not the patients. Our customers, the people we wanted to help inherently are the patients, but the people wanted to help. Other technicians are the ones that have a tight schedule and have to go through five patient an hour and have to keep the schedule going and going and going and going day in, day out.
Those are the real people that we help. And if we manage to get them to do their job faster in a more efficient way or in a more effective way where they have less trouble. this, this is what’s really matters. Of course, that’s cherry on the cake. it’s in the field of saving people. That’s, that’s, that’s bonkers, but seeing those people deal with machines every day and, and seeing the joy in their eyes when they receive a new version and the see, okay, we know that it’s going to help us.
This is, this is the real stuff.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:23:58] Yeah, I think it’s that seeing people use your, whatever it is, whether it’s machinery or software, I’ve had a couple of experiences where I’ve written software, that people stayed in for eight hours a day. I got to meet those people and sit with them and they told me how bad the last.
Package they had. And when we custom did something in house and I was the one who did it, like it was my product. So I mean, I wrote the whole thing and I’d sit down with them and, and, you know, take them through it. And they’re like, Oh wow, it does this and that. And like, yep. It does all that. So you’re good to go.
You let me know if you need anything. I’ll, I’ll try to get, you know, we’ll try to go through the process. Actually. We didn’t have a process. That’s, you know, you just let me know if you need something and I’ll, I’ll try to see if I can get it in there. Of course. Then we created a process after that. There you go, you live in, you learn developer at the time.
It was, I just wanted to be helpful is what I was trying to be. And I realized after that, that I was opening myself up for a lot of pain. Yeah, no, in this communication thing, I think we’re, I think a lot of what we’re talking about today does come down to communicating with people. Although I think you’re probably one of the best people that we could have had on here talking about communications.
So
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:25:09] I, I think it’s, I think it’s interesting. It reminds me of, I think I want to go deeper into that because I had another idea, but I think that asking more about communications is going to be really, Interesting. So for what you were talking about before was, you’ve probably heard of empathy mapping.
I went to a, we have a
Tim Bourguignon: [00:25:26] local.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:25:28] Company here called improving. And they do a lot of meetups. And one, one was called empathy mapping where you kind of take the persona and kind of try to understand how, what they feel and what they do. Do you have any other activities that might be beneficial to, you know, up and coming developers that they can maybe try to do in their companies or try to help them become better communicators that you might be able to share with us?
Tim Bourguignon: [00:25:50] if I may, I’d like to step back once, before doing all these exercises, like empathy at being like, like personal was profiling. Yeah. Like trying to, to match your feelings in a team, et cetera. I love pair programming and even more and more programming because those are the, the Sen boxes where you can.
Try communication, in different ways without having the pressure of doing communication in a formal way, without trying to map things, trying to do it formally, et cetera. So if, if, if we talk about mob programming, that’s basically the whole team sits in front of one computer. Was a giant screen, as big as you can, as big as it gets and one keyboard and one mouse and you rotate, at the, the keyboard.
as fast almost as you can, some say four minutes is the maximum. You should do. some go a bit, a bit beyond this, but, basically you rotate really quickly. And what happens is that you’re forced to communicate. You’re forced to do this brain to brain communication and what you will realize very, very fast.
Is that expressing your ideas so that somebody else can type it can really get it on the screen is really, really hard. You can do this in pair for me as well, with the real navigator driver, roles. So the driver is only typing and navigator is trying to get the driver to do something. in the, in the pear port, in the mob programming way, it’s even more on steroids because you have something like, like five people trying to get one driver.
So they have to communicate even more. And this is really your sandbox. This is really the greatest exercise you can get in, getting to a consensus, exchanging ideas and trying to make sense of all their ideas on the fly. And then try it. Steve, Tom, someone to word, I’m getting this on paper and you don’t have to do any, any meta gaming around it.
It’s really either you, you will manage it or you will just fight. Till the end, but if you manage to make such a pair programming or more programming session successful, then you have overseeing you need. And that that’s for me, the greatest, starts. And, and if you can keep it up and continue doing this, this is all you need.
This is great. This is absolutely great. Have you tried this.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:28:24] I’ve
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:28:24] I’ve done pair programming before, D Douglas and I we’ve talked about trying to do that, recently together. And so, but I do have a followup question. Have you, how much have you done it before Douglas?
Tim Bourguignon: [00:28:37] I
Douglas Hirsh: [00:28:37] wouldn’t say that I personally worked somewhere for a little over maybe a year and a half that we did a pair programming.
And I would say it was one of the best environments that I had worked in. I think from a productivity standpoint, it stopped, fully understood that when we say that we want to put two developers in front of this one computer. How much things really do improve that I got some of the like most work done in the least amount of time.
When, when there were two of us, I believe I firmly believe that we pumped out more productivity than, than two developers as working together as two developers when, when we work together. So fully agree with that. And the communication piece too, is is that. Now, now the driver navigator, if it really is down to like the person who is, who is doing the driving, listens to the person doing the navigating, I don’t know.
I’m not sure if we did that a hundred percent. Right. I’m you know, I’m thinking that that person was thinking for themselves too, you and doing some stuff and having a discussion with me and, and we, we were doing things and then we would switch and I would have the keyboard. The advantage that the other person had was they were in the code base a lot longer than me.
So if they were doing the driving. they kind of knew what was going on, but when they flipped around, they had to start talking to me about things. Right. They could, they didn’t, it wasn’t all in my head. And that’s the difference, Tim is that if you take someone it’s a really good way to break somebody up into a code base, right.
Because if you don’t take the keyboard away from them, And let them do the driving that you have to do the communicating. So you, yeah. Just hit the nail on the head.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:30:14] Okay. Canberra came back would be shaking his head at you right now. Joking Douglas
Tim Bourguignon: [00:30:21] direction. Yes. Up
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:30:24] and down and side to side. But, So I have a few follow ups cause I was actually talking to another developer is about as much experience as me.
and they, they were interested in going to a company that does paired programming, but one of his biggest,

his biggest fears was what happens if I have to, if I pair a someone I don’t like, I think I’m going to hate that environment. Right. So that’s one thing I wanted to follow up with. And then I have a second followup question is.
I love the mob programming and pair programming. I’m totally on board. how do you get, how, how do you convince your boss to even let you do it? Right? Cause that’s you see that as a big blocker? for a lot of people on here, because we have, we come from different company cultures that accept certain things and don’t
Tim Bourguignon: [00:31:10] so, so let’s, let’s take them one after the other.
So how about when you’re with somebody you don’t like, well, Buckle up and go through it. the, the best thing you can do is be professional and try to find something to learn in, in this case. I have to be honest. Yes. Sometimes it’s not fun. Sometimes you just want to quit and just stop doing this pair programming.
if you’re not working from home, there’s also some, some, some personality, traits that’s that’s, you, you don’t have any more in, in working from home. So bodily, hunters and stuff like this. somebody who who’s. just, just ate something very spicy and, just doesn’t, doesn’t say it’s with your, with your nose or something like this.
It’s sometime hard, but I guess if you have enough empathy and if you try to, to build it up with your colleagues after some, sometime this goes away. And, if you’re in the team, then it’s even easier. Cause you try to rotate this. So you’re not going to be with this person for the whole day, or you’re not going to be with this person for the whole week.
You’re you’re trying to rotate and get everybody to get their hands and their eyes on a piece of code. So you get the best of all the words. If your team is diverse enough. Then you get the newbies to look at it and work with the architect maybe. And then you have, you’re a designer, taking the seat of a developer as well.
And, and, and maybe bringing some of the different ideas in there. And maybe you have one person that was more, more, tuned to, to taste it testing and breaking things. And they coming in and, and, and look at this another way. And so. You get all those personalities, I’m looking at the code and, if you do this well, then this problem you are, you advocate is, tends to be less important.
It doesn’t go away. And that’s true. Sometimes it’s, it’s a bummer. But, you can sometimes work around it. So, and, and talk, talk one another. If you’re, if you’re harnessed and, and, and say, what’s, what’s bugging you and say why it’s not going and doing great, then, then most of the times, you can work things out.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:33:15] Yeah, don’t eat the onion sandwich, please. During lunch, that really
Tim Bourguignon: [00:33:19] causes me a problem. Yeah,
Douglas Hirsh: [00:33:21] I know that some people might take that as a pretty offensive, but I will say Tim, from someone who did work in a company that really believed in pair program, I mean, we were on one week sprints and we changed our pairs every, every week, but we did work with that person.
So we took a story in and worked through it. We, we stayed with the same. On the same pair, but then the next sprint would come around. We would get, we would rotate around. We did never worked with the same, the same other developer. And if you did like try to gravitate that way, then upper management would go, no, you can’t do that.
Like, we need to, you need to stop doing that. You’ve got to work with someone else. And I knew someone who tried to do that and they came in and they’re like, no, you can’t do that. You got to switch. And I actually liked everyone on my team, so I appreciate it. Being able to switch out and work with all those people.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:34:12] So I had that second
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:34:13] load. I had a double, double, double barrel question there for ya.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:34:18] yep.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:34:18] Yeah. About the boss or the company. How do you convince them?
Tim Bourguignon: [00:34:22] So the best thing is to first become Vince yourself. That’s you want to do it because there is nothing. Whereas in trying to sell something that you’re not convinced stuff to somebody else.
And so I would say try it under the, under the hood start doing it. like an exercise. I’m not sure if you do Qatar’s sometime you just sit. Together and for half an hour to do some, some kind of exercise and just try something else, try something out. that’s you can do half an hour a day. Come on.
You can, you can do this without having to report to anyone and you can try this and, and get your chops going and understand that. Hey, that’s, that’s interesting. Or maybe there’s another one that is the, the Christ’s crazy crisis mode mode. When the hits the fan and something is going wrong. And then your boss is going to accept that all hands are on one keyboard to solve one problem.
And you’re just doing more programming is just because, there’s a crisis on our hands. And so you’re doing what programming, and then you can talk to you about software and say, That was good. Wasn’t it. So, well, why shouldn’t we do this a bit more often? Maybe not every day, but just a little bit more, a little bit more.
And at the end of the week, you’re doing one, one day of pair programming or more programming every week, and then you can go to two and increase this. so, first have to be convinced and then do some baby steps.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:35:42] So I love that it’s like the underground underground, a pair programming there. When you first start, don’t see, I tend to ask, I think I tend to give you a lot, like more like, Oh, I have to ask my boss when I’m doing all the time, but I think it’s smart just to do things sometimes and try it out, especially if, you know, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Is that what you’re saying?
Tim Bourguignon: [00:36:02] Exactly. I’m I’m the master of asking forgiveness.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:36:06] You need to write a book on that so I can read it learning a little more.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:36:09] Okay. That’s probably my French roots speaking, just doing stuff the way we want to do it. I love it.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:36:18] So what’s
Tim Bourguignon: [00:36:19] your, do you mind,
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:36:20] giving us some of your secret sauce from consulting and, and sharing some more of, how you teach developers to be a great developers or, I mean, I don’t want to give away too much, but, would you mind sharing anything that might be pertinent to maybe individuals that they can implement themselves?
Tim Bourguignon: [00:36:35] Sure. Sure. So, secret sauce of consulting, I guess the, the, the it’s not secret at all, but that’s the secret sauce of consulting is you have to, I’m not sure if it’s the correct word you have to, to, get to where your clients are at. So you don’t, start by telling them well, there’s Ducker and there’s communities and you can do old your, your software on containers, and it’s going to solve all your problems.
If there are not even in CIC D yet, if the don’t even didn’t even go out of their, of their, Platform thinking or stuff like this, then you’re just talking way over their head. And so don’t do this, try to evaluate where they are at and start there. If it’s, if it’s that high up, then go there and talk to them with this vocabulary.
But if it’s not, then you have to find the right focal purity, the right level to start talking to them. And this analogy of consulting goes for everything you do. When I started talking with my son who was seven years old, I don’t talk to him the same way. I talk to the devil I work with. We can have conversations on almost the same topics, but I have to find a whole different way of speaking to him.
And there’s this myth heifer for, Oh gosh. Who, who. Coined this, I don’t remember. It’s the, the elevator metaphor. And so architects, all the ones going all the way up to the top management and speaking their vocabulary and then all the way down Bruce, and they have to speak old, the, a levels in between.
So they are, they’re just writing this elevator just left, help him down and talking right differently at every levels. And this is the, the, the, the secret sauce of, of, architecture or software architecture. And I guess this applies as well, where you are, you have to find the right context and the right words to speak to those persons.
If you’re on a podcast, you have to find who is the audience and talks to them this way. If you are not in doing a conference talk, you have to try and and find who are, the, the, the people in yogans. And, and tailor your talks for this and the same with your teams, et cetera. So this, this, I guess is, is something that re often miss and misunderstand.
Yeah. Because it’s hard. It’s really hard. And then we just run into walls because we’re not talking the same language. Yeah,
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:39:00] it reminds me, I think it’s so interesting. Cause my favorite English class I ever took in, in, college was about the same thing where each, each ANC group, I forgot there’s a, there’s a terminology for this type of language we use.
And the, but I’m going to just say anger group. Like each anger has its own language. And if you don’t, if you don’t communicate in that language, you’re, you’re kind of. Outside of that sphere. You know, if you think, if you’re out, if you’re at the table with, you know, your friends or whatever, and you’re not communicating in their language, they’re going to kind of treat you as an outcast.
I think I see that the same way as kind of what you’re saying is like, you have to use the right language you have to use when you’re with the business people, you have to speak in the domain of that business. Otherwise it’s not useful when you’re speaking tech, technically you have to speak. you know, you have to use our jargon, right.
Otherwise I don’t understand what’s going on. And that’s why we try to use the same terminology for Pat. That’s all. We, we develop names for patterns and for, all the other things that we have. but what is the,
Tim Bourguignon: [00:40:00] how.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:40:01] Have you seen, have you seen any developers be able to, get this, get this ability?
Cause it’s, I was like, you kind of just ha you know, you’ve had it or created over time. Ha ha. Are you able to teach other developers to learn this? And if so, how do you acquire these skills? Cause it sounds kind of daunting, especially if we’re more introverted and like, I don’t know how to speak in all these different groups.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:40:25] There’s no secret to it. You have to do it. Yeah. I have to fail flat on your face and, and learn, okay. This way of doing it was not the right way. I’ve done it for 15 years and I still fall flat on my face every day. I in different contexts, I tiptoe in, in, in, spheres. I. Didn’t really, stepped into, so yeah, far surreal, C level management and, and talking to a really high management and doing some more, some more business, like communication.
And I quite often miss, use a word for another one, especially in German. it’s they have. Precise words for everything. And so I tend to just throw everything in one bucket and, and talk about customers. And then so, no, it’s not customers, suppliers. I say don’t care. It’s the same relationship as, or not another it’s completely different.
But until we came to them, this realization that I was talking about suppliers, but using the term customers, it happened last week, actually. So, I just, there was a mismatch, it was a miscommunication. So you just. Try. You just do it and you’ll fall flat on your face. And then you’ll be humble and honest and say, okay, sorry, I messed up.
Didn’t know. And so let’s start again. And if you build this relationship with your teammates or your colleagues and, and they trust what you say and the trust that you’re trying to help them or trying to do the, the, the good thing, then they’re not going to be offer skated, but there’s there. It’s going to be fine.
You just try it. And if you’re you spoke about being introverted and, and, and, and, maybe shying a bit from, from a public space and stuff like this, you don’t have to do it this right away. You start with talking in front of your four peers during a daily standup, for instance. Yeah. That’s, that’s already a challenge enough.
try to do this and, and try to find the right way to talk to your product owner. If you’re in scrum context or your, your, your product person, and end your colleagues and try to, to alternate from one to the other, and maybe you have an intern that comes in and this person is very new and they don’t have a lot of experience in the industry.
So you have to find a different way to talk to them. And we’re just talking about developers right now, and maybe one product. Person and that’s already exercise enough. And when it’s, once you’re comfortable with us to just go one step further, right. And try to get some persons with a different context, maybe some your backend engineer, and then you try to talk more to front end people who tend to love JavaScript and CSS, and they have a different, a different reference points in their lives.
And you have to find the different metaphor for this. Whatever’s your context. Just do again. One step after the other, just, try to peel the onion one layer at a time.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:43:02] I love that. I love that analogy of doing it one layer at a time, and it reminds me of your you’ve learned how many languages do you know, by the way
Tim Bourguignon: [00:43:10] I speak German, French and English fluently, and a bit of Spanish just to be dangerous enough.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:43:16] And how many computer labs now I’m just joking. But you know, you see that that’s funny, right? There is. We just knew the context right there, what it was talking about, and it could have been, it could have gone one way or the other. So you’ve learned multiple languages and I’ve I’ve, I haven’t mastered Spanish, but, I used to know it fairly well that to communicate and read and write in it, but it reminds me kind of the two things that I kind of pulled from.
What you just said is if you’re curious, humble, right. If you’re not afraid of failing. Right. And you’re curious, this is what I’ve seen before with like good, good managers and stuff. They come in very curious, ask lots of questions and don’t be afraid to be wrong. Then you can, then you can pull back layer by layer and just learn the domains and all the language and everything like that.
would you agree with those to kind of boil it down a little bit?
Tim Bourguignon: [00:44:04] Absolutely. I was terrible, terrible language learner. at school I tried to learn English at school and I really hated every, every second of it and German, exactly the same. I learned German in high school and dropped out of my German class as soon as I could and started learning Spanish and hated every minute of it as well.
But, through. Movies and video games and books. I started to learn English and really like the English word. I English language. I speak nowadays, I’m German. I needed a different, a different incentive. my wife is German, so I had the different incentive to learn this. But again, that was really going practical.
This, this idea. I need it now. And so when I started learning German, I just flipped the switch in my mind and say, okay, now I need to speak German. And I relied on, people making faces when they, when it was completely wrong and it didn’t get it. And so they corrected me and say, well, I didn’t get what you said.
And then we find a way to, to, to say, to say it again, or say, Hey, I understood what you meant, but it was really, really, really wrong. So let’s me. Let, let me help you, teach you how, how we could say this better and. It came bit by bit.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:45:19] And so it’s, it’s funny too, cause it’s kind of like this it’s the internet pattern, right?
Like as developers, we’re like, we’re fine to go and iterate over and over again and make tons of mistakes, you know, unless they, unless you’re that, unless you’re that unicorn developer who I’m definitely not, I’m more of the like fix breaks, fix the breaks, or I try to try and try and try until it works.
and a lot of us are, are willing to try things until it works. And so it’s the same thing there and, and not being afraid of. When I think when, like when you were learning language and when you think of a little children where they’re learning languages, they’re not afraid of failing because we don’t, we don’t beat them up.
And I think a lot of the times when we go into these other domains, if we’re we’re for the only developer there, and I think Douglas has explained this before, you know, you’re the only developer really only interested in the end user’s problems. Like they’re going to love you to death, whether or not you make mistakes.
Absolutely. I think that’s a, that’s part of it too.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:46:12] And that’s maybe a one on one side, a side, side, common there. this is why it’s also very important to, use the domain language, which in your code, because then you’re thinking in the language of your customers, and then it’s, it’s an easy step to do used our use this, this language and communicate with your customers.
And you have the feeling you’re talking about your code and the customers are understanding what you say. And this is very important. This is, this is a clutch that we use to, to bridge those two worlds together again. And, this, this is work wonders in the path for me. and so far that it’s become a hindrance in one of the projects because we were coding, in English and using German words in there, and then talking in a bit in a mix and match off English and German and the, in our day to day job.
But that was intentional. We really needed to have all those German words in there so that we’re talking the language of our, our, customers and then the domain people who were helping us, understand what we were supposed to do. It’s, it’s, it’s really hard, but, but you have to, you have to do this.
Otherwise it’s going to break down and then you’re not going to be able to build what your customers really need. And you’re going to build your model of what you think your customers need. And this is where things start to get nasty.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:47:31] So
Douglas Hirsh: [00:47:31] I’ve seen, yeah, I’ve actually seen that a lot when, when people don’t talk to people and they just build stuff, it’s really sad when someone dumps a lot of money into their, their, their SAS, that’s gonna cure.
The world of whatever it is. And then no one really cares. So you got to talk to people. It is so important.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:47:51] Absolutely. And, maybe when the one psycho at stake, in a daring, a different, tangent you asked me for, for, for our consulting, secret sauce. So let’s talk about mentoring and mentoring is also just communication.
It’s, it’s only communication just at very different levels all the time and centered in somebody else. So you’re when you’re mentoring somebody you’re just helping. My definition is a bit, there’s been an extremist, definition. It’s really being intentional and you’re helping someone it’s already mentoring for me.
And you do this by. Just showing up and listening and really going into this deep listening mode. When you try to listen to what the person is saying and not listen to your own voice, trying to figure out what you’re going to be able to end search with this and sound smart, which is really, really hard.
Our brains are freaking machines that are supposed to be thinking the whole time. That’s why meditation is so hard. And, when you’re trying to listen to somebody. It’s really hard to stole your voice, your inner voice, and really listen. And this is where mentoring starts really trying to listen to someone.
you do this as well in your relationships with your partners. Sometimes you really need to just shut up and listen. And this is very, very, very important. And that’s where mentoring starts. And that’s where communication starts. You try at first understand what the person is saying, and maybe go beyond the words, try to understand the context, which you understand the meaning for twins, then the emotions that behind it.
And that’s all just listening. You’re not talking at all. You’re just listening. And when you’re done with this listening, then you can start talking and maybe the only thing you have to do is just rephrase what you heard and say. I think you just say this, or maybe use exactly the same word and say, did you mean this and use the same way and doing so you’re just pushing the ball.
on the other side again, and this person can, can rephrase themselves. can can start talking again. then you can rephrase it differently. You can refer phrase it wrongly intentionally. I say, Oh, did you mean this? No, no, no, no, no, certainly not. And then they will say something else and you gather some more information.
You noticed? I it’s just communication tricks that I listening and this just rephrasing what I hear. I haven’t started even thinking I’m just rephrasing and listening and then you can go on. And so communication is really one step after the other and down the line, there is the expertise where you’re telling me something about.
that doesn’t sound right. Do you need this Docker at all? Have you thought about this and this and this other way? And, but this is the expertise down the line. There are many, many, many, many steps into communication before then you can mess up, mess up, and if you don’t mess it up, maybe you will never have to go there because the person you’re talking to will realize that they are going into the wrong path or choosing the wrong direction from the very beginning.
And you only listened. And rephrased stuff. Communication is, is absolutely magical when you, when you do it right. And in order to do it right, you have to listen, practice, ask questions. And at some point you can step up and become the mentor that we can’t imagine with, with a white bird and, wise figures like Gandalf style that that’s just
Douglas Hirsh: [00:51:16] by the way it is going, it’s going
Tim Bourguignon: [00:51:18] great. But I
Douglas Hirsh: [00:51:18] blame the three children for this. There is gray in my beard.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:51:22] I blame my search a little as well. but it’s, it’s starting to wear you out, but it’s, it’s taking time, but no, you don’t need a white bird. You can be a mentor with, with 20 something and, and still have whole your, or maybe no hair, no facial hair at all.
And you can still be a mentor.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:51:40] See, I like that. And, and, and really, if you, if you look at the martial arts and I don’t know if you’ve been in martial arts or not, but I. I have I have. And we believe that the minute that you become that you’d get to the next belt. If you were a white belt and you become a yellow belt, guess what I can have you teach?
I can have you show the white belts how to do their kata because you know it now. And, you know, we test if you want it, we know, you know it, and of course there may be some techniques or something that you might want to hire belt to straighten out, but at least you could have them. You can have them lead them through, through their lower, you know, their lower belt CATIA.
And that’s the way that it works the entire way. You don’t have to be a third degree, black belt to come in and teach the white belt kata. The white belts. You can start as soon as you’re a yellow belt. So I really liked that
Tim Bourguignon: [00:52:31] where you went with that. Absolutely. I did a lot of Tai Chi and, so that was very, very slow and, very, centered on yourself.
And of course we had some, some masters were able to teach us the, the form and teaches the moves and everything, but he took only the. The oldest master who barely spoke French back then to teach us what was really behind it and show us when you speed up Tai Chi by 10 X, here’s what comes out. And he showed us how you fight and that’s what came out of it.
And it was just amazing to see the stage. He really, come to, to, to blossom and. Before this, I had never needed, this kind of teaching. I went from one stage to the other and learning the moves, learning how to central myself, how to find the right, correct posture. So that’s, it’s effortless, et cetera.
And these could be done by. Bye. I’m not almost everybody, but, but I’m a person that was just one, one stage, ahead of me, but all to get all the way there and to this real, a realization that needed some more, understanding, but you don’t need that every day. You don’t need that everyday. You’re perfectly fine with somebody that is just a few steps ahead of you.
And can you show you the, the, the ropes and take you through this journey and, I, I dare say there’s a lot of cases where you don’t even need to be, a few steps ahead. You just need to be smart enough to listen and ask questions and you can do that, but just exercising your, your critical thinking and just listening to what the person is saying and say, okay, I heard, a contradiction here is, is this really the way it is?
And by just pushing back you, You help this person verbalize what, what their, their thinking. And, and while when they hear themselves speak, they will maybe realize something is wrong here. You probably have done it before with, with, duck and all these yellow ducks, plastic ducks that you have in your bath.
I’ll hold it all. They call the in English.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:54:34] The the, the yellow, basically the,
Tim Bourguignon: [00:54:37] rubber docks, we call it rubber, rubber duck. Yeah. So when, when you have a problem, you just take, you take one of those or whichever plush you have at hand. one of your kids just stole one of your kids and, and start talking to them and telling them what’s, what’s, you’re trying to do, and trying to explain to this doc or the, this, this, this plush animal, what’s your what’s your intentions are, and by doing this.
50% of the time you were realized where your problem is. It’s also the stack overflow effect. If you’re trying to, to write a question on stack overflow, you know that if your question is not spot on, you will get some, some nasty answers. So you should’ve thought about this and need you to try that, et cetera.
Of course I did, but I forgot to write it in. So you’re right. Every step in there and you try to be as precise as you can and by doing so you realize damn. I didn’t think about this thing and you try it out and that’s with the answer and then you have to finalize the question and post it and then answer to yourself.
That’s the real way to do it. People that don’t, don’t realize you had the answer and just, just be silent, help, help all the people. But, that’s the way you find your answers verbalizing and trying to explain it like I’m five to somebody else and you will realize the, this is the, The biggest communication step you need in your life.
Trying to verbalize saying, explain it, reformulate it so that it’s understandable. And that’s already a big, big, big, big step.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:56:06] Yeah, that is, that is the, that’s actually one of our major tenants at the, at our bootcamp. And oddly enough, Cody, the duck. Is a yellow, rubber duck. And we give out, there you go.
We give out little coatings. Yeah. That that’s our mascot. And we give little Codys out to everyone who comes into the program. They, everyone gets a little Cody. I wish I had, when we went remote, I left my little Cody at the, at the office. So I can’t, I can’t pull it up and go, Hey, look, I got one. But, we can just imagine there’s a little rubber duck with our logo on it.
That’s okay.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:56:38] Yeah. The, one of the funniest arguments I, I lived through was a one, one teammate that just exploded and turn around to one of his colleagues who was talking to him and say, do I look like a duck to you? And we realized that this other colleague had. I’ve been talking to him for 10 minutes and just not, not expecting an answer, just talking to him, talking to him, talking to him and using him as a duck.
And, I didn’t realize this was happening until this guy exploded. I said, do I look like a duck? That’s what was happening.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:57:11] That’s amazing.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:57:12] So heavily Cody on, on your, on your mind is that’s very important.
Douglas Hirsh: [00:57:17] Yeah, never. Yeah. Oh man. So yeah. Cool. this has been a really great Tim. we’ve gotten a lot of good information about communication in this episode and really do appreciate you being here.
wanted to go ahead and ask you in, you know, if people want to continue having a conversation with you and want to, you know, want to reach out or follow you, what what’s, what’s the best way to, do that.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:57:43] I’m, I’m easy to find on the internet. I’m on Twitter, way too much. So you can go to a team of that’s my handle on Twitter.
you can find me on my, on my website, Tinbergen you to fr, Maybe you can add that to show notes for people who are having a hard time, spelling Bougainville and, and you can listen to all the stories that I, I record weekly with as many, diverse profiles as I can find, Def journey.info.
And that’s, that’s the podcast. It’s a weekly podcast. it lasts about 45 minutes. And, it’s just me trying to get one more story, before I can go to bed. So
Douglas Hirsh: [00:58:21] there’s another thing.
Tyler S. Lemke: [00:58:22] There’s another thing I want to mention real quick since we didn’t get into we, I honestly, Tim, I think we could talk for hours and hours.
Like we’re, if there’s so much good info that you have, but I wanted to bring something up that we didn’t delve into is the mentoring stuff. There is a, I found your long lost art of mentoring presentation on YouTube. So I really want people to go check that out. I think that’s excellent about understanding the mentor, mentee, mindset, and, you might be able to explain a little bit more about that, Tim, if people want to check that out too.
Tim Bourguignon: [00:58:50] Yeah. mentoring has been the, the biggest rollercoaster of my life, after my family stuff, of course, but I’m getting to too, it’s like a, a new gear on your, on your car. It’s like, it’s, it’s, what’s taking you from a, from a certain speed to double speed being with somebody else and helping each other.
Get further on. And so I’ve tried to, to give to that again, to as many people as they could. So I’ve, this email class mentoring that rocks, you can have this small, you know, class, and I have a couple talks on YouTube as well. I try to just explain to people. Mentoring is not a nasty word. It’s not something that you have to, to have 20 years of experience under your belt to be able to do it’s something you can do right from the get go.
You just have to be intentional about it. Jeff too. Shut up, listen and ask questions. And, and it’s going to take you already a long, long, long way further than, than you could ever think. And, and some that’s something, few people realize, all the persons that we see, all the celebrities, all the big with big air quotes and the celebrities in our industry are not knowing this readout.
Or mentored, they all have mentors. we just have to, to realize this and, and, and try it and do it. And, they help you so much. So. I don’t know what I can do, what else I can do to try to popularize them. So we have to do it. And, and when you look back on your life, you will not remember those projects that took you, way too long and, and, long hours into the night.
You are, remember when you move people, you will remember the connections you had, and this is what I attribute to mentoring. So, yeah. Try to do it. And if you want to talk to me, just ping me. And I’m always happy to stay up very late into the nights too, to talk to people.
Tyler S. Lemke: [01:00:41] That’s awesome. So we, like I said, we’re going to tee you up at the end here.
what’s the one question when we should have asked you that we missed, so maybe you can leave us off with, something to think about. .
Tim Bourguignon: [01:00:53] I actually didn’t think about that one.
what do you could have asked? what’s what’s a French guy doing in Germany. that’s when he is easy, you do everything for love. I guess, D do you have to be your free and, and stay up all night and do all kinds of things during, during your evenings and during your weekends to be a good developer. I used to think this, and I’m, I’m a workaholic and I love my work and I tend to work way, way too much, but I’m learning this as well, Jura Thrones for the podcast.
we don’t have to be this way. We, we can, there is another way and people doing it another way are as least, at least as, as successful as, as I am or, or, or the other kind is. And so this is something we all have to explore. Do we have to do it the way we are doing it right now? Or are there, and there’s a way, and I’m pretty sure we’re all going to be surprised by the answer.
There was not really a question.
Tyler S. Lemke: [01:01:55] No, I think that’s a great, that’s a great way to leave it off. Hey, thanks so much again, Tim. we hope to be in contact you and we’ll be following you on dev journey.
Tim Bourguignon: [01:02:04] Please do. Thanks, likewise.

Ep 12 – Mastering Communication As a Developer – w/Tim Bourguignon

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